Progesterone Resource
Center
Freedom
to Choose a Safer Form of Hormone Replacement Therapy
(HRT)
by Catherine P. Rollins
While
drug companies, politicians, doctors and health gurus
argue what’s in the best interest of women’s
health, women themselves are rarely given a voice in
the hormonal health debate, an arena that sees women
the casualties of exploitation and victims of political
agendas.
Women are big business in the healthcare industry.
Which explains why female baby boomers are led to believe
menopause is a disease that requires synthetic hormone
replacement therapy (HRT) for the rest of our lives.
Rarely is it clarified that these drugs carry significant
side-effects, all too often negating any benefit.
If
we’re to offer our bodies to science in the
trial of any drug, synthetic or otherwise – as
is often the case – it should be with our consent
upon full disclosure. We’re told synthetic HRT
dosage is safe when individualised, based on a woman’s
tolerance to the drug. Nonetheless, HRT makes some
of us quite ill. We need and demand a more natural-to-the-body
alternative when it comes to hormone replacement therapy.
Estrogen Dominance
Estrogen dominance is a term coined by the late Dr
John Lee in his first book on natural progesterone.
It describes a condition where a woman can have deficient,
normal, or excessive estrogen but has little or no
progesterone to balance its effects in the body. Even
a woman with low estrogen levels can have estrogen-dominance
symptoms if she doesn't have any progesterone.
And how do we become 'estrogen dominant'?
All
too often our food chain is laced with toxic pesticides,
herbicides
and growth hormones – a sea of endocrine-disrupting
chemicals that mimic estrogen in our body. If we are
overweight, our body’s store of excess fat can
be converted into estrogen. Insulin resistance leads
to estrogen dominance. A visit to our GP for the odd
hot flash or missed period can result in a prescription
of estrogen pills, patches or implants.
Men are not excluded here. Estrogen gradually rises
with age, while saliva levels of progesteorne and testosterone
gradually fall with age. Thus, with aging, estrogen
dominance occurs. A clear sign of estrogen dominance
in aging men is their tendency to develop breasts.
This indicates these men are low in progesterone and
testosterone.
And yet unopposed estrogen in our bodies results in
all sorts of hormone-related health problems such as
PMS, endometriosis, uterine fibroids, infertility,
weight gain, increased blood clotting, thyroid dysfunction,
even cancer, in both men and women.
Dr Cavalieri, Professor at the Eppley Institute for
Research in Cancer and Allied Diseases and his team
at the University of Nebraska Medical Centre in Omaha
Nebraska are on the brink of discovering that almost
all the important human cancers that we get in Western
civilisation have the same origin - which is estrogen.
Estrogens, according to Dr Cavalieri, are initiators
and promoters of cancer.
For women, cancer of the breast and/or in the uterus
most often occurs with a progesterone (P) to estradiol
(E2) ratio of less than 200 to 1. According to Dr David
Zava of ZRT, who has amassed a database of tens of
thousands of saliva samples and questionnaires, these
cancers occur very rarely in women with a healthy P/E2
ratio.
We
know that the micronised progesterone in our jar
of cream is bioidentical
to the progesterone molecule
found in our body, making it extremely safe to self-medicate,
is non-toxic, and has no recorded side-effects. It’s
the drug of choice for women (and men) looking to offset
estrogen dominance which, as we’re learning,
can represent a potentially life-threatening state
of hormone imbalance.
The Politics of Progesterone
The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA)
has classified Progesterone an S4 drug, available only
on prescription. Anyone using progesterone, whether
in the form of a cream, troches, drops, pessaries or
orally without a doctor's prescription is using it
illegally.
Regardless of its good safety record and extremely
low toxicity, and its uses in women's cosmetics and
moisturises in the United States over many years, progesterone
is tagged an 'S4 poison' because of the category it
falls under rather than its drug characteristics.
Problems arise when women are forced to track down
a collaborative doctor who's willing to write a prescription
... and then track down a source for cream.
For
example, Lawley Pharmaceuticals, located in Western
Australia, manufacture
a high-grade progesterone cream
that is, paradoxically, only available to women within
the state of Western Australia. Any woman ordering
cream in from the Eastern states, even with a doctor’s
prescription, is breaking the law!
