I'm Too Young for This!: The Natural Hormone Solution to Enjoy Perimenopause (2 page)

For the first few years of my medical practice, I thought these women sounded suspiciously menopausal, but their blood levels were almost always in the “normal” range. Well then, I thought, perhaps these patients were perimenopausal. During my ob-gyn residency at USC, perimenopause had been briefly mentioned as a woman’s transition to menopause, usually beginning in her late forties or early fifties. I was taught it lasted about five or possibly ten years, but that it didn’t require any specific medical treatment.

To gain insight on why my patients in their thirties and early forties felt so bad, I began testing their hormone levels, which I had never been taught to do. To my surprise, I started identifying subtle deficiencies in hormone levels in most of my young patients. I also started testing very young women on the birth control pill, and women who were postpartum. I found similar deficiencies. I realized these states were surprisingly similar to each other in terms of their symptoms and also in terms of their hormone levels. I had already been treating my menopausal patients for several years with bioidentical hormones, so I started treating these other conditions with them, too. To my surprise and happiness, these patients got well!

That was almost thirty years ago, and while my treatment of perimenopause has evolved and become more comprehensive, most doctors still don’t recognize the existence of subtle perimenopausal changes. Because of that, often they won’t check a young woman’s hormones to establish healthy baselines, and they won’t recommend treatment until a woman is well into menopause. A possible exception is the doctor who recommends the birth control pill as treatment for perimenopause. I feel treating perimenopause with the pill is terribly off base and is at best an ineffective Band-Aid. It usually makes women feel worse, due to suppressing their estrogen levels even more.

So what is my mainstay of perimenopausal treatment? I want to sing it out to the world and to every woman in need: bioidentical hormones are a woman’s most effective therapy to help her experience vital health and youthful beauty. One of the most common causes of death in women is heart attacks. Bioidentical hormones also help prevent diabetes, high cholesterol, hypertension, and even deaths provoked by dementia in women.

Why don’t women rush to balance their hormones back to youthful, healthy levels as soon as they begin to decline? They have heard there are no studies on bioidentical hormones to show their safety. They have been told hormones increase the risk of breast cancer and heart disease, and they are afraid. They are like a lot of doctors who have confused the data from synthetic nonbioidentical hormones (like Premarin and Provera) with bioidentical hormones. These are completely different hormones and do not react at all in the same way in the human body. In fact, bioidentical hormones have been studied extensively for the past seven or eight years. Here are a few of the studies documenting their safety:

So please, dear readers, please don’t be afraid of these natural bioidentical hormones. They perform all our body’s functions, like beating our heart, facilitating clear thoughts, cleansing toxins, and allowing normal growth and repair of our cells. We mistakenly believe our bodies can function without hormones. In fact, if we suddenly lost all our hormones, we would die in less than ten minutes.

Many of my patients question why we would want to interrupt or change the natural course of our body’s aging process. Why would we want to interfere with our body’s wisdom? Well, many of our grandparents and parents didn’t do so well aging naturally, did they? They experienced a terrible loss of vitality and function. We don’t have to live that way or decline as nature wills it. It would be a rare individual who would turn down an antibiotic to save his or her life, yet that same person might decline a hormone that would prevent his or her death from a heart attack; both are “unnatural,” yet wise decisions.

It basically comes down to this: the choices we make about our lives matter. The food we eat matters; how we exercise matters; our thoughts and the love we give and receive matters. Mark Whitwell’s ThePromise.com helped me discover the importance of our choices; and the hormones and supplements we choose to replace or ignore, matter very much.

In your hands, you hold the secrets of all the right choices to make. Suzanne Somers offers yet again a groundbreaking contribution to the health and longevity of her readers with her comprehensive and extensive approach to perimenopause. With what gratitude I will recommend her book to my patients! I want them and you to be vital, beautiful, and healthy at every age, and to become, as the poet David Whyte encourages “the force that makes the river flow, and then the sea beyond.” Let’s all get on board and make this transition in life an illuminating ride to the joy and wisdom we all were created to share.

With love,

Prudence Hall, M.D.

The only constant is change. Learn to love it. As the rate of change accelerates, the result will appear chaotic to the uninitiated. But there is elegant order in chaos. Few so far have learned to recognize and profit from it. This is where the future lies.

—Frank Ogden

Is this you?

This could have just as easily been signed Screeching in the Suburbs or Raving in the Rurals. Women all over are feeling the pain of their hormones gone haywire. I get it, I was there! Let me tell you my story.

It crept up on me. It started with little things, little signs I didn’t pay attention to at first. I had always been thin. In fact, growing up my nickname was “Boney Mahoney,” and that was my reality for years, including my five years as Chrissy Snow on
Three’s Company
. I didn’t think about being thin because I just always
was
. In fact, I had been so skinny that in the three years I was starring in the fabulous Moulin Rouge extravaganza at the Las Vegas Hilton I wore shorts under my gowns to look fatter! Imagine. Such a problem!

But at around age thirty-five things started to change. I was exercising constantly while learning new dance numbers and doing strenuous production numbers for my show. But instead of slimming down I was getting a little thick around the middle (not fat, but thick). And my moods changed … things that normally wouldn’t bother me would make me flare up angrily, especially right before my period. This was completely out of character. I would feel murderous if anyone dared to suggest that I had PMS.

Afterward, as the hormones calmed down, I would feel ashamed and mortified by the way I had acted and by the things I had said. But I still didn’t “get it.” I had no idea I was entering perimenopause. No one was talking about this major passage,
certainly not our mothers. In fact, it was their big dark secret, the one they suffered through in silence and with good reason; women of my mother’s era were routinely sent away to sanitariums if they got too “hysterical.” I knew girls whose mothers had been sent away. No one was shocked or outraged, no one questioned it; it was considered sad but “for their own good.” Imagine! I, being clueless, just figured that in midlife some women went crazy. In fact, they did in a way, but at that time no one understood what was happening, least of all the medical community.

Mood swings, PMS, plus annoying weight gain are part of a
language
that I could not then understand. I didn’t know that these symptoms were simply a prelude to other changes I was about to experience. I didn’t know the misery that was coming.

My life was good. I was grateful. My TV success had been so unexpected and glorious. I had everything to be happy about. A wonderful husband, a wonderful son, and finally as a family we were working through the barriers of misunderstandings that had been plaguing ours, like so many others at that time who were trying to blend together children who didn’t want new parents or a new “family.” It was new and uncharted territory.