Bio identical only means expensive
It is truly sad that we live in a world wherein "doctors", who take an oath to do no harm, are allowed to prescribe hormone replacement to the masses. This shows to me that a doctor is the equivalent to a crooked auto mechanic: "aw man, this is bad, your muffler bearings (there's no such thing) are shot, you need new ones right away, I can't even safely let you out of here without them".
Doctors know damn well that when you introduce hormones at or above physiological levels that the systems responsible for controlling and producing those hormones completely shut down. "So? They're malfunctioning, who needs'em!?" You do, to live. When a person starts taking thyroid hormone (usually for weight loss), their thyroid inevitably shuts down it's production of thyroid hormone. When a person starts taking insulin (side note: I know people who have to do this and their doctors tell them to continue to eat bread and fruit!! wtf!?!) they stop producing their own insulin. I've used both of these scenarios to illustrate a point: if the person stops taking their thyroxin or insulin, guess what happens to them? They die!
On to the "bio identical hormone replacement therapy". These are steroid hormones, which means that when you take them you are taking steroids. Bio identical or not that's what they are. The media is all too happy to wax on and on about the evils of steroids, anabolic steroids specifically (what do you think "bio identical" testosterone is?) and how they will rot your organs and make you "hear voices" and develop "homicidal and suicidal tendencies" (I'm referencing the Chris Benoit double murder/suicide that was blamed on steroids, not his extremely advanced brain damage from having literally hundreds of concussions). I'm not demonizing anabolic steroids, they are a boon for burn victims and AIDS patients and hey, they help our Olympians bring home the gold!
Yes the forms of testosterone used for anabolic steroids are sometimes different that those used for hormone replacement. But the effect is still the same, it's the same damn thing whether it's testosterone base, 1-testosterone or testosterone propionate. Even more ridiculous and hypo critical is that injectable testosterone is way better for. You see when you inject testosterone it does not have to go through the liver so they can be a more pure form, when you take testosterone pills of any kind they are alkylated which makes them toxic so the liver won't touch them allowing them to make it through the liver in to your blood stream. Bottom line: testosterone in pill form is toxic to the liver! Period.
Anabolic steroids aside, what about estrogen and progesterone? I can safely say that virtually nobody in the civilized world needs estrogen. Why? Everything we contact is estrogenic, from doughnuts to your car interior, everything we do is increasing our estrogen load. People with symptoms of having low estrogen are suffering from one of two things: too much weak phytoestrogens (soy products, wheat, flax etc.) or low progesterone (although one does equal the other). To boot: we can't detoxify estrogens at all because we're so low in magnesium and B6 it's ridiculous, the WHO has identified this deficiency as the most prevalent deficiency in the world. So we are exposed to tons of estrogens and we can't get rid of them (is your ass wider than your shoulders? guess why). Great.
Guess what having ridiculously high estrogen (phyto, xeno, exo or endo) levels does? It tells your pituitary gland to shut off progesterone production. So if you have abnormal estrogen levels, you have abnormal progesterone levels. How can this be said? Progesterone and estrogen antagonize each other. If one is fudgy, so is the other. Not to mention poor testosterone. Testosterone is made from progesterone. So you can see the issue there as well.
There could be some confusion at this point as to how exactly high phyto estrogens result in low estrogen levels. Many of the phyto estrogens we encounter are very weak estrogens, this means that in your body they attach themselves to your estrogen receptor sites and are not chemically powerful enough to activate them, this is how the drug clomiphene citrate or Clomid works. It blocks normal estrogens from completing the activation of their receptors.
This is all compounded even further because guess what competes for raw materials with progesterone? Stress hormones!! So high stress levels scavenge all of your pregnenalone (raw materials) so there isn't enough left for progesterone production.
So let's just imagine for a second that you have normally functioning hormones. What you can expect to see is that there are natural hormone cycles that coincide with certain activities (or lack thereof), with your hormonal system responding to the changes in your body by raising certain hormones and binding/destroying others. This is how your physiology is designed to work.
When a hormone is replaced, the delivery system is now in control of how much hormone gets into your blood and when. Your natural cycles fail and as a result your physiology is now no longer in control of the system. Your bodies chemistry and operation represent one of the most complex systems ever discovered by science, you could not even with a team of the top endocrinologists in the world, replicate it with hormone replacement. Which means that in short hormone replacement is a drastically inferior system compared to your bodies own system.
But the reason anyone would even consider hormone replacement is because the system has failed to do what you want it to, right? To which I ask: what have you done to make it work properly? Nothing perhaps? Well if you don't change the oil in your car what happens?
La Resumen
Here are the take home points:
- by taking replacement hormones you become dependent on them (did somebody say racketeering?)
- your average doctor knows nothing about hormones
- testosterone pills are toxic by the nature of how they function
- our entire civilization is estrogen packed
- plant foods are filled with estrogen blocker (this is only conditionally true, in most cases the subject, or what a doctor calls a "customer", responds with full blown estrogen symptoms)
- You have a mineral/vitamin deficiency that amplifies your health/hormone problems
- Stress wrecks your health/hormones
- hormone replacement is inferior to a functioning body
- Your actions destroy your hormonal health, not heal it (unless you change your actions)
- this is all fixable: luckily there is ProgestroPro, it boosts your natural production of progesterone and detoxifies your estrogen and liver all in one go without replacing anything
You can read more about these topics in my article: Why you aren't lean.