Women in all Eastern states of Australia must be content
with creams formulated by a compounding pharmacist,
only a handful of which have cultivated the skills
and training in compounding customised medicines using
traditional skills, advanced techniques and specialised
knowledge.
While regulatory laws on natural progesterone exist
in the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, a doctor's
prescription is NOT required in countries such as the
USA. Natural progesterone creams can be legally sourced
through whatever channels available - over the counter,
via marketing distributors, or on-line over the internet.
So, for the time being anyway, a US drug law does not
apply to progesterone usage.
There
have been rumblings, however, that America's Food & Drug
Administration (FDA) will, in the next five years,
impose changes
to current drug law, restricting
ad-hoc marketing of creams. The consequence of this
decision will possibly push distribution underground
and compromise the manufacture and cost of quality
controlled progesterone creams. Pretty much the scenario
forced upon Aussie women.
Whether
we order cream in from overseas or via a local compounding
pharmacist,
the retail price per tub of
cream is prohibitive at roughly A$50 per unit. But
this wasn’t always the case. Prior to seizure
of all commercially distributed progesterone creams
in Australia in December 1997, the price of a tub of
cream was at least A$20 cheaper. This considerable
price hike pushed cream further out of reach of so
many women who relied on progesterone to maintain optimal
hormonal health. Once again, women lost out big time!
Here's the rub, though. Women need a script to get
acces to bioidentical progesterone replacement therapy
but our doctor's flatly refuse to prescribe it, despite
empirical evidence collected over several years suggesting
its a safe, non-toxic alternative to synthetic HRT.
It's unfortunate, but a fact nonetheless, women who
need a script will get it any way they can, including
a visit to doctors who take their money but offer no
support or education. This is a real concern when women
sneak around behind their own doctor's back, accept
treatment that may be contraindicative of progesterone
usage, perhaps unable to tell their doctor the full
story, all of which has the potential to end badly.
Wild Yam Scammers
Pharmaceutical companies and politicians aren't the
only ones guilty of exploitation of women. A good example
would be the growing popularity of Wild Yam Extract
creams. Word has caught on that progesterone, derived
from Wild Yam Extract (Dioscorea Villosa) is restoring
women's health.
Manufacturers of Wild Yam creams, unable to get access
to USP (United States Pharmacopeia) grade progesterone,
have sold women the notion that diosgenin, in its 'natural'
Wild Yam state, can be converted into progesterone
in the body. These claims fly in the face of the facts
- that this is physically impossible because there's
no enzyme in the body to take up disogenin. Diosgenin
first needs to be 'synthesised' in the laboratory to
render it identical to the human hormone. (Many of
our modern steroids are manufactured from diosgenin
extracted from them. Drugs like birth control pills
are affordable due to this genus).
These Wild Yam creams that contain absolutely no USP
progesterone are sold through health food outlets and
by naturopaths as complying with Dr John Lee's protocol
and research on progesterone. This simply isn't true.
According to the publication 'Herbal Medicine,
Principles and Practice of Phytotherapy, Modern Herbal
Medicine' "claims have arisen in the popular
literature that the female body can manufacture progesterone
from diosgenin, particularly if a wild yam cream
is applied to the skin. No evidence exits for mammalian
enzymes which are capable of effecting what is a
difficult chemical conversion. The evidence that
does exist strongly disputes the possiblity of this
conversion. In fact, diosgenin appears to have estogenic
properties in mice and lacks progesteronic effects."
Bioidentical, natural-to-the-body progesterone is
not produced anywhere in the plant kingdom. Bioidentical
progesterone is manufactured in a laboratory with the
aid of an enzyme. The substance diosgenin, found in
the Mexican Wild Yam or Soy plants, has to undergo
a series of chemical changes whereby it is synthesised
or converted from its raw state into United States
Pharmacopeia (USP) grade progesterone.
And this confusion is not limited to lay women. Members
of the medical fraternity, when arguing vehemently
against the efficacy of progesterone, constantly make
reference to homeopathic Wild Yam creams containing
diosgenin.
Natural
progesterone creams are referred to as ‘natural’ because
the end result represents the same molecule naturally
occurring in the body. It is chemically identical to
progesterone of ovarian origin.
