Women with menopausal and
PMS trouble are increasingly interested in safe alternatives to conventional
hormone replacement therapy.
For many women, Bio Identical hormones are a good
answer.
However, I see women who aren’t getting quite as
much relief as they wish, even using bio-identicals.
There is much more that can be done, so don’t give
up!
Working with acupuncture
meridians can change how you react to hormones.
When your body works comfortably with hormones, you
get better results from any type of hormone that you are taking, and from
those hormones that you naturally produce. This alone often relieves PMS.
After working with the
acupuncture meridians, herbal and glandular supplements are the next step to
help your body function more normally again. At this point, most women with PMS
and some with menopause symptoms don’t need to take any hormones at all to
get relief.
But if a little more is needed, bio-identicals work well.
Bio-Identical hormones are
made from plants.
They match your body’s hormones but are weaker than
what you produce naturally.
Using this weaker version of hormone softens the
unwanted effects of unbalanced hormones, such as hot flashes, night sweats
and anxiety.
A point of interest:
“Estrogen” is from the same latin word root as
“Frenzy”.
I use a sublingual form of
bio-identicals, small pellets that dissolve under the tongue.
I stopped using skin creams because women were
telling me that the creams worked great for a few months, and then not so
well.
The explanation for this is that with creams, quantities of
the hormones can build up in the skin and start being released unevenly.
Saliva tests can show huge spikes of hormone levels
after a woman has used hormone creams for awhile.
Creams work well for vaginal dryness, and I do keep
a cream available for that specific usage.
So far, this may sound
pretty simple, and sometimes it is.
Other times, we delve into the intricacies of the
endocrine system.
Female problems aren’t caused only by the uterus and
ovaries.
We have to take into consideration functions of the
pituitary, hypothalamus, thyroid, liver, and adrenals.
Sometimes stress is a precipitating issue, sometimes
a person has an exposure to xenohormones that we have to track down.
Poor diet over time may have limited the ability of
hormones to pass through cell walls or there may be a nutrient deficiency.
As you can see, it gets a little more complicated.
The good news is that as we find and correct these
problems, all aspects of a person’s health get better!
In addition to a patient’s history and response to muscle testing, a couple of other tools we can use are saliva testing and hair analysis.
Saliva tests differ from blood work in that blood testing measures a protein-bound form of hormones which circulate in the blood stream, and saliva tests measure how much hormone is actually getting to the cells where the hormones do their work. It doesn’t matter if you have perfectly normal blood hormone levels, if that hormone can’t get out of your blood stream and into your cells. It is useful to have both blood and saliva tests to see if getting the hormones to the cells is part of the problem. If it is, then we use a specific detox protocol to fix the problem.
For women without menstrual cycles, a single saliva collection is sufficient. For menstruating women, 11 samples are collected over one menstrual period, to see the rise and fall of hormones throughout the month. The ratio of estrogen to progesterone is vitally important, and the 11 sample test shows how the ratio changes throughout the cycle. More information on saliva testing can be found at <www.diagnostechs.com>
Hair analysis measures mineral excretion by the body. Ideally, one finds normal mineral excretion ratios. Abnormal ratios point to specific organ system stress in a person. Heavy metal toxicity is also measured by hair analysis. A hair analysis looks at what has been happening in a person for the past 3 months, and thus can be repeated at 3 month intervals.
Natural treatment for female problems is effective and affordable. I prefer natural treatment for 2 additional reasons:
1. From a humanitarian viewpoint, it is much kinder than using Premarin, which is made from horses who are imprisoned in stalls for urine collection.
2. From an ecological viewpoint, it causes less water pollution since you aren’t excreting chemical hormones in your urine and the products are organically grown.
If you are curious about improving your life with bio-identicals or you just need a little help to get back to feeling well, give me a call.
Sandra Ashbrook, D.C.
(941) 962-7785
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