Hormone Replacement Therapy

Natural versus Synthetic,
Good, Bad or Scary?

By Dr. Thomas S. Lee, NMD

Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) uses normal amounts of hormone supplements to return hormone levels to normal ranges.  This is done to gain the benefits these ideal hormone levels can provide to a human body.

Human hormones have been clinically proven to benefit health for the past 50-70 years.  This article will clarify what forms of hormone replacement may be helpful and which will be risky, if not possibly harmful.  It will also identify the possible benefits and risks associated with hormone replacement.

Doctors and scientists have long noticed that optimal human hormone levels decline in people for various reasons, such as aging, traumatic injuries, diseases, and genetic defects.  Because these were associated with declining healthy functions until death, it followed that restoring these ideal hormonal levels in deficient patients might bring back their health.

Early efforts to isolate these hormones from plants or animals were problematic.  In the 1930s, doctors were finally able to make human hormone medicines out of hormone-like chemicals derived from plant phytosterols.

Hormones are biochemicals that affect thousands of normal health functions in tiny amounts.  You can understand that they would be harmful if taken in excess, at the wrong time, or in a form that is difficult for the body to use.

So far, we can agree that the intelligent use of a hormone might be a powerful medicine for the physician to help restore health.  From here on, the issues grow to be more complicated and political.  When complex sciences like human physiology and biochemistry tangle with the worlds of large money, and political, religious and personal power, a lot of controversy results.

This article is not light reading, but if you are interested in human hormone effects or affected by the symptoms of their imbalance, read the whole thing.  You will understand the subject better and make wiser choices for yourself with these understandings.

To get straight to our recommendations on how to achieve safe, natural hormone balancing, click here.

What's Wrong With What Most Women Are Told About Menopause

Why Synthetic Hormones Create Problems

Why Gynecologists Don't Prescribe Progesterone

Only Drugs Can Be Patented

Where Synthetic Estrogen Comes From

Synthetic HRT:  Proven Side Effects

Back to the Basics

Hormones

Estrogens

Progesterone

Estrogen Dominance

Do Men Dodge the Hormonal Imbalance?

The Negative Effects of Estrogen Dominance

What Is Menopause?

History of HRT

HRT's Second Inning

Economic and Political Realities

Osteoporosis

Heart Disease

Cancer

Natural, Non-Toxic Solutions

References

Now comes the body of this important article.

What's Wrong With What Most Women Are Told About Menopause

Women have been told they need estrogen therapy to prevent osteoporosis and other menopause symptoms because their body has stopped making its own estrogen.  Synthetic HRT (synthetic estrogens plus synthetic progesterone) will supposedly replace these hormone levels.  Until recently, this has been routinely recommended for almost any situation, physical or mental, that can be even remotely tied to menopause.

What the drug industry and its medical cheerleaders have chosen to ignore is that at menopause, a woman’s estrogen output drops to around 40 percent (#36, Sellman, p. 16) of pre-menopausal levels.  Ovary production of estrogen does drop way down below the level necessary for reproductive function.  Estrogen is made elsewhere, however, and the estrogen output of adrenal and fat cells continues in order to maintain the other important endocrine functions of estrogen which are not directly related to reproduction, such as:

• bone-building
• electrolyte balance
• insulin balance
• fat and protein metabolism
• cholesterol synthesis

(Guyton, p. 1024)

Notice that the fat cells will actually produce small amounts of estrogen, much to the dismay of many aging women.  After hysterectomies, many women notice 20-30 pound weight gains that can be incredibly resistant to dieting.

That 40-percent figure is only for American and Northern European women, who have the highest estrogen levels in the world.  In Third World countries, the drop is much less, because their normal estrogen levels are much lower, on average.  What is not mentioned is that the progesterone levels in these Western women often decline far closer to zero at menopause, and it is vital to keep progesterone in balance with estrogen.  Estrogen dominance is a very miserable syndrome of imbalanced hormone effects, but it is a new phenomenon in nature, created by modern society and modern medical politics.

