Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones (5 page)

Your best defense to prevent this from happening is to take charge of your health
now!
This gradual decline we all will experience is preventable for the most part by making a few simple changes in the way we take care of ourselves.

This book will help you become internally young, healthy, and energetic. This book will help you achieve agelessness on the outside with vibrant beauty. Here is what to expect.

Part 1
—
Keeping Your Insides “Young”
—you will learn about all the hormones that are key to your well-being. You will learn what happens with decline in each transition of your life, from perimenopause (one of the most misunderstood passages) to menopause and beyond.

You will learn how to achieve hormonal balance. You want the right amount—not too much, not too little. You don’t want the hormone levels that are normal for a person your age—a person your age is in hormonal decline. The goal is a more youthful body, inside and out!

You will learn about various life transitions, including the dangers of perimenopause and what can be done about it. Perimenopause is generally not understood by the women going through it, nor is it understood by the doctors who are treating them. Perimenopause is a dangerous passage, and this book will explain why. This is very important information. This is life-changing information.

Part 2
—
Men and Their Hormones
—turns our attention to men and the antiaging issues they face. Men are the biggest offenders in terms of disregarding the importance of putting back lost hormones. Somehow they think it’s not macho. Those who do understand get to live a long, healthy, vital life. Lost hormones are not only the domain of women. Men, and those who love them, are going to find this section and its interviews fascinating.

In
part 3
—
The Three S’s: Sex, Sleep, and Stress
—you will learn how to restore your sexuality, how to sleep better through hormonal balance, and the importance of sleep in restoring your healing hormones. You will also learn how to assess what stress is doing to your life and ways you can get back the youthful energy you once had.

In
part 4
—
Detoxification and the Effects of the Environment on Your Health
—you will see how exposure to environmental chemicals and other poisons leads to premature aging—and what to do about it. Chemicals and toxins can come from a multitude of places: mercury in our food supply and our teeth, chemicals inside our homes and offices, poisons in the air, polluted water, and “pesticide enriched” foods.

In
part 5
—
Ageless Living
—we will look into simple, doable lifestyle changes, from nutrition to supplementation to exercise, that will begin reversing the aging process. This information will give you an edge relative to health and beauty. If you keep yourself young on the inside, it will manifest on the outside.

Being ageless takes a little work. There is no free lunch, but the rewards of this outweigh all the money in the world. You don’t need to be rich to take advantage of this new information, either. So get an edge. Stay young and healthy while you age. Learn from these doctors. This can be the best phase of your life!

I embrace bioidentical hormone replacement and antiaging medicine. I gladly take my supplements, vitamins, herbs, hormones, human growth hormone injections, and vitamin B injections, and follow a healthy lifestyle and diet. I embrace my exercise and yoga programs. I take my new doctors seriously, and I work
with
them. This is true integrated medicine. I have never felt better or been happier in my life. I love my age. I don’t dread my next birthday, because I feel
great on the outside and inside. Good health brings joy, balanced hormones bring joy, a well-running body brings joy, and emotional health brings joy.

This book holds within it the medical answers to fight the damage we have done to our planet that is affecting each one of us personally. This book gives you the key to unlock the answer to the ravages of aging that we are seeing all around us.

I want to live a long and healthy life and die healthy. What about you? You are never too young to start. So if you are between the ages of twenty and a hundred, man or woman, this book is for you. Enjoy.

CHAPTER 1
T
AKING
C
HARGE OF
Y
OUR
O
WN
H
EALTH

To remain oblivious to the hidden regenerative processes inside your body will cause you to die unnecessarily young.

Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, MD,
–Fantastic Voyage

F
ive years have passed, and as of this writing I have now been happily pronounced cancer-free. What a relief. No longer does each ache and pain trigger a fear in me of “Oh God, is that ‘it’ coming back again?”

Cancer does that to you. It’s an inner nagging, a constant reminder that there could be something bigger than yourself lurking out there in the shadows, sitting back, like a predator, deciding when and if it cares to strike again. Now, finally, I can release that fear. The predator has been locked up, in prison, hopefully never to be let out again.

Along the way in this war I have been fighting have come the blessings. I am truly loved by those who mean the most to me. They showed me this over and over during this time. Through it all, I learned about my own strength and courage. I didn’t know I had it in me to buck the system by choosing unconventional therapies and
doing it my way. But you see, I was never able to wrap my arms around the “standard of care” set forth by Western medicine as the way to treat cancer.

When I was diagnosed with cancer, I needed to be emotionally strong to fight the battle. To help with that, I needed to be hormonally in balance. It is hard to be in a fighting mood when you are hormonally depressed. Balanced hormones keep your emotions in check and I believe (based upon my research) are the most effective way to prevent cell proliferation (cancer). Unfortunately, Western medicine’s “standard of care” believes that taking away all hormones prevents disease. I believed differently, so I didn’t want to go off my bioidentical hormones.

Nor did I want to undergo chemotherapy. You see, I do not believe in the “poison” theory of using chemotherapy. It is my belief that an environment of balanced hormones prevents disease. This is reinforced by many of the doctors interviewed in this book. For one thing, it ablates, or takes away, hormones. Chemotherapy does kill cancer cells, but it also kills the immune system. Without a strong immune system, cancer has a perfect opportunity to recur. We need a strong immune system and balanced hormones to prevent disease. So it didn’t make sense to me to “take away” hormones as a means to kill cancer.

As I now see it, there are two ways to fight cancer: build up or destroy. Western medicine’s standard of care is to destroy. Well-meaning though it may be, the idea of chemicalizing myself, destroying everything, and hoping my health would come back, coupled with the instructions to give up my hormone therapy, was not appealing.

