Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones (36 page)

Then I changed my daily schedule. I told my office I would take phone calls only between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. Before or after that was off-limits, and they were to send e-mails that I might or might not answer that day. This new schedule allowed me to write my books during the day. My office was suddenly quiet because the phone wasn’t ringing. I had all my doctors’ appointments scheduled for only one day a month so I wasn’t driving into town several times a month. Business meetings were scheduled the same way. Television
appearances were all cleared through my husband, who is very protective with my time and vigilant about not wasting it. At the end of each day, I stopped working at 6:00 p.m. and made a beautiful healthy delicious dinner for Alan and me.

Guess what? A calm came over me. I woke up happy, grateful, and well rested every day. My libido increased. The extra five pounds I had been carrying around disappeared. I looked fresher, younger. People noticed.

All my blood work improved. Dr. Galitzer kept using words like “perfect.” I knew it, too. I had made such progress in my life, but I think without constant vigilance it is easy to slip back to old negative habits. I had had a slip, just like an alcoholic. I had to ask myself some hard questions. This kind of work is agitating and upsetting. I realized that in addition to overwork, lack of sleep can contribute to feelings of depression because of the hormonal imbalance from raised cortisol. Sleep and a determination to change have paid off. It was a change in my lifestyle that did it.

I wake up pretty happy almost all the time these days. But I have learned never to get cocky. The body needs tender loving care. Without it I am the loser.

One of our dearest friends and my husband were business partners for many years in the early 1970s. I watched the schedule my husband’s partner has been on with awe for years: flying back and forth to New York each week, then back to L.A. the next day to run the production company; late nights, early mornings, diabetes that I never knew about. My husband and I had dinner with him and his wife regularly over the years, and we all loved being together. This intense schedule went on like this for years. He was a “wonder, invincible, successful,” enviable.

Then came the phone call: “My husband has had two major strokes,” said his wife. Both Alan and I felt numb. How could this be?

In my grief for him, I started to think about the craziness of his lifestyle. In understanding physiology, I know that cortisol could never have had a chance to go down with all the flying and late nights. When cortisol doesn’t go down, insulin doesn’t go down, a very dangerous scenario for a diabetic. Because he didn’t carry weight, he
didn’t appear to be diabetic, but most likely his adrenals were so revved up that he couldn’t put on much weight. Eventually he would have, but the stroke got him first.

Today, he is in the fight of his life. He has the will of a soldier, and in one year he is walking slowly and speaking well enough to go to work. I know where he came from with the stroke, and his progress is nothing short of a miracle.

I tell you these two stories so you might see yourself in the big picture. The body is not invincible. The chaos of your youth will kill you in your later years if you do not make a change in your lifestyle. Nobody is above it. No hormones can fight it. You have to understand the toll that stress takes and care enough about living to realize that changes have to be made.

You hear stories of fifty-year-old-men suddenly dropping dead from a heart attack. It is usually followed by “He had just been at the doctor’s and was told he was fine.” These men and women who drop dead suddenly are usually A types, “superworkers” who burn it at both ends. They don’t see sleep as anything other than a nuisance. It catches up … even big strong “he-men” can fall. Learn from these stories. All the vitamins, supplements, injections, hormones, and vegetables in the world can’t fight biochemical breakdown (exhaustion). The body can do only so much, and then it breaks down, and the picture is not pretty.

Lifestyle is a choice. Choose to live well, manage your stress, eat healthy, value sleep, and think good thoughts. Avoid stress and confrontation, adjust to change, maximize your energy, and enjoy your life. This is the only life we’re sure that we have. Don’t waste the opportunity.

CHAPTER 17
D
R
. H
ERB
S
LAVIN:
S
LEEP
, S
EX, AND
A
NTIAGING
M
EDICINE

Dr. Herbert Slavin has been in private practice in south Florida for twenty-five years specializing in internal medicine and has helped thousands of patients regain their health and vitality through natural methods, including nutritional therapies, bioidentical hormone replacement, and chelation therapy. Dr. Slavin has been on the radio since 1990 and currently hosts the talk show
Healthline
on WLVJ (1040 AM) at 11:00 a.m. Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. The show can also be heard live online at
www.wlvj.com
. Dr. Slavin is a dedicated doctor, a good guy. I sent my best friend, Susie, to him because I was so impressed with his forward-thinking, cutting-edge approach to medicine
.

SS:
How did you become interested in antiaging medicine?

