The Natural Hormone Makeover: 10 Steps to Rejuvenate Your Health and Rediscover Your Inner Glow

By Phuli Cohan, M.D.

Summarized with permission of Wiley (www.wiley.com). All rights reserved.
All rights reserved.

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The Ten-Step Hormone Makeover

The ten basic steps to your hormone makeover are:

1. Know your symptoms.
2. Partner with a doctor and/or a compounding pharmacist.
3. Measure your hormone levels and do baseline tests.
4. Start by supporting sex hormones.
5. Support adrenal and thyroid hormones.
6. Measure melatonin and growth hormone levels.
7. Support the supports with vitamins, herbs, minerals, and amino acids, as well as a healthy diet and lifestyle.
8. Monitor your hormone metabolism.
9. Taper off support (or not).
10. Maintain your health as you age.

Hormone Safety and Metabolism

The largest studies in the West have primarily examined the safety and benefits of synthetic hormones taken orally.
Before you take the results of such studies to heart, understand four important points:

• The type of estrogen used in most of these studies was horse estrogen, which is totally different than ours.
• The hormones were given by mouth, not via the skin (transdermally) as they are intended.
• The progesterone used was a synthetic form, usually medroxyprogesterone, which is not the same as a woman's own natural progesterone.
• The timing for hormone support is important: It must be given before diseases such as heart disease and detrimental brain effects occur.

To summarize, here is what some of the large studies on hormones have shown:

• Women live longer if they use hormones (even synthetics) when compared with women not using hormones. As a woman ages, her risk of heart disease increases, and using hormones early on - before age sixty - lowers heart disease risk and lowers mortality despite a slightly higher risk of developing breast cancer if using synthetic hormones. These studies also found that drinking alcohol significantly increases the risk of breast cancer.
• When using oral, synthetic horse estrogen and synthetic progesterone over the age of sixty, there is no reduction in heart disease but there is an increased risk of blood clots and stroke. It also shows that women with a history of heart attack have an increased risk of heart disease during the first year of hormone treatment.
• Using synthetic hormones increases the risk of breast cancer.
• Women who began using hormones within five years of menopause or hysterectomy had better memory scores when tested.
• Women who began hormone replacement therapy (HRT) closer to menopause tended to have less heart disease than when HRT was started later. A study of these women's CAT scans showed less plaque (hardening of the arteries) in heart vessels when hormones were started early in menopause.
• If HRT was started within ten years of menopause and lasted for at least ten years, there was a significant reduction in dementia. But if women began their HRT ten years later, they had a greater risk of dementia.
• Natural progesterone and natural estrogen protect dopamine pathways (important in Parkinson's). Studies have shown that the risk of Parkinson's disease increases in women with an early onset of menopause.
• The longer the duration of HRT, the better the brain tissues looked.

Bioidentical Hormones

From the mega-studies discussed above, we know many things about synthetic hormones, but what about natural, bioidentical hormones such as the hormones that are normally circulating in you?

• Bioidentical hormones are natural, not because of where they come from, but because they look and behave just as our own natural hormones do. They will act at our cell receptors and break down in our cells (metabolize) exactly the same way as the estrogen and progesterone naturally made inside our body have always done.
• Bioidentical hormones have been used by physicians for over twenty years. In the United States, bioidentical hormones are now available from drug companies, with hundreds of studies showing their efficacy in reducing heart disease risk factors, protecting women's uterine linings and preventing waning bone densities.

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