Menopause: HRT, ERT or Alternative Medicine?

Menopause happens to every woman. There is no way to avoid it, but there are ways to cope with the changes. Menopause is a transition in a woman's life when the ovaries stop producing eggs. This may happen over night or could take years before the process is completed. This is the time when the body stops producing the hormones estrogen and progesterone.

Symptoms and the onset menopause occur differently in every woman so it is difficult to say what each woman will experience and when. The normal age at which a woman begins menopause is anywhere from 40 to 55 depending on the woman. A study has been done and it has shown that woman who are malnourished tend to start menopause at an earlier age then women who are well-nourished. Another factor in when menopause will begin is when the woman began having menstruation. Women who start menstruation earlier tend to have menopause occur later in life.

The symptoms of menopause also vary from woman to woman. The most common symptoms include hot flashes, missed period, sleep disruption, mood swings (changing mood), vaginal dryness, hot flashes and a low sex drive. These changes are caused by a change in your estrogen levels.

To combat symptoms of menopause, women have many options. There are two types of hormone therapy the first being hormone therapy replacement (HRT) is a combination of progesterone and estrogen and the second, estrogen replacement therapy (ERT). HRT is an excellent way to help alleviate the symptoms of menopause, but it has its downfalls. Studies have shown that HRT does slightly increase your chances of breast cancer, heart attack and stroke. If you are at high-risk for any of These consult your health care provider using HRT.

With ERT, there are three different types of replacement therapy. The first method is by using the hormone estrogen by itself as a cream, vaginal or oral pill. The second method is similar to the way you use the birth control pill. You take estrogen pills or use the patch daily, but you also use progesterone for a set amount of days out of the month. The final one is continuous therapy, which is estrogen plus the use of progesterone pills taken a few times a day.

ERT has risk factors and side effects including premenstrual symptoms (PMS) such as bloating and tender breasts. There also is an increased risk for breast cancer, coronary artery disease, blood clots, gallstones, uterine fibroids and stroke. There is a possibility of weight gain while on treatment.

If a woman decides against hormone therapy, there are a number of different alternative practices she can use. Some alternative methods include starting an exercise routine, staying away from beverages and foods containing caffeine, avoiding alcohol and staying clear of spicy foods, all of which will help decrease hot flashes. An alternative to hormone therapy for hot flashes would be to use Paxil or Prozac. They have been known to help also. For vaginal dryness there are several over the counter lubricants that can be used.

There are many different ways to help ease the transition of menopause. The best option is to speak with your health care provider and give them a family history of any disease or illness. This will help you make an educated decision on what treatment is best suited for you.

The Functional Medicine Model and Health Information from Dr Mark Hyman MD

Kevin: My guest is Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D., who is a respected medical consultant, New York Times best-selling author and a leader in the emerging field of functional medicine. Functional medicine is ideal medicine made real. It is a new medical model, a more successful way of treating human illness and disease born of recent technological and clinical advances applied in a fresh methodology. As Dr. Hyman says, "the future of medicine available now." Functional medicine moves beyond diagnosis-based medicine to allow treatment of the underlying causes of disease. It works with the body's natural forces to achieve what Dr. Hyman calls ultra wellness, lifelong good health and vitality. Doesn't that sound good?

So what I want to do now is welcome Dr. Hyman to the program. This is exciting. You're one of my own personal heroes in terms of medicine and I've read all your books and I'm really excited to have you here.

Mark: Well, it's a great opportunity to be able to talk about the work I do and it's really grown out of my own experience of being sick and my own patients and learning a whole new field, called functional medicine.

Kevin: Well, why don't you talk a little bit about how you got here and your story from when you first started and now, how it's developed into functional medicine?

Mark: Well, actually my original development started way back when I was in college where I was very interested in Chinese and Asian studies and actually the ancient healing systems of China. I learned Chinese and then I actually became a yoga teacher and way before I went to medical school I was very interested in health and was a vegetarian and actually thought I was going to go into medicine to do this kind of work in the first place.