Why Synthetic Hormones Create Problems

Synthetic hormones last too long in the body.  They are "biologically persistent," in that they bind to hormone receptors far more tightly than normal human hormones.  The natural hormonal feedback loops, which we barely understand, are often disrupted because the synthetics don't fit into the body's natural biochemical system the way the original “real” hormones do.

Let's put this into a computer analogy.  For many reasons (stress, toxics, missing nutrients, environmental hazards, etc.) the hormone system becomes fragmented with millions of one-way orders that are supposed to have return messages.  While these do have partial activity, they don't complete and eliminate themselves on schedule, so there's no way to "defragment" the system.  The result is the loss of proper interplay between the reproductive, adrenal, and thyroid systems.  These become more inefficient because of this fragmentation, which feels like hell for a person progressing through stress, to shock, and possibly to system crash (from exhaustion to collapse).  And by "collapse," we mean to embark upon the journey from whence no traveler ever returns.

This process of accumulating hormonal stress would first appear as something that is emotional and mental in nature.  The brain systems and emotional centers are far more sensitive than what would appear in laboratory chemistry tests or diagnostic imaging.  This has meant that many women have been dismissed as "psychological cases," with the over-prescribing of anti-depressives or anti-anxiety medications adding their complex drug activities to the physical stress these patients originally came in with.

Once a misunderstanding of a woman's hormonal balance has entered the modern medical system, a dangerous process of case management will often follow.  Medical professionals are often intelligent, compassionate specialists doing their best work with the finest equipment and medicines they best understand.  But how many unnecessary hysterectomies, oophorectomies, ligations, D&C's, abortions, and even heart bypass surgeries have spun off from an original misdiagnosis and lack of these understandings about hormonal health?

Why Gynecologists Don't Prescribe Progesterone

Actually, some are beginning to.  The problem is that natural sources of progesterone are easy to find and inexpensive to make from many plant sources.  As such, they cannot be patented, nor marked up enough to make money for the pharmacist, the doctor, or the hospital.

This is a basic point to understand.  There are inexpensive plant-based (phyto)estrogens and natural progesterone which can control most estrogen imbalances, especially when incorporated into a detoxifying low-stress diet.  Synthetic hormones and drugs can be valuable short-term emergency medicines.  These are less effective, however, for longer-term treatment plans that are intended to rebalance or heal the body.

Only Drugs Can Be Patented

There is no way to make massive profits from a natural plant source in an open market.  I repeat this, because this is why you are being frightened away from holistic natural supplements in the mainstream media today.  Natural, affordable, risk-free products are simply a threat to both the illegal and the legal drug trade.  Drug patents concern effects that imitate some of the benefits of the natural hormone, herb, or vitamin.  Whatever variation in structure and effect can be patented from these naturally occurring biochemicals is what can be protected and priced as a company's own proprietary product.

When a drug can be developed to mimic some of the activity of the real hormone, the business can begin.  After that, masterful professionals create a market by purchasing information, controlling the outcome and publishing of clinical studies, and by controlling regulatory agencies and entire governments, using the best political and legal tactics money can buy.

That one-atom difference in the shape of the molecule is all the difference in the world in terms of its breakdown, toxicity, and side effects, not to mention the ability to have a healthy life or its miserable opposite.

Where Synthetic Estrogen Comes From

The most popular synthetic estrogen is a drug called Premarin, and it is made from the urine of pregnant horses (PRegnant MAre's urINe).  This is not a joke.  Not for you, your family, or the mare.

Most estimates are that at least 75 percent of HRT drugs contain Premarin.  Since 1993, Premarin has been among the top three drugs in the U.S. in gross sales (National Center for Health Statistics).

