Wednesday, January 27, 1999
Doctor says estrogen compounds problems
BY SUE MacDONALD
The Cincinnati Enquirer
If you're a woman who's been prescribed an estrogen pill or patch, Dr. John Lee wants your ear for a minute.
It's entirely possible your body has all the estrogen it needs but doesn't have enough of another hormone, progesterone, to balance out the estrogen, says Dr. Lee, a promoter of natural progesterone for women for more than 20 years.
According to the retired California family physician and author, millions of modern-day women are showing signs of what he has termed “estrogen dominance,” a condition that can be solved for many women by rubbing an over-the-counter natural progesterone cream onto their skin three weeks of every month.
Natural progesterone, he says in his updated book, What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Premenopause (Warner Books; $14.99), can help women who aren't yet menopausal but are experiencing premenopause problems:
• Weight gain despite exercise and dieting.
• Tender and lumpy breasts.
• Thyroid dysfunction.
• Once-regular periods that are suddenly too frequent or unpredictable.
• Fibroid tumors and heavy bleeding.
• Fatigue.
• Premenstrual symptoms.
• Migraines.
• Loss of sexual drive.
• Cold hands and feet.
Many of those symptoms, he says, are signs of too much estrogen, a condition that can be evened by adding natural progesterone to the body's chemical soup to restore the body's natural balance of hormones.
The problem, he says, is that drug companies aren't interested in natural progesterone because it can't be patented and sold at a profit, and if drug companies don't market and promote a product, many doctors don't know about it.
Progesterone creams can be purchased from pharmacies that compound, or individualize, prescriptions (see list in the book), online or at health food stores. Brands include Pro-Gest, Renewed Balance, Natra-Gest, Serenity and others. Prices vary; Pro-Gest is about $20-$25 for a tube that lasts 1-2 months.
Dr. Penny Wise Budoff, author of No More Hot Flashes (Warner Books; $24), points out that 25 percent of U.S. women use hormone replacement therapy for menopause problems. She does not support the use of natural progesterone because it isn't tested by drug companies.
DR. LEE'S ADVICE
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• Find a doctor willing to try natural progesterone as part of your lifestyle and treatment program. If you can't find one, educate your current doctor.
• Find products that contain true natural progesterone; read labels carefully (Dr. Lee's book contains a list of natural progesterone products). Just because a product says “wild yam extract” doesn't mean it has a natural progesterone formulation that exactly matches the human hormone.
• Get saliva tests for accurate measurements. Blood tests don't necessarily assess a woman's hormones accurately.
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Dr. Lee's philosophies, however, are supported by other doctors, including Dr. Susan Love, author of Dr. Susan Love's Hormone Book (Random House; $25), and Christine Conrad, coauthor of Natural Woman, Natural Menopause (HarperPerennial; $13).
“Real progesterone has been available for all these years, and the medical profession has ignored it in favor of synthetic birth-control pills and estrogen,” says Dr. Lee, 69, who retired in 1989 as a 35-year family practice physician to promote natural progesterone through books, talks, a newsletter and a Web site:
www.johnleemd.com
“I started (recommending) progesterone back in 1979, and it took me 10-12 years to realize that all these other women's problems — thyroid deficiency, osteoporosis, inability to carry babies to term, fibrocystic breast disease — weren't happening among my patients,” he says.
Yet when many women complain of premenopauseproblems to their doctors, they frequently are prescribed estrogen (with or without synthetic progesterone), and problems not only continue but worsen, he says.
Natural progesterone affects nearly all the body's organs and tissues, and its major purpose is to balance estrogen in the body, Dr. Lee says. As women age, they tend to lose far more progesterone than estrogen, leading to estrogen dominance.
Estrogen dominance is just one of several factors that explains why women in their 30s and 40s who are still 10-20 years from menopause are having puzzling and troubling symptoms, Dr. Lee says. Other factors cited in his book include:
• Poor nutrition, which hinders the body's ability to produce and use hormones properly. He recommends a diet high in fresh fruits, vegetables, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fiber, natural oils and free of processed foods. Meats should be organic and hormone-free.
• Stress, which stimulates a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol is made in the body by progesterone. Under stress, the body has to pump out more progesterone to make more cortisol. Eventually, hormones compete with each other, leading to bone loss, high cholesterol, depleted adrenal glands and chronic fatigue.
• Environmental factors and exposures that interfere with natural hormone production and overall health, including solvents, pesticides, weed killers, meat from animals fed estrogen-based drugs to fatten them, plastics, air pollution and emulsifiers in soaps and cosmetics.
Estrogen is a wonderful hormone, Dr. Lee says, helpful for brain function, bladder health, memory and other functions, but it should be used “with great care only when necessary, in very small amounts, in its natural form (meaning that it is identical to the estrogens made by your body).” And it always should be paired with natural progesterone, even in a woman without a uterus or ovaries, he says.
Many prescription estrogen drugs are chemically altered by a molecule or two so they can be patented and sold as drugs; Premarin, for example, is partly made from horse-urine estrogens. Dr. Lee recommends natural estrogens, available as creams, pills or patch.
And natural progesterone, according to studies by Dr. Lee and other researchers, can be used by the body to produce its own estrogens and other hormones. Progesterone also helps build bone, burns fat for energy, prevents endometrial and breast cancer, and allows embryos to survive during pregnancy.
Moreover, it has few of the side effects linked with synthetic estrogens — endometrial and breast cancer, osteoporosis, bloating, depression, headaches and more.
“The answer is don't give more estrogen than a person needs,” he says, “and include real progesterone with it.”
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