So I had this sort of in my mind right from the beginning and then I slowly got into medical school and sort of got brainwashed little bit and took on the medical model fairly strongly, because it was pretty convincing model. Over the years, I began to realize that even if I was doing a great job with this model I could only do so much for people. It was kind of like I was putting my finger in the dam. In about my mid 30s, I went to China and actually I was there doing a project there, but I got sick. I
got mercury poisoning. I got back to the states and a number of different things happened and my whole body collapsed and I developed chronic fatigue syndrome. It was through the process of my own illness and recovery and through my work as the medical director at Canyon Ranch that I discovered a new way of treating and diagnosing illness that was based not on symptoms, but based on the causes of illness. It was based on the underlying issues that are really at the root of why we get sick and I realized that with putting your finger in the dam and simply treating symptoms you may quiet them down briefly, but the disease, or the processes that are causing the disease still are going on.

So for example, if you take a high blood pressure pill your blood pressure normalizes, but if you stop the pill your blood pressure goes up. So you really haven't done anything to treat the high blood pressure. All you've done is suppress the symptoms. So I began to have to understand this not in sort of an academic way, but in a very real way to my own process of detoxification and healing, because I had no other way to get better. Conventional medicine didn't offer me any solutions other than here take some Prozac, or take some drugs that deal with this or that, that were really not helpful anyway and so I got very lucky at the time and I was working at Canyon Ranch and I was introduced to the work of Jeffrey Bland, who is a nutritional biochemist, student of Linus Pauling, who's been working over the last 35 years really reframing our medical science in a way that allows us to understand things and how they work together.

This is called systems biology and it's an understanding that there are thousands and thousands of diseases, but there are really only about seven underlying systems in the body that has to function in order for you to be healthy and those things, when they're not functioning create illness and the treatment and the diagnosis has to be focused on those seven things. So the rest of the names in the things we call diseases really become more irrelevant as we understand those seven causes. So you can have migraines, or depression, or Alzheimer's disease, or heart disease, or diabetes or irritable bowel, or whatever. Those are just names for collections of symptoms and that any two people with exactly the same named disease can totally different problems. We have no way of knowing that if you have depression, one person might have mercury poisoning. Another person might be severely folate deficient, or B12 deficient. Another person might be hypothyroid and you can't treat them all with Prozac. They're not suffering from a Prozac deficiency. They are suffering from some fundamental, underlying imbalance that has to be addressed in order for them to get better and the body has to get the things it needs to function and thrive properly.

So this is sort of the evolution of functional medicine which has happened over the last 15 years and we have just recently published a textbook of functional medicine that lays out this paradigm in great detail. For those who are health practitioners, it's a wonderful resource, with over 20,000 scientific references. I contributed a couple of chapters to that. Mine was very large chapter on influence of diet on health, which is a big topic. It's a really exciting model, because it's not just an idea. I'm a practicing physician and every day I see patients in my office and I always say I get to be a witness to miracles.

Kevin: Wow. What's the difference between integrative medicine and alternative medicine, as opposed to functional medicine?

Mark: Great question. That's a great question and I think it's an important question. Let me just go through the history of how we got to where we are. We had conventional medicine, which is basically a reductionistic science. It breaks things down into component points, component parts. We have organ systems. We have various diseases. Then came along holistic health, which said we should pay attention to some other things, like mind-body effect and we should use some other treatments that help the body heal, like meditation, or yoga, or massage, or energy healing and then there was sort of a movement in awareness of other modalities, called alternative medicine, which included things like Ayurveda and Chinese medicine, which unto themselves are entire, whole healing systems with their own philosophy and methodologies that are very different from conventional medicine. Then Andy Wilde came along and he said there's all these great things out there that we're really not paying attention to that have been around for centuries or even some newer techniques that can really help the body heal, whether it's osteopathy, or acupuncture, or herbs and we should integrate those treatments with conventional approaches to kind of have the better outcome. So what that does is that it says well, here are the conventional diagnoses; migraine, irritable bowel, depression, arthritis, whatever. We're going to use these treatments, these alternative therapies and integrate them with conventional therapies.

Prescription Medicine Alternatives Offer Same Solutions and Save You Money

Did you know that you most likely live within a short distance of cheaper prescription medicine than you are now paying? If you are having to choose between filling your prescription or buying food for you and your family, you may want to read on. This article will not only explain how you can save thousands of dollars in prescription medicine but also where you can get it for a lot less.

