Hormonal Misinformers! So Many! Too many! And OBGYNs! Lions & Tigers & Bears Oh My!

Last week I was in Naples seeing patients. Fantastic patients here at the Naples’s Center For Functional Medicine. Most all the patients here are so great, it’s like falling in love multiple times a day. A true honor to serve here. But I bump into the weirdest things. Especially what patients tell me that other doctors tell them - regarding hormones.

This very smart woman from the Boston area (should be an area with savvy docs right?), told me she was taking progesterone prescribed by a naturopath. Okay. Her OBGYN said, “Oh no, progesterone. It’s bad for you. Go off immediately!” This woman is starting to experience mild cognitive decline, losing words, struggling with insomnia, and other recurrent issues she has worked with other docs on but hasn’t yet been able to put in her rearview mirror.

Her OBGYN went on to say this: “Progesterone does nothing for your brain. Zip. Progesterone does nothing for sleep. It’s a useless hormone, after you no longer want kids. It does nothing for your thinking”. (wrong, wrong, wrong btw).

In the olden days they taught if you didn’t have a uterus you didn’t need progesterone. Even though it’s made all throughout the body. And Nature never does anything without a good reason.

So I asked if this doc was an older practitioner.

But no, she was young.

The OBGYN continued: “And estrogen, don’t get me started. It does nothing but keep your vagina juicy. Estrogen has no effect on your brain or sleep! And it’s dangerous”

So this hormone specialist doctor took this mid-60s patient off hormones. The patient, going through a very rough time with litigation and stress, went into a tale spin. Her insomnia and anxiety soared. She felt like a million years old.

She stopped all hormones because this hormone expert had told her hormones were not only useless, except for vaginal health, but hormones were actually dangerous!

Now, hormone replacement is not the only answer to reboot this relatively, in my mind, younger older woman (she had been working out for years and was in really good shape physically). She was already on hormones and her cognition was starting to decline.

Forgetting your dear friend’s name with them standing in front of you is rather frightening.

Hormones were not the woman’s total answer as she was already on them.

But her serum levels tested zero while on them.

In a patient like this, we need to rule out “hyper-excretion syndrome”.

We take the blood labs on the exact same day as the urine. If her hormone blood levels are low but her urine is high (we track metabolites in the urine) - it suggests her body is taking hormones but rinsing them out. In her urine. So even though she is on them, she doesn’t get the benefit from them.

Also, her thyroid was not stabilized. Thyroid has a lot to do with mood and thinking. Along with a huge influence on lipid control.

She had a slightly low free T3 while her reverse T3 was getting higher than I like.

Stress can make reverse T3 soar, and ding your real T3.

Real T3 is the only true thyroid agonist or hormone-form that signals the thyroid receptor (parks into it’s binding domain and delivers the the life promoting thyroid signals).

Her lipids were a bit out of control. One parent had died in their early 30s from a heart attack and a sister just got several stents. So thyroid was a real first line thought to help out.

So I shared a list of to-do’s for her naturopath that included getting her a carotid ultrasound, a calcium score test, and an EKG stress test. We needed to check her blood flow to her brain. Tracking if her blood flow is able to nourish her precious brain and memory tissues.

Her local docs need to make sure that thyroid, that rules cognition, mood, and lipids, is stabilized and working optimally.

But the biggest thing is the relationship we developed through talking, making goals of what we want to accomplish, and sharing scientific citations that support what I am suggesting to her medical team in her part of the country.

I love to team up with far reaching providers. What a lovely way to spread supportive knowledge.

But… who are these doctors? The ones making us fearful of hormones while having NO physiologic knowledge of how they are the most powerful signaling molecules the body has?

What literature are they reading?

What planet are they on?

I just read Mercola’s totally bogus podcast on the dangers of estrogen. I posted my rebuttal Tuesday morning. Close to 5000 people have read it. You can read it here: Mercola & Guest's Analysis - WRONG on Estrogen

Gynecologists world-wide have been emailing me if they can mentor with me. YES!

So many women miss out. Too many.

I don’t know how my karma/dharma got me to be one of the voices for the hormone awareness movement. I started out going to National Naturopathic college and Western States Chiropractic school, after my masters in nutrition.

But then ended up a Distinguished Hormone Scholar working with the scientists that discovered how hormones work, discovering the first estrogen receptors, and unveiling the endocrine disruption story.

I have written 21 books, many on hormones, one of the first rebuttals of the first WHI (Safe Hormones, Smart Women), one of the first breakthrough books on endocrine disruption (Hormone Deception), been working in multi-med practices that focus on hormones since 1980 (and before this was a nutritional/woman’s health practitioner since 1973), and lecturing for CMEs to all kinds of practitioners since the late 1970’s and still going hormonally-balanced strong!

I formulated Metagenic’s first Fem-Line and now Biotic’s first female line. Had a hormonally driven breast cancer 30 years ago, and other tumors, but been on BHRT for almost 28 years now. So been on both sides of that “doctor’s desk”.

Old but still going youthfully strong!

When your life mission shows up and grabs you off your feet - you go for it.

There is a lot that can be done.

But you gotta have a tool bag. A large unbiased tool bag as you never know what will work for the patient sitting in front of you.

Why are hormones so misunderstood? By the doctors that most of us believe are the American caretakers of hormones.

I ponder it’s because they want to basically sell estrogen patches and Prometrium, FDA-approved hormones while continuing to push many other medications and down the road, promoting “customers” for nursing facilities cause we’re all so weak we can’t take care of ourselves?

Remember that article I wrote a while back? Docs get dinged and paid less (in these inflationary times this has got to affect what they recommend) if they prescribe fewer meds. That means to you and me.

I hope that Dr. Rosensweet and I get to teach our 3-day hormone certifications course (CMES for MDs, NPs, and NDs) that we are planning in mid-March in Chicago in Buffalo Grove. We are pondering if we should do it in person or online.

Your thoughts?

Stay tuned. Dr. R is now thinking perhaps we should do it online.

Knowledge is power.

Dr. B.