Are Hormones Needed After a Hysterectomy?

May 12, 2023

In this podcast video and transcription, Dr. Hotze discusses the reasons most women have a hysterectomy, and how this surgery can often be prevented by addressing the underlying cause naturally. He also addresses the question “Are hormones needed after a hysterectomy?” Learn about the negative health symptoms you can experience after a hysterectomy and how you can resolve them by restoring hormone balance with bioidentical hormones.

Podcast Highlights:

0:30: …a hysterectomy is the second most common surgery in the country. The most common is a cesarean section, both of which are used in excess, and let me explain about that.

2:39: Now, I worked in training, this is hard to believe, with a OB-GYN doctor who told me he went from room to room in his office prospecting for hysterectomies. Do you get that? Prospecting for women that he can out their uterus. 

3:00: Well, if a woman is having problems with irregular menstrual cycles, heavy bleeding, clotting, breakthrough bleeding, fibroids, and all that, that is caused not by a malfunctioning uterus. It’s caused by a hormonal imbalance.    

3:19: Remember, the hormones control a woman’s menstrual cycle. Before you had hormones, ladies, you had no periods.

4:48: And as a woman gets older, it’s harder for those ovaries to kick back in and begin to work, and so they’ll get problems. They’ll get affective disorders. They’ll get postpartum depression. Doctors come in, put them on antidepressants.  

5:07: Postpartum depression is not caused by low levels of pharmaceutical drugs. It’s caused by a dramatic decline in your natural occurring hormones, particularly progesterone.

5:47: I’ve told numerous women in our practice that have been pregnant, “After you deliver that baby, you start on progesterone right away, and that’ll keep you from having postpartum blues.” And it does.

7:13: As a matter of fact, women oftentimes after they hit 40, have anovulatory cycles. They don’t ovulate every month, and when they don’t ovulate, they make no progesterone, and so the estrogen is uncontested, and it is a proliferative hormone.

8:42: When your estrogen levels are imbalanced with progesterone, and you have what we call estrogen dominance, that adversely affects a woman’s ability to assimilate thyroid hormones into her cells. Thyroid hormones are what enable your cells to produce and use energy.

9:33: All this is caused by an imbalance in the hormones, which your OB-GYN, which is a surgeon, and surgeons think the chance to cut is a chance to cure, just wants to cut out your uterus.

10:45: …progesterone has an anti-cancer effect, and it’s very important. You should never take uncontested estrogen. If the doctor says, “We’re just going to give you estrogen, and that’s it. You don’t need progesterone, because you don’t have a uterus anymore.”

11:00: Progesterone affects every cell in your body, and the hormones, particularly the cells that are most importantly affected are your brain cells.   11:11:  Your female hormones, ladies, have a tremendous impact on the production of neurotransmitters within your brain to help you think clearly and have good moods.

13:08: You can be treated with natural progesterone, and that will prevent you from having to go through and have all these irregular cycles and ultimately get a hysterectomy.

Podcast Transcription:

Dr. Steven Hotze: Hello, I’m Dr. Steve Hotze. Welcome to the program today. We’re going to talk today about one of the most commonly searched items on the internet at our practice, and that’s the issue of whether or not a woman should have a hysterectomy, when and what are the reasons she should have one, or why shouldn’t she have one.

Now, this is really important because a hysterectomy is the second most common surgery in the country. The most common is a cesarean section, both of which are used in excess, and let me explain about that.

What is a hysterectomy?

It’s the removal of the uterus. Hyster means uterus. Ectomy means removed, so hysterectomy is the removal of the uterus. So there’s different types of a hysterectomy. There’s a total hysterectomy where you take the entire uterus out, but you leave the ovaries. Then there’s a total hysterectomy and bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy. That’s a big word, but that means the uterus is removed and the ovaries are removed as well, the fallopian tubes and the ovaries.

Most people, and I’m talking about general public, think of a partial hysterectomy as just taking the uterus out and leaving the ovaries, and a total hysterectomy is removing them all, but that’s not the case. A total hysterectomy is simply removing the uterus alone, and when you have a bilateral, that means two-sided, salpingo-oophorectomy, the removal of the ovaries, that’s what most people in general think of as a total hysterectomy, but it’s a total hysterectomy of bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy.

Now, why do women have hysterectomies?

Well, very commonly the reasons are simple. They have irregular menstrual cycles. Maybe you started off when you were young, three to five days in mild to moderate bleeding, and then it went years later, five to seven days, seven to nine days. You get heavier and heavier menstrual periods with clotting, and then you get breakthrough bleeding. You get severe cramping. You get severe premenstrual symptoms. You get fibroids. You go to the doctor and say, “Doc, what can I do about this?” And he goes, “Well, I can solve that problem real easy. We’ll just do a hysterectomy.”

Now, I worked in training, this is hard to believe, with a OB-GYN doctor who told me he went from room to room in his office prospecting for hysterectomies. Do you get that? Prospecting for women that he can out their uterus. Well, if a woman is having problems with irregular menstrual cycles, heavy bleeding, clotting, breakthrough bleeding, fibroids, and all that, that is caused not by a malfunctioning uterus. It’s caused by a hormonal imbalance.    Remember, the hormones control a woman’s menstrual cycle. Before you had hormones, ladies, you had no periods. Then you entered puberty, and you began to have your menstrual cycles, and that was governed because your hormones came into play.