Many of the articles I have read, about reducing prescription medicine costs, involve buying your medicine online or from a source you probably do not feel comfortable with. What I hope to share with you is not only different, but the cheaper prescription medicine is probably within 5 miles of where you live.

Prescription medicine can cut a deep hole into your family's budget and is too often left as the last thing to purchase in order to maintain your limited budget. Sacrifices are given too often in areas that will eventually catch up with you and the price you have to pay later is greater than the sacrifices you made.

The pharmaceutical companies do not take into account the recession we are in and even before it was announced that this country was in a recession they continue to gouge the sufferers with outrageous prescription prices.

Pharmaceutical companies are constantly bombarding physicians with their new, improved, and revised medicines they produce. They will peddle free medicine samples through your personal doctors and they in turn will suggest or prescribe the name brand medicines that the pharmaceutical companies have provided free samples. This really seems unethical, but this is the way new medicines are often introduced.

You may be thinking that you have to qualify or be accepted to get the free or reduced cost prescription medicine. The truth is, if you have a legitimate prescription prescribed for you, you are entitled to reduced cost prescription medicine. You just need to know who offers these refreshing and welcomed deals. In many cases, you may be closer to the better deal than you currently travel to pay the higher prices for prescription medicine.

Most but not all prescription medicine has a generic substitute, but unless you ask, it may not be offered to you at the time you ask for your prescription to be filled. It always saves you a considerable amount of your money to ask if a generic substitute is available.
Free antibiotics, prescriptions for $4, Prozac and Vista prescriptions, 30 day supply for only $12, and other great deals to keep you healthy and with medicine at these prices there is money left over for food and other necessities. There are online pharmacies, but most are fearful of their source and usually resort to paying higher prescription costs thinking there are no other alternatives.

Even if you live in a remote area, there are money saving ways to greatly reduce the cost of your prescription medicine that you probably never heard of, that you need to know about.

As we age and become more dependent on prescription medicine, there are alternatives you need to be aware of. Giving away your life savings on prescription medicine, in order to live longer or healthier is not the right answer. Always know that where there is greed in the world, there are those who seek to deter greed and find ways to offset that mentality. Life is about living and enjoying what the world has to offer. Paying a premium in order to enjoy life, is not a natural part of that experience. The time we have to physically enjoy life and our family is very short, but we want to capture as much of it as possible, and be able to afford it along the way. If you know someone that is struggling with their prescription medicine costs, please pass this message along, so that others may know there are simple alternatives for so many people.

Prozac Mug at Your Desk

What can you usually find on your desk at work or even your desk at home? Surely, what you would find would include papers and pens and pencils and staplers and files and other items that will constantly remind you of the work to be done and all the work that will keep piling up if stop attending to them. It could even have a computer or maybe that picture frame of your family or your friends. These will remind you of the happy days that you could have if you were not spending too much time on work.

Just what can you add to your desk to make it more lively and to give you that energy boost that you need to get all the work done fast and done well? Well, you can have your daily dose of Prozac - but not necessarily the medicine. This type of Prozac is the medicine that you need to make sure you continue to work and that you do not drown in the bottomless pit called work.

Get yourself a Prozac mug. This mug is not any of those ordinary desk accessories that you will find littering other people's desks. This one is pretty special. It comes with the saying "A Prozac a day keeps the voices away." So this means that you can just simply continue to work and imagine having a dose of Prozac each time you take a gulp from this mug.

But that is not all that will keep reminding you of the happy times you could get once you're out of that desk. The Prozac mug also has got a really wonderful design which will make everything around and on that desk look really bleak in comparison. See, the Prozac mug has been designed to be totally colorful. It even has been decorated with lots and lots of colorful pills that will give total meaning to what the mug has been saying.

Well, in case you may not have the heart to have this mug right at your desk, you still can purchase one and give as a gift to a colleague or maybe a friend. They could add the mug to their rising tower of desk accessories. But this one's going to be really different for it is going to make them smile each time they use or look at it. And it comes with its own colorful gift box so no need to wrap it up.