There are over 40 million women in the United States
between the ages of 40 and 60. Worldwide, about 25 million
women enter menopause annually. Estimates show that by the
year 2030, that number will increase to 47 million women
per year. Relief of menopausal symptoms such as improved
sleep could translate into a more productive woman whether
she works or is a mother or spouse. Healthcare dollars
could then be spent more wisely than in Medicare
reimbursements for constant doctor visits and endless
prescriptions and procedures. Quality of life would improve
for most symptomatic women. How? By way of hormone
replacement, an important choice for women, since estrogens
are known to be the only effective treatment for
estrogen-depleted states.
Right now, in the wake of the National Institutes of Health
(NIH) Women's Health Initiative (WHI), getting hormones is
difficult. Doctors are leery of even the "Standard of Care"
approved synthetics in this time and place. Getting
legitimate insurance-covered physicians to prescribe even
bio-identical hormones is a challenge.
The majority of Western medicine has been on a wild goose
chase for the elusive proof that being completely
hormone-less will save our lives, in the face of massive
evidence that even with all of our estrogen blocked at
every turn, we still keep dying of cancer. In the burst of
the Baby Boomers becoming menopausal, doctors from all
specialties have clamored to the forefront to be of
service. But nobody has any idea how to prescribe hormones
for women.
Since 1900, in the developed countries, the life expectancy
of women has increase from age 47 to well over age 80,
however, the average onset of menopause has remained at 50
as recorded for the last 150 years. That means most women
are living at least thirty years longer than they did at
the turn of the century. It's estimated that eighty percent
of women experience a variety of transiently debilitating
symptoms in menopause and 30 percent of those are
classified as severe.
About ten years before women ever have a hot flash or a
migraine, we have odd, too-short menstrual periods, we're
up half of every night and we start to look and feel old.
Exhaustion coupled with plummeting sex hormones creates a
life in tatters. Our joints twinge and we can't stay
asleep. The symptoms of menopause, which can begin for
women as early as their late thirties, are the same as the
daily challenges the elderly face, and in fact, we get "old
and sick" when our hormones start to plummet.
The sick and old in our culture means usually means cancer,
diabetes, heart disease, glaucoma, depression, even
Alzheimer's. If menopause might really equal cancer,
diabetes, heart disease, glaucoma, depression, and
Alzheimer's, why is it, then, that no one ever mentions any
of the life-threatening disabilities associated with
hormonal decline and urges women to accurately replace
those hormones that are now missing?
Instead, women are told that the FDA sanctioned hormones
from Big Pharma are really way too dangerous to take (WHI)
and bioidentical compounded hormones have never been
studied (AMA). That's what women in 2003 got from the WHI
historic report on synthetic drugs with hormone-like
effects, PremPro and Premarin.
These substances were donated by the pharmaceutical company
that had sold them since 1942 because the assumption was
the drugs would be found safe and effective. Nothing could
have been further from the truth. After nearly 800 million
taxpayer dollars and 14 years later, the overly emphasized
negative results of the Women's Health Initiative were
released in May 2002. This study was poorly designed,
strangely monitored and incompetently analyzed.
Interestingly, the WHI never looked at hormones, only drugs
with "hormone-like" effects that were dosed in a regimen
far from that of human replacement. This study has led us
to believe that conjugated equine estrogens (from pregnant
mare urine) and a synthetic progestin (Prempro) dosed on a
daily basis in static doses is clearly very harmful to
women after only a few years, and yet, in contradictory
reports from the same agency, PremPro seemed to have had
positive effects as well. The other drug studied, daily
Premarin, seemed to show substantially less harmful
effects. Even though the death rate for all arms of this
study was equal, the study was dramatically halted early in
a very public effort to "save lives."
This confusing and frightening media spin caused millions
of women to immediately stop taking their Premarin or
Prempro, or any other product deemed a hormone. Physicians
also threatened by the negative media reports stopped
prescribing them, thus leaving millions of symptomatic
women without any reasonable clinical guidance, except the
ludicrous exception to the bad news, that lower doses of
Prempro, the killer drug, taken for less years is safer.
This advice has not left women feeling safe.
But, what if real hormone replacement could really mimic
youthful hormone levels, not just mask a few symptoms, and
therefore; was a cure for those diseases? After all, young
women don't have those diseases and the difference between
young women and old women is reproductive capacity and the
attendant hormones. It's logical that the majority of women
with normal hormones don't have those diseases.
Common sense is that natural (not synthetic drugs with
hormone-like effects) hormone replacement, in and of
itself, could not cause cancer. If estrogen and
progesterone, or even testosterone, caused cancer, all
young women would be dead. So if logic tells us that
estrogen doesn't actually cause cancer in and of itself,
then there must be more to the story-like what kind and how
much estrogen and when to take it.
Whether or not women replace their missing hormones is not
up for debate. Living without them is far too miserable and
dangerous. So then, the question becomes "how"?
One Santa Barbara California researcher and author named
T.S. Wiley asked, "What if hormone replacement was made of
real bio-identical hormones and dosed to mimic the ups and
downs of the hormone blood levels in a normal menstrual
cycle in a 20 year-old woman, would all of the symptoms and
disease states of aging decline or even, disappear?"
Shortly thereafter, she developed a trademarked patent
pending delivery system consisting of bio-identical
estradiol and progesterone in topical cream preparations
dosed in a rhythm to mimic the natural cyclic hormone
levels replicated in serum blood produced by a twenty
year-old woman.
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Kristin Gabriel represents the developer of The Wiley
Protocol® (http://www.thewileyprotocol.com), a patent
pending delivery system consisting of bio-identical
estradiol and progesterone in topical cream preparations
dosed in a rhythm to mimic the natural cyclic hormone
levels of a twenty year-old woman. The Wiley Protocol is
only available at compounding pharmacies that have agreed
to the standardized methods, materials, packaging and
recommended pricing. Wiley is also the author of of Sex,
Lies & Menopause," and "Lights Out."
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