natural hormones as anti-aging therapy
Is anyone familiar with Ronald Klatz's "Stopping the Clock"? He's all
for natural hormone replacement as the greatest resource of anti-aging
medicine.
The use of natural hormones has very wide implications. Menopause is
just a tiny aspect of it. I wonder if in the future we will have all
kinds of hormone supplementation, based on need, not age or menopausal
status. It wd make sense. I cd have used progesterone already at 16.
And it actually was available all the while, tho inconveniently, as
suppositories. It makes me so sad that my life cd have been so much
easier, but drs only pushed the birth-control pill and hysterectomy
(which I avoided, thanks at last to progesterone).
Other good hormone books: Vliet's "Screaming to be Heard" and Ford's
"Listening to Your Hormones." I disagree with some points, but like the
contents in the main. Great service to women who are willing to educate
themselves, so they don't become victimized by those ignorant doctors who
are way behind the times.
Have you met some 80-year-olds who've been on hormones for a long time?
Wow, just the youthfulness of the skin, and the sharpness of mind.
"Makes your eyes brighter and your mind sharper," one feisty old lady
told me about HRT.
As for anti-hormoners, they are literally a dying breed. The all-cause
mortality rate of hormone users is a fraction of what it is for non-users
-- every single study has found this, tho actual percentages vary, as is
always true of epidemiological studies with their inherent sloppiness
and population variability. Even the early studies found mortality among
users to be only 40% that of non-users; the most recent study quotes 30%.
And this even with the use of pretty crude mainstream HRT.
One thing that Premarin has over natural human hormones is that equilin
(the main estrogen in Premarin) is a more potent antioxidant. Some
metabolites of equilin also have a more potent effect on neural growth
than estradiol, the main human estrogen. I'm still not recommending
Premarin because of side effects and cruelty to animals, but who knows, a
synthetically manufactured subcomponent of Premarin might prove a great
product for the prevention of Alzheimer's. I'm keeping my kind open.
Endocrinology is a fascinating field.