Manufactured by the Philadelphia pharmaceutical giant Wyeth-Ayerth since 1942, an estimated $940 million per year worldwide is generated by the sale of this one drug.  (Sellman, p. 5)

In 1992, Wyeth-Ayerth spent a mere $9 million just to advertise Premarin.  Their ad execs came up with the brilliant phrase "untreated menopause."  That same year, Premarin was the #1 drug prescribed in the U.S.  (Robbins, p. 140)

I will spare you the grisly details of what life is like for the mare providing these urine byproducts to human females.  Premarin was approved by the FDA over 50 years ago, when requirements were far less stringent than even now.  There are many unknown ingredients in Premarin which are unstudied, untested, and unnatural in human tissue.  These are probably instrumental in the abnormally high rates of uterine and breast cancer following synthetic HRT.  Those rates are anywhere from 30 percent to 600 percent increase above normal, depending on the study.

Synthetic HRT:  Proven Side Effects

A growing number of medical researchers who do not represent the interests of the drug cartels are stepping forward to show that the symptoms of menopause are not caused by too little estrogen, but by too much!  Synthetic hormones are not harmless.  Compare these effects to the original menopause symptoms they set out to cure.

Side effects of synthetic HRT:

Other side effects of synthetic HRT:

• Depression  (Obstet and Gyn, 1992 80:30)
• Breast cancer  (NEJM, 19 Jun 97; 336:1821)
• Stroke  (NEJM, 1991; Vol 325:756)

The synthetic progestins used in HRT are broken up in the liver after going through the digestive system.  The liver changes these into three other metabolites.  The benefits we need from real natural progesterone being able to balance and eliminate these toxic estrogens are not available, because these progestins don't work the way human identical progesterone does.  So the big change in the 1970s from ERT to HRT was just a social "mood change" created by drug industry advertising and its stepchild, the "peer-reviewed" medical journal articles.

Many problems some women describe at menopause are not caused by lack of estrogen, but by lack of human progesterone relative to an excess of harsh, toxic estrogen effects.  A woman's estrogen production drops 40 percent at menopause, but her decline in progesterone can be far greater than that, approaching 100 percent.  Also, the synthetic progestins are useless at best, so her estrogens are functionally unopposed.

Back to the Basics

As profits mounted over the years, manufacturers made additional claims about the benefits of HRT.  These were again unsupported by actual science.  The story was that women's lives would be improved if they could be spared the horrors of aging, menopause, osteoporosis, and the loss of femininity.

It was a great story that any of us would want to believe.  Sadly, it was simply not true, however much we might have wanted it to be.  Furthermore, the side effects of HRT have proven to be worse than the problems they were said to be able to cure.

Finally, as of December 2002, the Federal Government has declared estrogens to be the "greatest hazard" for creating human cancer.  According to Christopher Portier, director of the Environmental Toxicology Program within the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, this determination was made after their review of the medical literature over the past 2 years.  Although the literature over the past sixty years would have supported their conclusions, we certainly appreciate Mr. Portier et al. in reaching this conclusion.

Perhaps the major drug companies and medical lobbies who have profited so obscenely from the government's protection of their monopoly control over these pharmaceuticals will apologize and offer reparation to our nation's women and their families.  Their fiendish misuse of these drugs has created more wholesale suffering and death among our people than we care to think about.  Let's not hold our breath waiting for that apology.

To understand the scope of this crime, we need to cover some basic endocrinology.  We can't identify doubletalk without knowing the basics of plain talk.

Hormones

These chemical messengers come from all the body's glands (the adrenals, pituitary, testes, ovary, thyroid, etc.) and they carry the commands that affect all the tissues and glands in our body.  In an esoteric sense, hormones are where mind meets body, because the brain can initiate changes in these levels based on thought, emotion, and other stimulations of the glands in our brain.  The glands secrete hormones, and are in turn controlled by other hormones in the blood.  Thus, the endocrine system is as interconnected as a spider's web.  If one system goes haywire, within limits, it can be supported and covered for by other glands that can adapt to provide for some of the other glands' functions.