Doctors Don't Want to Know
The question is whether doctors are getting balanced
information or just promotional material from the pharmaceutical
companies.
As a patient, I know that a Wild Yam Extract cream
containing 'diosgenin' is not a precursor to progesterone
in the body. And that a synthetic progestin analogue
such as Provera (medroxyprogesterone acetate) is a
molecular modification beyond bioidentical progesterone.
But most physicians do not. They derive their knowledge
of drugs from pharmaceutical companies who, for obvious
reasons, focus their marketing pitch on patented products
only - such as synthetic HRT and the contraceptive
pill.
Natural
progesterone is referred to as ‘natural’ because
it represents the same molecule naturally occurring
in the body. It can be introduced into the body with
relative safety and minimal side effects because the
body recognises it.
And it's because progesterone is classified a naturally
occurring medicine, drug companies cannot slap their
logo on it, brand it as their own 'exclusive' product,
and generate commercial application.
This lack of financial incentive for drug companies
to inject millions and millions of dollars into research,
development and marketing of a drug they cannot 'own'
means progesterone is then overshadowed by its synthetic
cousin - progestin - not because it's less effective
but because, to these multi-national drug companies,
biological progesterone represents a dodgy investment.
The 1995 PEPI (Postmenopausal Estrogen/Progestin Interventions)
trial, a three-year multi-center, double-blind, placebo-controlled
trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health
(NIH), clearly demonstrated that natural progesterone
actually works better than synthetic progestin in terms
of protecting the heart, and that natural progesterone
can protect against uterine cancer as well as synthetic
progestin. Yet, inexplicably, this message has not
yet reached the medical community.
Chemically-altered hormones can shut down or reduce
our production of natural hormones. Because the molecules
have been changed, the synthetic hormones used in the
Contraceptive Pill and HRT do not have the same effect
on the mind and body as our natural hormones do. In
fact, many of the effects of synthetic hormones are
the exact opposite to the natural hormone they so ineptly
replace.
It's quite obvious some doctors really struggle to
come to grips with what exactly bioidentical HRT is,
and why incorporating salivary hormone profiles offer
more accurate results than blood tests. A flow on from
this is that women often cop a 'dressing down' when
they approach their GP requesting a prescription for
progesterone and that a baseline hormonal profile be
established using salivary assays.
Doctors are encouraged to prescribe a potentially
harmful drug (which may cause and promote cancer),
but see absolutely no reason why they ought to remain
open-minded (at least!) to a safer alternative - progesterone
- which may actually prevent cancer!
Some of us may manage to convince our GP to write
a script, and go so far as to order a saliva hormone
profile kit, but then our doctor leaves the interpretation
of symptom relief and saliva assays reports, dosage
adjustment, etc., up to us - the patient! We may as
well revert back to the days when we sourced our cream
through healthfood stores or MLM distributors which,
of course, did not include hefty GP consultation fees
and a 50% hike in the price of cream!
Technicially we're not self-medicating. We've elicited
the cooperation of our GP required to legally obtain
progesterone thereby meeting the guidelines set down
by the TGA. But why aren't these same doctors monitoring
our progress? Are they capable of monitoring our progress?
Evidently not.
Most doctors want nothing whatsoever to do with 'bioidentical'
hormones, preferring instead to stick to tried and
tested drugs they're more familiar with, resulting
in a 'stand-off' between women and their family doctors.
In light of the recent US and UK findings that conventional
HRT, once prescribed to millions of women to ease the
immediate symptoms of menopause and to prevent osteoporosis
and heart disease, has been found to increase the risk
of heart disease, cancer and blood clots, and perhaps
has legal implications for the manufacturers of HRT
drugs, doctor would be well advised to embrace every
opportunity to actually listen to the women who are
using natural progesterone and who are not only getting
well, they're remaining healthy (and happy) long term!
About
the Author:
Catherine P. Rollins is the author of 'A
Woman's Guide to Using Natural Progesterone' and Director
of the highly popular website:
Natural-Progesterone-Advisory-Network.com.
This
article was syndicated from The
Natural Progesterone Advisory Network:
http://www.natural-progesterone-advisory-network.com/freedom-to-choose.htm
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