Now, as you marched through your menstrual life, those hormones can become imbalanced, and here’s what happens. We see this commonly after childbirth. Remember, during childbirth, a woman’s ovaries don’t make any more hormones. All the hormones of pregnancy are made by a woman’s placenta, and particularly the hormone progesterone is made all during that pregnancy every day, and it’s often the cause of the glow of pregnancy.

There’s some women that will tell you, “I got towards the end of my pregnancy, and I had a burst of energy,” and they had that glow of pregnancy. That’s high, high levels of progesterone, three, four times as high as you would normally have during irregular non-pregnant lifetime, but when the baby is delivered, then the placenta is delivered, there’s a dramatic decrease in hormone production, and your ovaries, which have been shut off now for at least nine months, they got to turn back on, and they get sluggish, and they don’t turn on, and they don’t make the hormones as quickly as you would like.

And particularly if a woman’s unhealthy, and she’s had poor eating habits, or she’s taking drugs, or she’s deficient in vitamins and minerals, it just doesn’t work. And as a woman gets older, it’s harder for those ovaries to kick back in and begin to work, and so they’ll get problems. They’ll get affective disorders. They’ll get postpartum depression. Doctors come in, put them on antidepressants. Postpartum depression is not caused by low levels of pharmaceutical drugs. It’s caused by a dramatic decline in your natural occurring hormones, particularly progesterone.

What I did with my daughters, and I have five, and they’ve had a total of somewhere in the order of those five girls have had at least about 18 children, I gave them progesterone when they went in to deliver their babies and said, “You don’t even have to tell your doctor. You just start taking that progesterone the day after you have the baby. Just start taking it every day.” They did. None of them had any postpartum blues or postpartum depression. They all did fine, and I’ve told numerous women in our practice that have been pregnant, “After you deliver that baby, you start on progesterone right away, and that’ll keep you from having postpartum blues.” And it does.

So anyway, back to the whole deal about the hysterectomy, what happens is women march through their menstrual life and their hormones begin to decline. In a perfect world, in a 28-day cycle, a woman on day one has her period. By day five, her ovaries start making estrogen hormones, which once again proliferate the inner lining of the womb. Day 14, 15 she’ll ovulate, and that’s where she produces the egg that travels down the fallopian tubes into the uterus waiting to be fertilized, and the ovaries at that time begin to make progesterone, and progesterone balances out and matures the inner lining of the womb and balances out the estrogen. It’s like a seesaw.

And so you’ve got to have the right amount of progesterone to balance the estrogen. When that’s done, then the cycle, if there’s no pregnancy, you normally on day 28, approximately, a woman starts to have her period, and it lasts three to five days, and everything is fine. But as she marches through her menstrual life or after pregnancy, if hormones don’t kick back in, and maybe she gets into her late thirties and early forties, then even though estrogen levels begin to decline, progesterone declines more. As a matter of fact, women oftentimes after they hit 40, have anovulatory cycles. They don’t ovulate every month, and when they don’t ovulate, they make no progesterone, and so the estrogen is uncontested, and it is a proliferative hormone.

It causes the proliferation of the inner lining of the womb, so it really beefs up. And when you have a period now, it’s heavier, and you’ve got clotting, and then you get breakthrough bleeding. This is all hormonal imbalance and decline, and then that leads to the production of uterine fibroids, and that’s when you end up going to the doctor and say, “Doctor, what can you do about it?” And he says, “Oh, just do a hysterectomy. That’ll quit.” And it will. It’ll get rid of irregular bleeding, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem of hormonal decline and imbalance.

So if you have a hysterectomy, and whether they take your ovaries out or not, if you were in that state, your ovaries weren’t working well, they may take them out and throw you immediately into surgical menopause. One way or another, if your ovaries weren’t working, and your uterus was having irregular periods and producing fibroids, then you knew your hormones were imbalanced, and they’re not going to get better balanced even if you don’t remove the…after the hysterectomy, even if you leave the ovaries in.

Common Symptoms After a Hysterectomy

So you’re going to begin to have those significant problems of what?

• You’ll get hot flashes.
• You’ll get mood swings.
• You’ll get chronic headaches.
• You’ll get joint and muscle aches and pains.
• You’ll become fatigued and tired.

When your estrogen levels are imbalanced with progesterone, and you have what we call estrogen dominance, that adversely affects a woman’s ability to assimilate thyroid hormones into her cells. Thyroid hormones are what enable your cells to produce and use energy.

