HRT products hardly ever produced any positive results, though. In rare cases, HRT did minimize some symptoms. However, HRT managed this not by genuinely addressing an imbalance in the body, but by acting as a steroid—that is, suppressing the immune system’s response to viral inflammation, nutritional deficiencies, and exposure to toxins such as DDT.

In other words, HRT didn’t make anyone healthier. On the contrary, in some cases it hid diseases by temporarily preventing the immune system from fully reacting to and combating them. So while it sometimes provided symptom relief, HRT allowed cancers, viruses, bacteria, and more to continue attacking women’s bodies and aging them rapidly without their knowledge—at least, until the damage became became so severe it couldn’t be covered up any longer. Suddenly, doctors were noticing cancer and strokes on the rise among the women taking HRT.

It was just a glimpse of the true problems hormone replacement had been causing, yet it was enough to get attention. When the news was reported, sales dropped—for a while. Soon, another promotional campaign claimed that an adjustment to the products had addressed the problem, and HRT became popular again.

Then in 2002 an enormous clinical study called the Women’s Health Initiative, which ran for over a decade and involved more than 160,000 postmenopausal women, caught on to more of the havoc that HRT had been wreaking and concluded that HRT substantially increased the risk of breast cancer, heart attacks,
and strokes.* That is, hormone replacement therapy rapidly sped up the aging process. Once again, HRT sales plummeted. When the findings came to light about HRT’s dangers, it should have been banned. It should have prompted researchers to look into what was really behind women’s mystery symptoms—and started them down the path to the discovery that hormones were never the problem.

Instead, another strategy came into the mix: bioidentical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT). BHRT is much safer than the previous drugs used in HRT. Every doctor is smart enough to know that, at this point, BHRT remains experimental. It’s at the beginning of a 30-year journey of trial and error, just as HRT once was.

At least it’s not starting from scratch. We have the history of HRT already behind us, which will allow doctors to watch newer hormone treatments more carefully, seeing their positives or any possible negatives. Conventional trends in health care are so powerful, sometimes nothing can stop them. For doctors, these conventional trends can feel like following the Pied Piper—that is, following their best chance of keeping the peace with colleagues, protecting their livelihoods, and giving hope to patients seeking answers. It’s a difficult balance.

For women in a society that favors youth over wisdom, the pull is strong toward any trendy pill or cream that claims it’s the fountain of youth. Not even bringing the truth to light will stop the hormone train. If you’re presented with both HRT and BHRT as options and still want to try one, I suggest you choose BHRT from a compounding pharmacy.

Make sure you get your prescription from a highly skilled physician who’s well versed in holistic health and can regulate and balance dosages with knowledge and precision—and who also views BHRT as a temporary, periodic Band-Aid rather than as an indefinite, lifelong treatment without dosage adjustments. There are some really really great doctors who are highly skilled with alternative hormone treatments. They recognize subtleties in blood work, and they recognize the best times to draw blood. They’re more understanding about symptoms that patients are suffering from, and they’re open to other causes besides merely hormones.

This does change the game for the better and offers women an opportunity opportunity to improve their health while adopting hormone treatments. There are women who use HRT and get no relief, and there are women who use BHRT and get no relief. For over 25 years, I’ve seen women use both and get no results (except for accelerated aging, despite all claims that it will bring back their youth), and I’ve witnessed hundreds of frustrated doctors unable to get their patients better with hormone therapy.

That’s because neither form addresses the underlying health issues misattributed to menopause. When people feel like they’re experiencing improvement with hormone therapy, it’s because it’s never prescribed by itself anymore; it’s prescribed alongside loads of supplementation and an overhauled diet (meaning minimal processed foods and the removal of fried, greasy foods). It’s the supplements supplements and new diet that make women feel better.

And there are reasons for that: through this guessing game process, some benefits occur as real causes happen to be addressed. Hormone therapies, because they’re steroids, act as immunosuppressant drugs. A patient’s viral symptoms such as heart palpitations and hot flashes (which the doctor doesn’t identify as viral) may calm down on BHRT, leading everyone to believe it’s working. And consider the symptom vaginal dryness, which sometimes improves on BHRT. Vaginal dryness is a symptom of adrenal fatigue, not perimenopause or menopause—that’s why this discomfort can trouble even women in their 20s and 30s.

The BHRT steroids can potentially prompt the adrenal glands to churn out adrenaline; this is what temporarily brings some women relief. Yes, it’s possible to have hormonal imbalances. Yet the symptoms doctors call menopause are really caused by all these other factors we’ve explored in this chapter, not an imbalance of reproductive hormones.

Saliva, blood, and urine tests are not always accurate in determining if a woman’s hormones are balanced. These testing methods are fallible and often inaccurate. (Once again, a really good doctor who’s seasoned with hormone therapies, knowing all the subtleties and nuances of when to test for hormones, when not to, and how to read them, matters greatly. If that same doctor is well versed in thyroid hormones, it’s another win.) If the thyroid is underproducing hormones (that is, it’s a hypothyroid), then the adrenal glands overproduce hormones to compensate.

The interrupting nature of the overproduction of adrenaline confuses the viability and accuracy of blood tests that look at progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone levels. One way to get a more accurate reading when embarking on alternative hormone therapies, or any hormone therapies, is to make sure foods such as eggs, milk, cheese, butter, other dairy products, gluten, and even chicken and caffeine (coffee drinks, matcha tea, chocolate) are not in the diet. This will allow for a cleaner blood reading. Even if you only hold off on these foods temporarily, starting a few weeks before you get your blood tested, you’re going to have a better chance of your doctors reading the signals with greater accuracy.

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