Estrogens

Estrogens are hormones.  Estrogens are a steroid (that is, made from cholesterol) that occurs in both men and women, and they affect the growth and development of sex organs and other tissues related to reproduction  (Guyton, p.1023).

Estrogen is really a generic term for three separate hormones:

• estriol
• estradiol
• estrone

For this article, "estrogen," as is produced by the body, refers to all three of the above hormones.  Estrogen is produced in three main places in a woman's body:

• the ovaries
• the adrenal glands
• the fat cells

The main purpose of estrogen is to make the uterine lining, the endometrium, ready to implant a fertilized egg in the event that fertilization occurs.  To aid in this function, estrogen will promote:

• water retention
• fat storage
• maturation of the female adolescent

All the above is just fine if pregnancy is likely.  But excess estrogen throws off the timing.  Excess estrogen causes the body to prepare for embryo implantation all the time.  This state of over-preparation is the cause of the negative symptoms we observe in women who suffer from "estrogen dominance," such as:

• infertility, more likely miscarriage
• sluggish blood circulation
• migraine headaches
• increased clotting of blood
• high risk of strokes
• disrupted copper/zinc ratios in brain cells, causing mood swings
• fibroids
• endometriosis

Progesterone

Every system in the body has a feedback loop to keep balance.  The yin-yang, sister hormone of estrogen is progesterone.  Its functions are just as  important.  Progesterone is produced mostly in the ovaries or the placenta, and to some extent by the adrenal glands and the fat cells.  It is the precursor for both estrogen and testosterone, as well as all other natural steroid hormones.

Progesterone's functions are:

• maintenance of the endometrium during pregnancy
• formation of new bone
• regulation of blood pressure
• fat conversion
• sugar metabolism
• maintenance of myelin (nerve insulation)
• regulation of estrogen production

To review the basics, an egg is presented once a month from the ovaries, wrapped in an envelope called a follicle.  After the follicle lets go of the egg, the egg travels down the Fallopian tube on its way to the uterus, where it awaits possible fertilization.  The burst follicle still has an important job to do:  it begins to produce progesterone for the next two weeks.  The job of progesterone is to maintain the uterine lining until one of two things happens:

• pregnancy
• or not

If pregnancy occurs, progesterone production is resumed by the placenta.  If no pregnancy happens, the follicle stops producing progesterone.  This triggers the collapse of the blood-rich lining, which is then expelled as the woman's monthly flow of the menses.

The balance between estrogen and progesterone controls the whole process of reproduction in a woman on a daily basis.  Estrogen creates the lining each month, and progesterone maintains and eliminates the outmoded estrogens by sloughing off the lining if no pregnancy happens.  So with this balance, what's the problem?

There is no problem, unless one process or the other gets out of balance.  American women most often experience estrogen dominance.  This is because so many synthetics and pollutants in our modern environment have some level of estrogenic activity.  Also, the liver functions of overfed and undernourished Western women eliminate estrogens and toxics less effectively than those of women in the Third World.  Some of these pollutants are among the "sea of estrogens" listed below.

Estrogen Dominance

With estrogen effects so high, progesterone can no longer keep up its dynamic balance with estrogen.  Many American women live their whole adult lives with pathologically high levels of estrogen.  Three main reasons for the high levels are:

• overly refined diets

• lack of exercise

• external, toxic sources of estrogen:  xeno-estrogens

With respect to diet, the presence of refined carbohydrates, unsaturated fats, de-mineralized food, and too much of it, all serve to raise estrogen to abnormal levels.  These are often twice the normal levels, and they may remain high for many years.

The second reason for high estrogen levels is lack of exercise.  Dr. Ellison of Harvard University found that estrogen levels are much lower in women who eat little and perform strenuous physical work, as in locales with a largely non-industrialized lifestyle.  The opposite is true for affluent Western women who eat too much and get little exercise.  Abnormally high estrogen levels are the direct result.

