Conscious Choice Seattle: Reworking Replacement

Seven Steps to Revitalize Your Hormones

1. Understand the dangers of all forms of hormone replacement therapy.
“Natural” and “bio-identical” hormones can also cause side effects such as weight gain, brain fog, insomnia and heart palpitations. Some are synthesized in a laboratory.

2. Determine why and how your hormones can go out of balance.
Be your own “hormone detective.” And be aware that emotional stress, neurotransmitter imbalance, exposure to mercury and pesticides, legal and illegal drug abuse, head injury and nuclear radiation can all affect hormones.

3. Detoxify your body.
Cut caffeine, excessive sugar and cigarettes out of your routine. Dry-brushing your body with a loofah sponge or a coarse natural-fiber bath glove can be great ways to keep your blood circulating and stimulate the waste-ridding lymphatic system.

4. Follow healthy dietary guidelines for hormone rejuvenation.
The average American diet is too acidic and can be balanced by adding more alkaline-producing foods such as almonds, maple syrup, grapes, oranges, avocado and grapefruit.

5. Practice stress management techniques.
Take up yoga. Or, if you are pressed for time, escape the world by closing your eyes and taking deep breaths. A good belly laugh is an effective and simple remedy for stress.

6. Develop emotional-management techniques.
Don’t expect to be able to exorcise all of your emotional issues from childhood. Instead, strive to monitor your emotions with compassion. You can diffuse them with homeopathy and meditation.

7. Re-educate your body with homeopathy and simple health habits.
Adrenal cortisol imbalances have a variety of causes including dental issues. One simple thing you can do is check out your dental health. You may need to heal a tooth, perhaps one that has an abscess related to your symptoms.

April 2006 | Whole Health

Reworking Replacement

Hormone therapy needs an overhaul from the hype of medications. Here’s your starter ki

By Theresa Dale

For many women, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) during menopause is a disaster waiting to happen.

That’s because while many people think hormones are only related to sex, what they don’t know is that hormones and the endocrine system play a role in nearly every medical condition. The endocrine system greatly impacts our thinking and mood through critical neurotransmitters in the brain.

An undiagnosed illness such as Lyme disease, liver imbalance, a virus or serotonin insufficiencies may be the real cause of an endocrine breakdown, not menopause. But today, many women are mistakenly treated with hormones instead of looking for the cause of the symptoms. Women are given hormones along with other medications.

All types of hormonal hype have hit the media airwaves and marketplace during the last couple of decades. The result is vastly over-prescribed hormone medications, especially estrogen products, often as a result of an inaccurate or nonexistent diagnosis.

Newer research has linked these drugs to increased risk for heart attack, stroke and breast cancer. What’s more, studies have shown that “natural” or bio-identical hormone replacement can raise hormone levels to toxically high amounts, which leads to symptoms such as weight gain, hair loss and depression—and let’s not forget liver toxicity.

But women don’t know this. Amazingly, doctors keep on prescribing hormones because they are equally exposed to the hype and misinformation.

That sort of thinking needs to halt.

In the first place, it’s not normal to force your body to menstruate when you’re 70, 80 or 90-years-old. But if you do need medical assistance, there are natural ways to balance your body’s hormones.

There are ways for women to explore the complexities of their hormone health, and initiate an easy, effective action plan without drugs or surgery. Balancing hormones naturally involves reassessing and shifting lifestyle and exercise habits to improve your health.

There are natural health practitioners who can help with a plan. Look for practitioners who don’t go straight to HRT or its derivatives. A hormone rejuvenation program should be based on the premise that our bodies are natural, exquisitely powerful and unique systems designed to balance themselves in a healthy way through individualized care and nutrition.
Much of the medical establishment’s approach to balancing hormones fails to embrace the concept that the body is a natural living system, capable of self-repair. Instead, treatment regimens are based on the premise that we need to look outside of our bodies for hormone help via one-size-fits-all drugs.

Studies have shown that using hormones topically or orally causes the body to shut down production of its own natural hormones and creates a dependency that ages every organ and body system. It is scientifically proven that oral or topically consumed hormones of all kinds can elevate existing hormone levels to toxically high amounts.

This overloads the liver and then taxes the adrenal glands, which makes you feel chronically exhausted and stressed, while causing other uncomfortable symptoms.

Naturopathy is a European medical practice that uses homeopathic medicine, herbs, food and other natural substances to bring the body into healthy balance by stimulating its innate immune defenses rather than using drugs. Homeopathy is a therapeutic system of medicine that is based on the principle of “similars,” or “like cures.” This means a substance that can cause certain symptoms in a healthy person can cure similar symptoms in an unhealthy person. Created and codified 200-years-ago by German physician, Samuel Hahneman, homeopathy is recognized by the World Health Organization as a therapeutic system and is approved by the FDA. Individuals ranging from Queen Elizabeth of England to record-setting Olympic gold medalists such as Austrian skier, Hermann Maier have used homeopathic remedies.

Homeopathy stimulates the body’s own innate defense and immune processes, a fascinating, effective and relatively inexpensive form of healing. A drug-free program offers a safe and non-toxic, hormone-rejuvenating alternative for positive and graceful aging—which is your birthright.

Adapted from the introduction of “Revitalize Your Hormones: Dr. Dale’s 7 Steps to a Happier, Healthier and Sexier You”by Theresa Dale, a traditional naturopath and certified clinical nutritionist, who practices in Santa Cruz, Calif., and is the founder of the California College of Natural Medicine. She has developed homeopathic products and a five-element saliva test for monitoring hormone balance.

For more information, Email; www.wellnesscenter.net; Dr. Dale, 849 Almar Ave, C189, Santa Cruz, CA 95060; or phone 831-426-7800.

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