I decided to approach cancer by “building up.” This took courage, because it is daunting to go against the course recommended by one’s doctor. But because of the books I write and my understanding of the hormonal connection to health, I had a lot of information. I understood that hormonal balance is key to health and vitality. My decision to go against the standard of care was probably easier for me than it would be for other women not armed with the same information. I approached my cancer through balanced bioidentical hormone replacement and complemented this replacement with Iscador,
an anthroposophic medicine whose function is to strengthen and build
up
the immune system so that disease cannot attack and invade.

I believe this was the best decision of my life. Aside from the discomfort of injecting myself with Iscador every other day for these five years, my health has never been better. I have not had so much as a cold during this time; upon my last checkup, my immune system was so high that my doctor was ecstatic. He said he had never seen an immune system this strong in any of his adult patients. That information was able to put all my fears to rest. How could a life-threatening illness get past an immune system this strong? Great. I had done it. I beat it. I did it my way, with my body almost intact.

So you can imagine my surprise (five years and one month after my initial diagnosis) when my gynecologist told me that I had a
pre-
precancerous condition (not cancer, not even precancer) growing in my uterus and that in order to prevent possible severe problems down the road, I would need to have my uterus removed.

Why was the sleeping giant trying to rear its ugly head again? Luckily we caught this before it became cancer, yet it was serious enough to force the removal of an organ. I do not take the removal of any body part lightly. What was wrong? I have thought about this a lot. As a teenage mother, I was given my first major chemical, a shot to dry up my milk, and was encouraged to feed my baby Similac formula. In
chapter 5
I will discuss at length the protective aspects of breast-feeding and prolactin production. Second, at age eighteen I was put on the early high-dose birth control pills and stayed on them for twenty-two years. Unknowingly, like so many women of my generation, these chemicals put me into a false menopause. All those years of chemicalization were dangerous to my health. Add to this scenario stress and environmental assault and a brutal childhood and you have a recipe for disaster.

The ninth year of bioidentical hormone replacement, things started going wonky. I had breakthrough bleeding, and then after a while I was bleeding continuously. Something was wrong, obviously.

Because I was bleeding constantly, I was not ovulating. Thus I was not a reproductive person (according to my brain). The object of bioidentical hormone replacement therapy is to fool the body into
thinking I can still make a baby, even though I have no eggs left. Bleeding, severe hyperplasia, and adenomyosis (leaks in my uterine lining) made my quality of life unbearable. This excessive bleeding and hyperplasia created a perfect scenario for cancer, so I had no choice but to remove my uterus, thus removing my problem.

Maybe if I had not been chemicalized by the “dry-up” shot and if I had not been on strong birth control pills for so many years, this problem might not have occurred. Several of the doctors I interviewed for this book have also embraced this theory.

Losing my uterus caused me to do a lot of searching. For years, I was unknowingly hormonally imbalanced, not just as a perimenopausal and menopausal woman, but also as a young woman. Unfortunately, I never realized hormonal imbalance was the problem.

Without hormones or imbalanced hormones, we lose any grip on feeling “normal.” Without hormones life quality is greatly diminished. Without hormones a woman is at her weakest physically. Without hormones disease can proliferate because the brain perceives the body as no longer reproductive; therefore, nature wants to “eliminate” you to make way for those who are healthy and reproductive.

Loss of hormones is not to be taken lightly. Having no hormones is like having bad premenstrual syndrome (PMS) every day of your life. You are not in control of your emotions, nor are you in control of the cruel physical manifestations of the loss of hormones. Couple this with the stress of having and fighting cancer, and (to me) it doesn’t make sense to be without hormones.

According to T. S. Wiley, “We may have changed with the passing of time, but the biology inside us has not. Nature has a job to do, and the brain was hardwired at the begining of time and doesn’t know anything else.” A healthy woman is hormonally balanced. We can’t “outthink” nature. This never works, no matter how hard we try to come up with something better.

Women remain confused about hormones and in some cases terrified of hormone replacement; one day, headlines in the newspapers praise hormone replacement therapy (HRT); the next day, the headlines are screaming that HRT will kill us.

The truth is, despite the widespread use of synthetic hormone
brands such as Premarin, Provera, and Prempro these drugs have always been associated with cancer. The first cancer linked with synthetic hormone replacement was cancer of the uterus lining (endometrium).

The most recent resurfacing of the negatives associated with synthetic hormones and cancer came from a government-sponsored study titled the Women’s Health Initiative. This study was supposed to last 8.5 years, but it was stopped after only 5.2 years because the risks of using synthetic hormones outweighed the benefits. Breast cancer was just one of the increased risks discovered. Additionally, the study concluded that synthetic hormone replacement therapy protects neither your bones nor your heart. Ironically, bone and heart protection were two of the primary benefits once used by doctors as selling points to get women to fill their prescriptions for these drugs.

The Women’s Health Initiative study hoped to show decreases in

• breast cancer
  
• stroke
  
• pulmonary embolism
  
• colorectal cancer
  
• endometrial cancer
  
• hip fracture
  
• death due to any cause
  

The actual outcome results were shocking:

• 29 percent increase in coronary heart disease
  
• 41 percent increase in strokes
  
• 22 percent increase in cardiovascular disease
  
• 2,100 percent (yes, this is correct) increase in pulmonary embolism (lung blood clots)
  
• 26 percent increase in breast cancer
  

So much for synthetic hormones! These statistics alone should convince you right away of the negative effects of synthetic hormones.

Those of us who were on the original birth control pills for any
length of time were actually on synthetic hormones—strong synthetic hormones. Any wonder why women of our generation are under siege from an epidemic of breast and ovarian cancers? There is a link, and you’ll learn more about it in this book.