If like me you reason that 'natural' is an adverb rather than an adjective, then you will agree that the best road toward natural hormone therapy must involve copying the ways of nature, not slavishly but by retaining its benefits while culling out what is unhealthful.  And there is nothing natural about oral hormone therapy, whether equine or otherwise.  'Natural' hormone therapy implies the use of estradiol, administered non-orally because oral estradiol has an unnatural up & down pattern, lasts far too briefly in the blood stream & is about 60% converted by the liver into estrone as it passes into the bloodstream.   And in the natural pre-menopausal woman, estradiol levels are quite stable, contrary to popular opinion.  It follows that HRT should be delivered in a steady, non-erratic flow, never dipping to zero. 

'Natural' hormones

Excessive dipping in the estradiol level carries its own group of special risks & side-effects such as increased inflammation, migraines & breast cancer risk & should be assiduously avoided, hence the need for a steady-state delivery.  So natural estrogen therapy involves the use of non-oral estradiol, delivered in a steady, non-dipping fashion, adjusted to a dosage that accommodates the individual woman's personal rate of estrogen excretion, whether fast or slow. 

A: indeed it can, by its antidepressant effects,(depression destroys sexuality), by reducing the need for antidepressant drugs which also hinder sexual desire & function, & by direct stimulatory effects on the brain centers that drive sexuality.  That's a three pronged benefit!

A: Many women experience cognitive dysfunction or mind fog around the time of menopause that has nothing to do with real dementia, which should of course be tested for if the problem persists. This is what I call menopausal pseudo-dementia and it can rapidly be corrected with precision hormone therapy whereas psychoactive drugs (which the government recommends in lieu of hormones at menopause) can make brain-fog even worse and tend to increase stroke risk, the very complication the federales have used to condemn HRT in women over 60, as it turns out, quite erroneously.

A.Studies on estrogen therapy for bone loss reversal have not been impressive, probably because these studies used oral equine estrogens and at lower than effective doses. Oral estrogens have My health food store says Calcium supplements are a good treatment for osteoporosis prevention & even reversal, & they sell me a special, super-expensive chelated kind. Is this valid?

A: Calcium supplements, in the absence of hormone therapy offer no benefits for osteoporosis prevention or reversal in menopausal women. On the other hand evidence seems to suggest that menopausal Calcium supplementation may increase heart disease risk & cardiac events in menopausal women. I do not recommend Calcium supplements but vitamin D needs supplementing in many women.

A. Yes, cancer risk is reduced compared with women taking no hormones, but progesterone & synthetic progestins are the principle cause of side-effects such as fatigue, brain fog & depression that some women experience with menopausal HRT, and they also increase the risk for breast cancer, a very big deal. However the expert physician can get around this problem by employing special progestins and special ways of giving them so as to retain the benefits while avoiding the pitfalls. That is why one needs an expert and individualized instead of standardized care.

No, HRT-related "cancer" looks like cancer under the microscope but doesn't behave like it. It is preceded by a process called 'endometrial hyperplasia', a microscopic thickening of the endometrium or inner lining of the womb. A treatment with progestin or a D and C will usually take care of it. If you look at women who take estrogen along with progestin, they actually have a lower cancer risk in this tissue than those taking no hormones at all.

The uterus is like an inverted flask or bottle & it has 2 tissues, the endometrium in the body of the uterus and the cervix near the bottle-neck, just above the vagina. Cancer of the cervix is related to infection with papilloma virus and is diagnosed by PAP smears. Endometrial cancer is of 2 types, that associated with HRT & that unrelated to HRT. The kind unrelated to HRT can progress to cause serious health problems, & is commoner in obese women. In contrast the kind seen in association with hormone therapy only occurs when estrogen is given without progesterone. This condition is in a sense a cosmetic cancer and is non-progressive. Women taking estrogen plus progesterone in combination have a lower uterine cancer risk than women taking no hormones at all. The trick here is finding a progestin or progesterone delivery system that retains this anti-cancerous quality at the womb without also receiving the negative consequences of progestin therapy, and this can easily be accomplished.

That's pretty vague, isn't it? What kind of cancers, prostate cancer? You don't have one. "What about colon cancer ", you ask? Actually estradiol reduces colon cancer risk! Surely breast cancer then? There is no evidence that estrogen therapy, even when using antiquated oral equine products, increases breast cancer risk, in fact it may reduce it. There is a fundamental difference between considering factors that cause cancer or trigger cancer, & factors that aggravate an already existing cancer. That being said, a flare-up in a hidden, unsuspected breast cancer may bring it to your attention sooner rather than later, facilitating early, preemptive treatment.

<p>Indeed I have, in patients who had also attended other health providers &amp; some of these results were clearly absurd, such as the high progesterone levels reported in a 68 years old female patient who wasn't taking any progesterone whatever. This was either a miracle or a ludicrous result, perhaps even a scam.</p>

Absolutely not, unless your objective is to alter your saliva. Beyond trusting hormone measurements in the saliva offered by unaccredited labs, even blood levels of estradiol & testosterone from accredited, government-monitored laboratories are of limited use for monitoring hormone therapy. If those big labs believed they could credibly measure salivary sex hormone levels on a commercial basis, you can be sure they would do so, but they do not. And in my own experience the results from some of these other, non-accredited labs are often ridiculously misleading and glaringly inaccurate.

A. The media & even professionals often believe estrogen increases breast cancer risk.  This is definitively untrue.  What is true is that estrogen therapy given to a woman who already has a breast cancer can trigger a flare up, although this may be good since an earlier cancer diagnosis may ensue.  The estrogens stimulate two kinds of receptors, alphas and betas. Activated beta receptors actually reduce breast cancer risk. Genistien is a selective stimulator of beta estrogen receptors and testosterone therapy at menopause indirectly increases beta receptor stimulation.  Perhaps that is why I have seen only a tiny number of breast cancers during my years in practice, TG. 

No, naturopathy is neither a valid medical specialty nor a substitute for formal training in gynecology, endocrinology or internal medicine. Far worse than being ignorant is the unawareness of one's profound ignorance.

A: If you mean growth hormone therapy, no. There is a group of practitioners, many of them without endocrine training or expertise who tout injections of human growth hormone (hGH) as an extremely expensive anti-aging remedy, along with their own nutritional supplements. Unvalidated oral products are also sold that supposedly instruct the body to produce more hGH by itself. The testing hGH doctors base their treatments on does not necessarily validate growth hormone deficiency. Many of those who experience improvements in energy & vigor do so because the hGH shots stimulate the body to make more testosterone, a hormone that generates increased vigor & energy, which may alone be deficient in the group of patients that seek these doctors out, people for instance with chronic fatigue & depression. But hGH promotes diabetes risk & kidney disease. It also synergizes with testosterone to promote prostate cancer in men and masculinization in women. If one felt better when taking hGH it would be far less expensive to see if your testosterone level was low & then supplement it carefully & directly, instead of playing this hGH game based on intellectual dishonesty.

A. Hormone therapy is needed only if they also removed your ovaries, although during some hysterectomies the blood supply to the ovaries becomes unintentionally compromised leading to early ovarian failure,& since the uterus & the menstrual cycle, an accurate marker for ovarian function are no longer present, the victim can no longer make a connection between menstrual cycle patterns and early symptoms of premature menopause, such as mood & personality changes along with insomnia, and by default they often go the psychiatric route instead.