Confused About Hormone Therapies? Here are Some Quick Tips to Better Understand Them

July 29, 2011

 Manufacturers of synthetic hormones are doing their best to confuse the public and the medical profession about the difference between bioidentical hormones and synthetic or better yet, pregnant mare’s urine hormones.
 
Here is the low down on hormones from a physician trained in conventional medicine, who practiced conventional medicine for 20 years, moved on to treat patients with bioidentical hormones 10 years ago because I found them better for myself. Ultimately I became an expert with more than 15,000 patients presently under treatment with bioidentical hormones so I feel comfortable with sharing my education with you.
 
Hormones are good for you. When you are in your 20s and 30s, you are fertile, have no wrinkles, the incidence of heart disease, blood clots, and cancer are minimal unless you are genetically predisposed or are taking birth control pills or some other dangerous drugs.
 
When the hormones start to leave us as we approach menopause, the loss of hormones translates into increasing incidence of symptoms of hormone imbalance. The symptoms I am referring to are: hot flashes, night sweats, insomnia, loss of sex drive, itching, weight gain, palpitations, mood swings, irritability, vaginal dryness, recurrent urinary tract infections, and more. Finally, these symptoms if not treated will lead to increasing incidence of cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, interstitial cystitis, chronic illnesses and all aging diseases.
 
You have a choice at this point: you can do nothing and allow Mother Nature to take its toll and age you and make you sick or you can replace or supplement the missing hormones.
 
If you replace the missing hormones you are using synthetic hormone replacement therapy. The reason it is called replacement is that it replaces rather than supplement your hormones. Synthetic hormones or hormones made from pregnant mare’s urine are not molecularly similar to the human made hormones. That is because the drug companies who manufacture them want to have ownership of these drugs and the only way you can have ownership of a drug is to make it so that is does not have the molecular formula of something that occurs in nature. Ergo, synthetic, hormone replacement therapy.
 
Pregnant mare’s urine is made of 200 molecules of horse estrogens of which the manufacturer does not even know how many are active in the woman’s body. As a physician caring for women for 32 years I wonder what these 200 molecules are doing to our bodies…..
 
Bioidentical hormones have been around for 30 years. They are FDA approved and they are molecularly identical to the hormones our own bodies make. They are made from soy and yam oils but they are pharmaceutical products. They are pure and standardized. When your doctor prescribes them you can get them from the local drugstore in the form of commercially available pharmaceutical products- active ingredients are estradiol and progesterone or they cane be customized to your own needs by a compounding pharmacy that works with your physician’s prescription and makes the combination your physician and you have found best for your needs.
 
Do not be intimidated by anyone who tells you anything else. If your doctor tells you bioidenticals have not been studies enough, ask them why are they FDA approved then and why do they require a prescription. If your doctor tells you synthetics and bioidenticals are the same ask why they then make you feel so different. Ask them to try them themselves for a while if they are women., Finally, ask your doctor why the manufacturer of synthetic hormones, Wyeth pharmaceuticals is not conducting side by side studies to compare the efficacy of synthetic hormones versus bioidenticals.
 
I hope this has helped and I wish you a symptom free and smooth menopause!

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