Not to beat a dead horse, but…..
So back to hormones!
I have been receiving a lot of questions as of late from females realizing that yes they do have options to hormonal balance, as well as men realizing as they age their systems can become exhausted, thus adequately balanced also.
I had a pharmacy client come in for a refill of Premarin®. After speaking to her about Premarin® she was not aware that Premarin® is actually made from horse urine, actually a pregnant mare’s urine. They tell you in the name, PRE (pregnant)-MAR (mare)-IN (urine).
I remember a few years ago seeing a cartoon of a physician handing a horse a sampling of human hormones with the horse replying, “You want me to take what?” This is kind of how I feel about humans taking horse hormones.
Being out of ‘conventional pharmacy’ for a number of years, spending most of my time working with bio-identical hormones and nutrition in my compounding only pharmacy, I have been isolated for the most part from this particular client profile, and with the recent emails realize it is still not uncommon.
For this reason I thought I would write to hopefully clear some more confusion on the issue of hormonal replacement therapy. (And if I happen to add to the confusion, feel free to email me with your questions)
You might remember back in 2001 when the Women’s Health Initiative study was halted due to an increase of blood clots, breast cancer and no reduction of cardiovascular issues. This study utilized a therapy of either Prempro® a combination of Premarin® and Provera® (a progestin…NOT PROGESTERONE) or Premarin® alone.
The amount of money and time that went into this study to begin with boggles my mind. It does not represent good science in the realms of health and human nature. Even on their website they say they utilized estrogen and progestin. This is not a lie, but what they fail to explain adequately is that it is equine estrogen which does not represent a human’s estrogen profile in the remotest of ways. So why would you invest so much in studying it?
What ever brought us to the point of giving women horse urine concentrate for hormonal therapy? Well, there was a market for symptomatic relief. Women were experiencing hot flashes and many miserable side effects of peri-menopause and menopause. This was a problem and the public wanted a solution.
In steps a drug company. I don’t really know what led them to look at horse urine (kind of gross), but they realized that by supplementing women with horse estrogens, their hot flashes and other vasomotor symptoms significantly improved.
Doctors saw the relief their patients received, thus an easy sell.
Now we are seeing some ramifications of improper hormonal balance as the WHI study suggested. Does this mean we should avoid hormonal therapy all together?
You don’t have to.
We are learning that there are ways to assess and balance someone’s hormones to get to the root cause, not just take the approach of ‘quieting symptoms.’
If you or someone that you know is experiencing any ‘change of life’ symptoms the choice is yours for symptom management or in-depth hormonal balance.