Bio-Identical Hormones for Youth, Health & Vitality
by Ruth Galbraith, ND
Suzanne Somers is a big name in my practice. Little Chrissy from "Three’s Company" wrote The Sexy Years and followed that with Ageless and other books on bio-identical hormones and reversing the aging process associated with menopause. Somers has made a name for herself among my patient population, many of whom are menopausal women complaining of hot flashes, brain fog, and an overall feeling of being out of balance and "just not right."
These women come to see me, and many are desperate. Menopause can take some women almost literally by storm, transforming them nearly overnight from happy, healthy, balanced individuals to moody, unpredictable women who feel they may go up in flames at any moment! Words my patients use to describe their feelings about menopause and their symptoms include: crazy, desperate, on fire, inferno, brain fog, hardly know myself, off kilter and unhealthy.
Menopause is defined as the period in a woman’s life after she has ceased to menstruate for at least one year. Often, a woman will have erratic menses for up to 10 years before they cease altogether. This is considered perimenopause. Menopause may also be surgically induced when the ovaries are removed for one of several reasons, shutting down the body’s main source of sex hormone production. In perimenopause, decreases in hormone production can be slow and occur over many years, with onset of symptoms correspondingly gradual. In other cases, however, symptoms may appear very quickly, seemingly out of the blue. In surgical menopause, symptoms are generally quite sudden, since hormone production is abruptly cut off.
What’s going on for my "desperate" perimenopausal and menopausal women? In a nutshell, their bodies are responding to gradual or sudden changes in sex hormone production. In my experience, the healthier a woman is and the more balanced her organ systems, the less likely she will be to suffer severe menopausal symptoms. However, there is practically no way to predict how one woman’s symptoms will compare to the next, and even family history seems to be of little predictive value. Levels of estrogens, progesterone and testosterone may all be changing, and the unpleasant symptoms my patients report are their body’s way of communicating distress at these changes.
The list of menopausal symptoms is long and varied, but the most common complaints I hear are: hot flashes, mood swings (sadness, irritability, depression, etc), loss of sex drive, vaginal dryness, fatigue, brain fog, memory problems, insomnia, weight gain/inability to lose weight, itching, bone loss, high blood pressure, incontinence, dry skin and thinning hair.
What causes all these symptoms? Pure and simple, it’s the imbalance between the various hormones as we age and move into menopause. The body has performed for years with an optimal balance of estrogens, progesterone, testosterone, cortisol, insulin and DHEA. Aging and menopause upset this balance, and symptoms begin to develop.
What can you do? Get back to that optimal balance of hormones and stop suffering!
Estrogen is responsible for: building strong bones; regulating weight; healthy skin; helping to regulate blood pressure; sex drive; vaginal lubrication; increased energy; and helping to regulate the thyroid gland, among other functions.
Progesterone helps: restore libido and sexual function; stimulate growth of scalp hair; build bones; prevent estrogen-induced insulin resistance; improve lipid profiles, raise HDL ("good cholesterol"), lower triglycerides and LDL; increase deep sleep; prevent endometrial cancers; regulate the thyroid and blood pressure; and may help protect against some breast cancers.
Balancing your hormones can make a dramatic difference in how you feel! However, do not allow a doctor to medicate you unless he or she first tests your current hormone levels to see what is needed for balance in your body. Unfortunately, it was once thought that all women in menopause had low estrogen, and many doctors were trained to give estrogen as a matter of course to any woman complaining of menopausal symptoms. There was a rule: "If the woman has a uterus, don’t give unopposed estrogen." In these cases, a standard dose of synthetic estrogen and progesterone was given.
Today, those of us who study and practice Anti-Aging medicine know that it’s not as simple as this. Each woman is different. Menopausal symptoms may be caused by low estrogen, but they may be caused by too much estrogen as well. Or they may be due to low progesterone. Until we test hormone levels, we simply don’t know what is needed for your body to find balance again. Prescribing hormones without testing a patient’s levels first is, in my opinion, irresponsible. At the very least, it is unlikely to bring the desired results.
Using synthetic hormones is also a questionable practice. Our bodies are equipped to use and process natural estrogens and progesterone, and bio-identical hormones are exact biochemical copies of these natural hormones. On the other hand, our bodies can’t make all the enzymes to correctly process synthetic hormones. Therefore, it is thought that bio-identical hormones are the safe alternative to synthetic hormones, which have garnered unfavorable reports in recent years.
I was told by one of my mentors in medical school, "You won’t choose your specialty, your patients will." I didn’t fully understand that statement at the time, but I do now! I’ve discovered that menopause is a time of great change for most women, and most of that change isn’t exactly welcomed with open arms. Once I started helping women with their hot flashes, mood swings, insomnia and general feelings of imbalance during perimenopause, I found they were telling their friends, and my practice began to fill up with women suffering The Change of Life. No one wants to feel unwell, and menopause can nearly drive a woman crazy.
What I’ve discovered is that bio-identical hormones are a huge part of regaining balance for many women in perimenopause and menopause. My patients are finding that not only are their hot flashes and mood swings gone, but their weight is more easily controlled, their sex lives are better than they have been in years, they have energy for the things they love in life, and stamina to do all the things they put off while they weren’t feeling so great! In short, like Suzanne Somers says: they feel younger, healthier and sexier. Who wouldn’t want to feel that?
To my great delight I am also using many of the other tools in my naturopathic medical bag to enhance this improvement in my patients. I have continued to discover that addressing diet and lifestyle, and balancing all body systems in addition to the hormonal system is the quickest route to superior health and wellness for my patients. I never look at hormones without also addressing the health of the thyroid and adrenal glands, too. These systems are very, very inter-related. In order for optimal health, all need to be balanced. And, yes, it works for men too!
by Ruth Galbraith, ND