Dr. John Lee points out the obvious corollary:  Menopause is a much bigger transition for women in industrialized countries, because the estrogen decline is so extreme.  The difference between pre- and postmenopausal estrogen levels is significant.  Like the big dip on a hormone roller-coaster, this change is very stressful, and is the real cause of the discomforts of menopause.

This "sea of estrogen" in which we exist is the result of many factors:

Xeno-estrogens (foreign, unnatural estrogens) maintain estrogen-like effects at up to double the normal values for the entire adult life of some human females.  As the sister hormone that's supposed to balance the whole delicate system, progesterone is often simply overwhelmed by the dominant estrogens.  Natural hormones are subtle, fragile, and transient.  Xenoestrogens, in contrast, are harsh, strong, and long-lasting.  Progesterone just doesn't stand a chance.  Hormone-replacement therapy with its fake-progesterone "progestins" is just another form of xenoestrogens, which only makes things worse.

Do Men Dodge Hormonal Imbalance?

We wish!  Toxic overdoses of estrogen and estrogen-like toxics are really a disaster for men as well as women.  It turns out that, in a chemical sense, men are really the weaker sex.  Sorry, guys.  Testosterone can be shut down and converted to estrogen far more easily than the other way around.  With testosterone levels falling in men and all higher vertebrate species of animals around the world, the disaster of infertility and feminization of all species is a process now well under way worldwide.  This is due to the increased pollution levels in our environment, including excreted synthetic hormones accumulating in our watersheds, lakes, and rivers.  Also, since most of us live with and love the women in our lives, any adverse effects upon their health matter to us very directly.

Though some scientists have known about the problem for years, public attention was drawn by a series of articles that appeared in three consecutive issues of the Los Angeles Times in October 1994.

Alligator offspring studied at University of Florida had very high estrogen and low testosterone levels as a consequence of a large pesticide spill in Lake Apopka near Gainesville.  Gonad shrinkage was observed in males, leading to a drop in alligator reproduction in the lake, estimated at 90 percent since the spill occurred.  Read the work of Michael Fry of the University of California at Davis in the journal Science, 1981, for documentation of these sad facts.  An article in Lancet in May 1993 estimates a drop in men's sperm counts of 50 percent in the past 30-50 years, and links the decline to environmental estrogen mimickers.

It is no coincidence that the women of the industrialized nations of northern Europe and the United States have two things in common:

• The highest rates in history of breast cancer, endometrial cancer, and HRT consumption;  and

• High exposure to plastics, chemicals, computer chips, pesticides, and other xeno-estrogens.

The Negative Effects of Estrogen Dominance

With long-term estrogen dominance, the stores of body fat increase.  Fluids are retained, causing bloating and edema.  There are defects in both fat and sugar metabolism, often severe enough to cause diabetes.  Risks of endometrial cancer are increased 5-14 times, as cited in the 1975 NEJM articles above.

Gradual blood poisoning (toxemia) develops due to the inability of xeno-estrogens to be broken down.  This contributes to auto-immune disorders like lupus, chronic fatigue, and arthritis, in which the body begins to attack its own cells as they become so toxic that they are unrecognizable as "self."

Alteration of zinc and copper uptake in brain cells causes mood swings (a polite term that could include going absolutely crazy).  The incidence of stroke increases 50 percent with chronic estrogen use, according to an extensive project known as the "Boston Nurse's Questionnaire Study" of 121,000 nurses.  (Stampfer)

Normal estrogen stimulates breast and endometrial tissue.  Excess estrogen causes excess stimulation of breast and endometrial collagen, resulting in fibroids in both locations.  (McDougall, p. 87)

Another health detriment of excess estrogen is its destruction of B vitamins.  Excess estrogen has been reported to destroy Vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, and other B-complex vitamins such as Biotin, Choline, Folic Acid, PABA, and Inositol.  Most functions of cell metabolism depend on the B vitamins.  Symptoms of depletion include fatigue, sluggish memory, hair loss, and aging.  Other problems can deplete these vitamin levels, but excess estrogen is a common one.

