Women’s Health: What Women Want??

Excellent gynecological health, high energy, and sex derive before, during and after menopause

By John R. Lee, M.D.

Your uterus, also known as your womb, is a remarkable and powerful muscular organ, ranging from the size of the fist in a woman who hasn’t given birth, to the size of a watermelon to a woman in her last trimester of pregnancy. Any woman who has experienced, monthly crams, labor and childbirth, a deep orgasm that involves the uterus, or even the twinge from having a tissue sample taken during a pap smear has no doubt to the power and muscularity of her uterus. And the uterus, it seems, has equal power to make life a joy or a misery.

Every month, for decades, the uterus builds up a glandular body lining – the endometrium – in response to hormonal signals and release its menstruation if the signals for pregnancy don’t come. If a pregnancy does occur, the uterus gradually enlarges and becomes a perfect incubator for nine months of gestation.

In a woman’s uterus, nature has created a powerfully protected anticancer milieu that almost always remains intact unless we throw it out of balance. When a woman does get endometrial cancer, the most common time for it to begin is about five years before the onset of menopause, when estrogen is still plentiful, but anovulatory cycles may be causing a chronic progesterone deficiency and therefore setting up estrogen dominance.

Endometrial cancer is one of the types of cancer we know most clearly how to prevent. Avoid unopposed estrogen.

Uterine Enlargement and Fibroids

The Uterus is one of the first organs to manifest symptoms when a woman’s hormones are out of balance. Two of the most common uterine symptoms of premenopause syndrome are an enlarged uterus and uterine fibroids. Women with PMS often experience painful periods (dysmenorrhea) which are most often caused when the endometrial lining of the uterus extends into the muscular wall of the uterus. When shedding of the endometrium occurs (menstruation), the blood is released into the muscular lining, causing severe pain.

Conventional medicine treats this pain with nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as Ibuprofen, but ignores the underlying metabolic hormonal imbalance that caused it. The problem can be simply resolved by restoring proper progesterone levels, which restores normal growth and shedding of the endometrium.

Estrogen dominance causes the uterus to grow, and without the monthly balancing effect of progesterone it doesn’t have the proper signals to stop growing. In some women this results in an enlarged uterus that presses on other organs, such as the bladder, and often on the digestive system, and generally causes discomfort and heavy menstrual bleeding.

In other women estrogen dominance results in fibroids, which are tough, fibrous, non-cancerous lumps that grow in the uterus. Some fibroids can grow to the size of a grapefruit or cantaloupe, causing constant bleeding and such heavy menstrual periods that the blood loss is akin to hemorrhaging.

Fibroids always shrink at menopause, but the most common course of action a doctor takes when a patient comes in with a fibroid is to remove the uterus. The explanation given is that a fibroid is too difficult to remove without irreversibly damaging the uterus. But in most cases this is no longer true. If you do end up needing to have a fibroid surgically removed, find a doctor who can do it without removing your uterus with it. If you have many small fibroids, it may be more difficult to remove them. On the other hand, their smaller size may make it easier to treat them without surgery.

What Doctors Aren’t Telling Women?

What doctors aren’t telling women is that giving them estrogen before menopause will cause a fibroid to grow – and that giving them estrogen after menopause (when it would naturally shrink) will likely cause it to continue to grow. What most doctors don’t know about fibroids is that avoiding estrogen and using some natural progesterone cream will almost always shrink a fibroid enough to minimize or eliminate symptoms long enough to get to menopause, when it will normally shrink significantly enough to cease being a problem.

It’s ironic that our conventional medical culture has evolved in such a way that a woman who has an enlarged uterus or fibroid is considered to have a disease. And that her uterus is considered a liability, all because it has become a virtual requirement that your doctor prescribe Premarin and Provera to you when you reach menopause.

Having a uterus also means that your doctor can’t just prescribe estrogen alone; he or she also is required to prescribe Provera (synthetic progesterone) to offset the cancer causing effects of estrogen. The first attempts at hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in the 1960s used only estrogen, and this human experiment cost the lives o thousands of women who died of uterine (endometrial) cancer in the 1960s and 1970s before it dawned on the medical profession that unopposed estrogen was the cause.

It another decade of intense public relations and marketing campaigns to convince women that it was safe once again to take HRT because they would now be protected form cancer by the addition of a synthetic progestin to the mix, most commonly Provera.

But as Gail Sheehy so aptly described in her pioneering book The Silent Passage, there aren’t too many drugs in the world that will make women feel worse then Provera. Many women outright refuse to continue taking Provera when they experience its side effects (something akin to severe, permanent PMS) and will even risk cancer and take unopposed estrogen to avoid it.

This gives your doctor yet another reason to suggest that removing your uterus will solve a lot of problems. The promise is that once your cancer prone uterus is gone, you’re safe, and you can take only estrogen without Provera. The promise is that estrogen will save you from heart disease, osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s disease, so the trade-off of losing you uterus is well worth it. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. Unfortunately, these promise aren’t true. If you’re removing your uterus and take estrogen, your troubles have only begun.

Your Body, Your Choice

The economics of these choices are extremely difficult for you and your doctor. We aren’t suggesting that you shouldn’t ever have your uterus removed, because in rare cases that is necessary. But we are strongly recommending that you take into account the hidden agendas that exist in this type of situation before making a decision, and that you make your decision based on what’s best for you.

Natural Healing Options

What to Do?

• Use natural progesterone cream.
• Eat a plant based, fiber rich diet everyday.
• Take a liver supporting and detoxifying herbal formula that includes some or all of the following herbs: milk thistle, goldenseal, burdock root, yellow dock, dandelion root.

What to Avoid?

• Unopposed estrogen.
• All dairy products.
• Feed-lot meats (eat only range-fed, organic meats free of drugs and pesticide residues).

____________________
Excerpts from “What Your Doctor May NOT Tell You About Premenopause” by John R. Lee, M. D., Jesse Hanley, M. D. and Virginia Hopkins.