When it’s time, you can expect to transition through menopause in one of three ways. If you’re unlucky enough to land in Menopause Hell, give some serious thought to bioidentical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT).
Some women experience Menopause Heaven, in which your periods start changing and then stop without drama. A year goes by without a period and you say, “Oh, so that was menopause. What’s everyone’s complaining about.”
Then there’s Menopause Usual. Same change in your periods with an occasional hot flash and a rare night sweat. No big deal. Herbs like Black Cohosh work nicely for this.
Lastly, Menopause Hell, a veritable smorgasbord of physical and emotional misery. Heat waves course through your body all day (you grab anything in sight to fan yourself), perspiration drips down your forehead and the back of your neck, night sweats wake you despite having set your bedroom thermostat at “meat locker,” PMS turns your usual ebullience into chaotic mood swings, and your sex drive is a distant memory.
Life in Menopause Hell is definitely unnecessary.
Relieve the symptoms of menopause with BHRT
Keep in mind that we replace other hormones when we need them, including thyroid, insulin, and adrenal hormones. So what’s the issue with replacing your sex hormones, estrogen and progesterone?
Doubts about hormone replacement surfaced years ago after a study called the Women’s Health Initiative concluded that taking hormones increased risks for breast cancer. A few years later, the conclusions were challenged when it turned out some women might have entered the study with undiagnosed breast cancer, invalidating the numbers.
Today, just about all doctors agree that hormones are safe when used appropriately—namely, to relieve menopause symptoms.
However, an increasing number of physicians, myself included, believe one of the overlooked risks of hormone replacement therapy relates to the source of the hormones themselves. The estrogen in Premarin and Prempro, the most prescribed hormone products, is extracted from the urine of pregnant horses. Big Pharma deviously renamed this ingredient “conjugated equine estrogen,” equine being Latin for horse.
It’s not human estrogen–it’s horse piss, definitely not the same as human estrogen.
If you’re a woman who wants to restore her hormone levels, common sense dictates you choose hormones that are as identical to your own as possible, hence the term bioidentical (short for biologically identical). These hormones are derived from plants such as soybean and wild yam, the soy and wild yam plant estrogens and progesterones concentrated into a clinically effective hormone replacement.
Aside from animal cruelty, why horse estrogen isn’t right for you...