What Is Menopause?

Is menopause a disease that requires medical treatment to be "cured"?

In a word, no.

Menopause is the portion of a woman's life in which her hormonal changes end her ability to bear children, while enabling a mature, stable condition of mental development and wisdom.

The unpleasant symptoms we have come to associate with menopause are common only in a small group of women in history:  the more-affluent American and northern European women in the past 75 years.  Outside of that group, menopause is not such a problem, and is taken in stride as a natural phase in a woman's life with little fanfare.  Evidently, the more simple the lifestyle and the diet, the more effortless the transition.

History of HRT

The concept of this transition period called "menopause" as being a treatable disease corresponds to the same period during which Western scientists have known how to synthesize estrogen.  Specifically, the year was 1938;  the scientist, Charles Dobbs;  the biochemical, diethylstilbestrol (DES).  This was thought to be the first "synthetic estrogen."  The American Medical Association, consistent with its self-funding schemes through product endorsement, started predicting that miscarriages could be prevented by it, and various problems of pregnancy could be cured with it.

So DES was prescribed to millions of American women over many years.  By 1960, it was noticed that 60-90 percent of DES daughters had abnormal sex organs, leading to many instances of infertility, miscarriages, and cancer  (Sellman, p. 28).  DES sons often had testicular dysfunction and were often sterile.  The mothers who took the DES even displayed an increased incidence of breast cancer by 40 percent  (Myers, p.143).

This first "synthetic estrogen" was also the first drug that could cause cancer in the offspring of mothers who took it  (Reusch, p. 22).  However, DES wasn't taken off the market until 1971 (Kamen, p. 99).  If you can determine how much the AMA "earned" from its endorsement of DES over the many years of its profitable use in American medicine, I would love to hear from you for future research projects.

HRT's Second Inning

In 1966, the gynecologist Robert Wilson wrote the bestseller, Feminine Forever, in which he popularized the profitable view that menopause is an estrogen-deficiency disease.  We have all lived and wasted money in the climate of that misconception ever since, thanks to the social engineering and marketing skills of the pharmaceutical industry and allopathic medicine.

You can track the funding of various patented drugs that partially imitated human estrogens, progesterone, and testosterone in many anthologies of medical and drug history, if you are so inclined.  Study the Wilson Foundation and who funded it:  the drug industry, to the tune of $1.3 million.  Dig into the many studies they sponsored that didn't get reported because the results weren't "favorable" enough.

The primary study was a trial in Puerto Rico on 132 women to prove that synthetic estrogens were effective contraceptives.  All the negative side effects were discounted, including the fact that 20 percent had serious side effects and 5 women died without any investigation as to cause.  This was called a "success" by the FDA, and these dangerous estrogen imitators were then approved.  This permitted the birth control pills, which were so important for the "sexual revolution" that has so completely impacted the American family today.

Everything you might have read in the major women's magazines about hormone therapy from about 1965 to 1975 was based on less viable clinical studies of human women than the Puerto Rican one.  Well-written and beautifully created feature articles endorsing HRT's health benefits were bought and placed in mainstream women's magazines over a period of several decades.  Perhaps you recall these.  These had the best photography and high-end marketing that big money could buy, and they worked.

Economic and Political Realities

What are some of the risks with any commercially supported therapy program in modern medicine that affects people's experience of health and comfort?

• Research results are bought by the very companies who want exclusive control of profits from the products their own research supports.

• New drugs have no requirements for conclusive positive benefits demonstrated by controlled, randomized clinical trials on humans.  This database is eventually provided by reports from doctors on side effects from the first few years of use in your community.