Symptoms of Hypothyroidism

So if you’re binding up the thyroid hormones with thyroid binding globulin caused by the overproduction or the imbalance between estrogen/progesterone, you’re going to be thrown into a low thyroid condition, which causes you to have:

• fatigue
• difficulty thinking
• weight gain
• cold sensitivity
• cold hands
• cold feet
• sluggish bowels
• recurrent and chronic infections
• dry skin
• puffiness
• pale
• loss of the lateral third of your eyebrows
• modeling of your tongue, because the tongue enlarges and bumps up against the teeth
• you generally just feel sick and tired
• loss of romantic moods and inclinations

All this is caused by an imbalance in the hormones, which your OB-GYN, which is a surgeon, and surgeons think the chance to cut is a chance to cure, just wants to cut out your uterus.

And then when you begin to have these problems, they’ll put you on some counterfeit hormones. They’ll put you on Premarin, which is horse estrogen. Premarin is a great, great product for horses in menopause, but not for women. You need your own bioidentical, human bioidentical hormones. So you need to be on natural estrogen and progesterone. That’s why you had your uterus cut out. It’s because your hormones were imbalanced. They should have been balanced, but if they didn’t after the hysterectomy, you want to balance them again, and you do need progesterone, natural progesterone.

The doctors oftentimes will put you on what is called Prempro, Premarin with Provera. Provera is a counterfeit to natural progesterone, and in studies back in the early 2000s, it was shown to cause increased risk of breast cancer and other cancers, so you want to be on natural progesterone.

And natural progesterone has been shown in studies when there are low levels of progesterone, there’s a dramatic increase of cancer in the body. So progesterone has an anti-cancer effect, and it’s very important. You should never take uncontested estrogen. If the doctor says, “We’re just going to give you estrogen, and that’s it. You don’t need progesterone, because you don’t have a uterus anymore.” Progesterone affects every cell in your body, and the hormones, particularly the cells that are most importantly affected are your brain cells.     Your female hormones, ladies, have a tremendous impact on the production of neurotransmitters within your brain to help you think clearly and have good moods.

Symptoms of Hormone Imbalance in Women

So when women lose their hormones and their hormones decline or become imbalanced, invariably:

• you can get anxiety
• you can get panic attacks
• you can have depression
• loss of romantic moods and inclinations
• you can have outbursts of anger
• you can have problems with energy and fatigue
• difficulty with weight
• you get brain fog
• you get joint muscle aches and pains

You basically get sick and tired of feeling sick and tired, and that can easily be corrected.

The Natural Solution

So what is the solution? Well, the solution is very simply, replenish your hormones with natural bioidentical hormones, estradiol and estriol. It’s known as Biest. We produce that here. Physicians Preference Pharmacy International produces that. We use that pharmacy. We also, and these are compounded preparations, we use natural progesterone. These are natural bioidentical hormones. These are the same hormones your body used to make in adequate amounts, but doesn’t make them inadequate amounts and doesn’t make them at all, because either you’ve had a hysterectomy, or you’ve gone through the change of life, and your ovaries aren’t working anymore. So that can be corrected, and that’s the natural solution.

And I want to encourage any one of you who is having problems with irregular menstrual cycles, or early fibroids, or having these problems, as soon as you start having premenstrual symptoms, I’m talking about mood swings, fluid retention, weight gain, headaches, migraines, breast tenderness, fibrocystic breast disease, joint muscle aches and pains, loss of romantic moods and inclinations. You begin to have that before you have your period. That’s a premenstrual symptom. You can be treated with natural progesterone, and that will prevent you from having to go through and have all these irregular cycles and ultimately get a hysterectomy.

Get started early. Don’t wait until you’ve got breakthrough bleeding, and you know have excessive amount of bleeding in excessive days, and you feel terrible for a week or more at a time. Come in early when you begin to have symptoms, and you can be easily treated to help prevent that.

We do preventative medicine. We want you to be healthy and well naturally. And so when you need to get started is when you begin to have the symptoms, to replenish those hormones, so you balance everything out. That’s real simple. It’s not rocket science.

As a matter of fact, I wrote a book. Let me see if I’ve got it here. Yep. Hormones, Health, and Happiness. And I want to encourage you to contact our office at 281-698-8698. You’ll talk to a new guest consultant. Tell them you saw my podcast. I will give you this book free and ship it to you free. I want you to understand how you can be healthy and well, no matter what age you are. Whether you’re in the twenties, thirties, fifties, seventies, eighties, you can feel healthy and well, and you should. That’s what our goal is with each one of our guests.

By the way, we call our patients guests, because we have set up ourselves to be in the hospitality industry, and within that context, we provide medical care. You become our friends. We’re here to serve you and help you get on a path of health and wellness naturally without pharmaceutical drugs. So I hope this has been helpful to you. Please contact one of our new guest consultants if you’d like to come in and be evaluated. We’d be pleased to partner with you to help you get on that path of health and wellness, so you have energy, and vitality, and enthusiasm for life. I’m Dr. Hotze. Thank you for joining us today.

Real Life Testimonials: Women Who Got Their Life Back After A Hysterectomy

Joy’s Story – A hysterectomy put her right into menopause.

Rose’s Story – How to beat depression after a hysterectomy.

Janae’s Story – How a hysterectomy made her feel like a different person.

Be sure to subscribe to Dr. Hotze’s podcasts at www.HotzePodcast.com.

Categories: Blog, Hysterectomy, Menopause, Women(s) Health

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