Click here for the original post. For our new January newsletter readers, let’s review my PMS prescription, explained in far greater detail in The Triple Whammy Cure. When you feel crummy, you’re menstruating, AND your symptoms appear predictably on a monthly (or every-other-month) basis, the problem is definitely hormonal and definitely fixable. Premenstrual syndrome (PMS) […]
Category: Women’s Health
Cure PMS The Natural Way…Without Seeing a Doctor
I can’t imagine what PMS actually feels like, but having heard the litany of miserable symptoms from thousands of my patients, it sounds pretty dismal. But just because I happen to be a male physician doesn’t mean I can’t offer help.
Menopause Transition Rx
Okay, you’ve faced the fact. You’re entering the potential minefield of the euphemistically named menopause transition and you know your hormones are definitely out of whack.
Q&A: Herbs Control PMS Palpitations
Q: In a health tip on hormones, you wrote that virtually any cyclical symptom is probably caused by hormone fluctuations. You described a patient who got such severe heart palpitations that her cardiologist considered heart surgery before one herb managed to get her hormones under control. Could you tell me which herb was used and how it worked?
Drug-Free Hormone Balancing
You yourself can balance your sex hormones–estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone–by making some key lifestyle choices.
Taking these steps will also help you look and feel spectacular (exercise, good foods, and supplements really do work):
Measuring Hormone Levels
First let’s discuss a strategy to get your health insurance to pay for as much of this testing as your policy allows. Good hormone testing is pricey.
(Those $30 kits that test all your hormones are only moderately accurate, especially when it comes to estrogen and progesterone. If you’re having periods, levels of these hormones change virtually every day, and trying to get an accurate picture with a single day’s result is a waste of your money.)
Symptoms of Hormone Imbalance
There are two ways to find out if your symptoms are being caused by an imbalance in your sex hormones (estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone).
“My hormones are out of whack!”
That’s the single most common sentence I hear from my patients.
It can come from a 25-year-old with irregular periods and industrial-strength PMS whose energy has gone down the tubes. Or from a 45-year-old (on the threshold of pre-menopause) who continues to gain weight even though she’s eating less and exercising more, and who adds that her brain feels like mush and her sex drive is a distant memory.
Pre-Menopause Anxiety
One of the most common symptoms my patients tell me about during their pre-menopause years is a pervasive sense of mild depression and anxiety. No particular reason for it, they report, just a sense that things aren’t going right, wanting to cry for no reason over little things that never bothered them.
Menopause and Bioidentical Hormones
Right now, thousands of women are having their first menopause-related hot flash. If you’re one of them you’re not alone: about 40 million US women will go through the menopause transition over the next 20 years, and virtually every one will experience a symptom of shifting hormones.
Women, Stress, and The Triple Whammy
Q. What exactly is the Triple Whammy?
A. It’s the cause of chronic ill health for tens of millions of women and involves the interaction of three factors:
Aromatherapy and Menstrual Cramps
Here’s a thoughtful gift for you, your daughter, or anyone who dreads her period because of cramps.
Hair Loss
Hair loss is challenging enough for men, but for women it can be devastating. Our culture accepts what doctors call male pattern baldness (even if many men aren’t crazy about the idea), but not balding women.
Easing Cramps
Of course I don’t know how menstrual cramps actually feel, but I suspect that if men were faced with monthly, industrial strength pain in the abdomen we’d go racing off to the Mayo Clinic in sweaty desperation.
Something New About Birth Control Pills
Just about everyone using the pill knows there are health risks involved, especially for women who smoke. Risks include migraine, blood clots, heart attack, and even stroke. Now some research has uncovered why this may occur. A recent report showed that women on the pill have much lower levels of two vital antioxidants, Vitamin E […]
Melatonin and Perimenopause
I was surprised to see a clinical report using the nutritional supplement melatonin in the Annals of the New York Academy of Science, simply because it’s a very conservative journal, rarely acknowledging the existence of natural medicine.
Q&A: Supplements and the Triple Whammy
Q: I unfortunately have all the symptoms of the Triple Whammy. What supplements do I need to take to get on the right track? A: Taking supplements to boost your feel-good serotonin is just one part of the Triple Whammy three-week cure, but it’s an essential component. To increase the amount of serotonin in […]
Fertility: Six Natural Steps to Take Right Now
At any given moment, there are more than six million couples struggling to get pregnant. Readers of The Triple Whammy Cure are well aware that because of low serotonin levels, women are especially vulnerable to Whammy #1–stress–and that stress can really wallop your fertility.