• Drug companies have a strong financial incentive to attribute side effects from the new drug to the disease process itself.  The scientific method has always been vulnerable to profit lust.  In medicine, this is at least as true as elsewhere in the economy.

• Drug hoaxes to benefit private suppliers are so common as to be modern principles of good marketing.  Recently, the mass immunizations given to those who served in the Gulf War have been shown to kill far more people than they saved.

You must inform yourself of these complexities if you are presented with a drug treatment that stands to benefit governments, pharmaceutical companies, or technology firms.

The issue with Hormone Replacement Therapy is that over 30 million American women are peri-menopausal.  The current industry of providing them with patented horse estrogens and synthetic progestins that are not found in human physiology has been pulling in over a billion dollars annually.

If these drugs are detrimental in their dosages or actual effects, it triggers the "need" for surgeries, cancers, pain management, symptom treatments, preventative checkups, and diagnostic imaging services tied to insurance packages and employee benefits.  These costs weave throughout the American economy and community.  The economic consequences are impossible to calculate, but the intangible factors of spirit, sexuality, comfort, and enthusiasm versus depression are so significant as to be priceless in most of our family lives.

Osteoporosis

Perhaps cancer isn't your worry, but the possibility of osteoporosis after menopause really bothers you.  Memories of Mom or Grandma melting down into a stooped and frail senior really haunt you.  Most of the public has been completely duped by medical disinformation about the plague of osteoporosis.  Standard "common sense" sold by the media warns women that unless they take estrogen and calcium, they will experience bone loss.

Wrong.  Look at the big picture.  Modern American and northern European women have the highest rates of osteoporosis in the world.  They also have the highest estrogen levels, intake of synthetic hormones, and dietary calcium in that same world.  What is wrong with the story here?

Bone in a living body is not a mineral type of substance like a hard shell or dried antler.  It is living tissue, with rich networks of blood vessels and nerves.  Bone is constantly being torn down and replaced by specialized blood cells.  Every seven years, the entire skeleton is completely replaced.

Bone has a matrix, or framework, on which calcium is laid down.  In America, most everyone gets enough calcium.  True calcium deficiency results in a disease of starvation called kwashiorkor, which is found usually in Third World countries.

Osteoporosis is not a disease of calcium deficiency.  It's a disease of matrix deficiency:  the framework becomes more flimsy, because there isn't as much of a matrix to attach the calcium to.

There's plenty of available calcium.  Calcium is an inert mineral contained in most foods.  The body maintains the blood levels of calcium at a certain level.  Anything extra, like in calcium supplements, spills out of the body through the kidneys.  If there's only so much of this framework, or matrix, it really doesn't matter how much calcium is in the blood;  the excess is eliminated, if one is lucky.  Stones, bone spurs, plugged arteries, and calcified joints are found when it is not eliminated well enough.

If women get enough calcium, why don't their bones become stronger?  The definition of pasteurization is removal of all enzymes via heat.  One of the enzymes in milk is phosphatase, and we need that to absorb calcium.  Plenty of calcium, not enough phosphatase, and the bones won't even have the benefit of usable calcium.

For further information on the negative effects of pasteurization, study this site: http://www.notmilk.com/  These scientists expose yet another branch of nutritional disinformation, brought to your family by the dairy industry.

Moving on past various billion-dollar drug hoaxes like Fosamax and Synthroid, our next stop is heart disease.  It's the last stop for millions of Americans.

Heart Disease

Unsupported but legally permitted claims are made that synthetic HRT will help prevent heart disease.  P.T. Barnum must have really made an impression on the drug cartels when he observed that "there's a sucker born every minute."  Medical literature is specific in listing cardiovascular disease as a clear danger in estrogen use.  (Br J of Obs and Gyn, Feb 1997; 104:163. Also, PDR 1998).

Heart disease is our biggest killer in America.  Less commonly known is that heart attacks in pre-menopausal women are very rare.  But ten years after menopause, and especially if the woman is on synthetic HRT, the rates soon rise to equality with men's rates.  Most women wouldn't appreciate that kind of equality.

In his books and videotape What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause, Dr. John Lee, MD notes that HRT is the number one cause of increased rates of heart attacks in postmenopausal women.  Why?  In a word, vasospasm.  The word means severe tightening or cramping of a blood vessel.

Men would be surgically treated for 85 percent coronary artery blockage, but women were dying with only 35 percent blockage.  Researchers couldn't understand what was happening for the longest time, until they began to do angiogram studies with Rhesus monkeys.  Since monkeys don't go through menopause, they had to create it for the study.  The way they did it was to first remove their ovaries.

To induce heart attack they injected Provera, the patented human drug for progestin activity.  They found this caused "unrelenting" vasospasm of the coronary artery, and death of the monkey within moments.  An artery which had as little as a 30 percent blockage constricted down to complete closure and would not open up again, no matter what they tried.

The researchers realized that synthetic HRT was the factor that was responsible for heart attacks in postmenopausal women whose coronary arteries were less than 50 percent blocked.  Furthermore, when natural progesterone was added to the Provera, the artery did not go into spasm, and the monkey survived.  This data was according to a study done in England at the London Institute of Heart and Lung Research by Peter Collins, MD.

Did you read about this study anywhere in Newsweek or your newspaper?  Information that challenges a billion-dollar HRT industry never makes it into mainstream media.  As long as media and drug companies are corporate assets owned by the same families, you will never find objective truth about anything affecting their own profits in that media.  Your study must extend into more independent sources of information.

Cancer

Worries about cancer have always existed around estrogen use.  That's why progestins (synthetic progesterone) were added in the mid-1970s, changing ERT to HRT.  While early studies were poorly executed, modern studies show conclusively that synthetic HRT significantly increases the risk of both endometrial and breast cancer.  Dr. John Lee states flatly that HRT is the only known cause of endometrial cancer.  (Lee, p. 220)

What does natural estrogen do?  It prepares the body for reproduction.  Those normal tissues are rapidly dividing:  endometrium, cervix, breast, and ovaries.  Now, what is cancer?  Very simply, cancer begins when a cell has lost its ability to specialize, but not its ability to multiply, or proliferate through rapid division.

A tumor is a group of cells multiplying rapidly out of control, but unable to perform any life function.  So which tissues do you think will most likely become cancerous?  Exactly, those which normally will tend to divide rapidly, like endometrial and breast tissue.  So estrogen and cancer effects have a lot in common.

Thus, it's no surprise that dozens of controlled medical studies and research reviews have clearly demonstrated that synthetic HRT, which is estrogen and functional xeno-estrogens (progestins) used over time, can cause cancer.

Okay, enough of the gloom.

Natural, Non-Toxic Solutions

Here are some effective, affordable methods for reducing the incidence of menopausal symptoms, creating a healthier, more balanced hormone system, and bringing more comfort and joy into your life:

• A clean diet and non-toxic lifestyle.

• Plant-sourced estrogens, called phytoestrogens, during the first half of a woman's cycle (lunar new to full, if not established already).

• Supplementation with natural progesterone as a cream or sublingual during the second half of a woman's cycle (lunar full to new).

• Liver function support with botanicals and nutriceuticals.

• Reasonable and intelligent exercise.

• A positive spiritual and philosophical focus.

To use safe, natural hormone balancing, click on our recommendations for Natural, Non-Toxic Solutions to Conventional Hormone Replacement Therapy, where we expound upon each of the methods above.

The references below will permit more detailed understanding of these concepts.  All of us benefit from an improvement in your own personal understanding of these complex health and political issues.

References

Here are the references mentioned in this article, and others which are relevant and interesting:

Hadwen, Walter, MD.  Microbes and War.

Hume, Edith Douglas.  Bechamp or Pasteur? CW Daniel, London 1923.

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