HS:
Years ago, I had heard about the American College for Advancement in Medicine (ACAM), a not-for-profit medical society, and I learned that a large group of doctors worldwide were treating the underlying causes of their patients’ problems rather than just prescribing medications. One of the events early in my medical career that really motivated me to look for a better approach to illness occurred at a meeting of the utilization review committee at a hospital that I was attending. They were reviewing the hospital records of two ninety-year-old female patients who had died as a complication of
bypass surgery. When I heard that, I started thinking to myself that these patients would probably still be alive if they hadn’t had surgery, but what other treatments could we offer them for their coronary artery disease? This is a national problem, but especially here in Florida where we have so many old people who get overtreated in my opinion.

SS:
I never thought about the retirees being in the majority.

HS:
Right. You see, in the rest of the country, physicians would typically look at a ninety-year-old and weigh the risks of the operation versus the risk of not having it. After all, you’re supposed to do what’s best for the patient. But in Florida that’s the age group that makes your practice. I mean at ninety years old, other treatment options without the risk of dying have to be explored. So this was when I began thinking about ways to implement alternative medicine into my practice. At about the same time, there was a doctor on the radio talking about chelation therapy. I had never heard of it, but he was interviewing patients on the radio, describing a condition caused by poor circulation in the legs that causes calf pain when walking. I thought, They never taught us that in medical school, or even in residency training. They never even mentioned chelation therapy except for the treatment of acute lead poisoning. My initial impression was he must be paying people to say these things because mainstream medicine has no cure for this condition. They have treatments for it, and when the pain gets bad enough, they might try surgery to improve the circulation, but they never recommend anything to reverse the problem. This doctor on the radio was also interviewing people who were cured of their angina without surgery. But I still was skeptical. Around this time, by coincidence, I learned that one of the nurses in my office had formerly worked with this doctor. Naturally, I asked her what she thought about what she had observed. She said she watched these patients have amazing results. One example she gave was of a patient who had had a stroke and required a wheelchair to get around. After the chelation therapy treatments, the wheelchair was no longer needed. I had heard enough and started my own research into this seemingly amazing therapy. I attended a seminar on chelation therapy where before and after pictures were shown showing marked improvement never achievable with drugs or surgery. It was
recommended that I read a book written by Dr. Elmer Cranton, called
Bypassing Bypass
. And that’s where I heard about ACAM, which I’ve now belonged to for fifteen years.

This type of medicine is not based upon a patient’s complaint to be treated with a drug. In ACAM, we ask the question “What caused the dysfunction in the patient?” Once you know the cause of a problem, your focus shifts to removing the cause rather than just prescribing drugs to treat a symptom.

SS:
So yours is holistic in its approach rather than a Band-Aid?

HS:
Yes, but it’s real medicine. Taking drugs to correct the problems of aging today is useless in so many cases, because drugs do not address the cause of the problem. If you don’t address the cause, the problem won’t really go away. In medical school, doctors are taught “Don’t treat abdominal pain until you know what is causing it.” In other words, you don’t want to mask appendicitis or colitis or a gallbladder attack until you know what is causing the pain. So in that particular case in medicine—treating abdominal pain—we don’t mask the symptoms, yet we do that in every other phase of medicine. If someone has high blood pressure, which is not a disease but a symptom, we mask it with a medication. We also do that with cholesterol issues, diabetes, and just about everything else

SS:
So if someone has high cholesterol, how do you treat it?

HS:
I look for the underlying causes of high cholesterol. In the vast majority of people, high cholesterol is usually adult-onset hyperinsulinemia, a condition that most of these people didn’t have when they were younger, and it’s associated with insulin resistance. In other words, patients with insulin resistance have high circulating insulin levels, which, in turn, raise their blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglycerides. Therefore, taking a cholesterol-lowering drug only masks the problem and doesn’t address the underlying cause, which is insulin resistance and elevations in circulating insulin. The drug is not going to make the problem better; in fact, it will make the problem worse.

SS:
How much of our illness in later life is caused by diet and bad lifestyle habits?

HS:
These have a tremendous effect. But so do drugs. It is estimated that the United States uses more prescription drugs than the rest of the world
combined!

SS:
I believe it. I lived in Europe for many years. When you get sick there, European physicians first treat you homeopathically. Drugs are the last line of defense. How did drugs become the first line of defense in the United States?

HS:
This issue has to do with the influence of the drug companies. They have taken control of health care in this country. It actually dates all the way back to about 1910, when the Flexner report was published.

Abraham Flexner was either directly or indirectly representing the Rockefellers and the Carnegies. His job was to go around to all the schools that taught health care, which back then included chiropractic, osteopathic, naturopathic, homeopathic, whatever schools they had. But what they did not have was allopathy, which is what we practice today, essentially the use of drugs and surgery to treat disease.

Flexner was hired because both the Rockefellers and the Carnegies owned pharmaceutical companies, and they had to figure out how they were going to market their products. They came up with this idea that the best way to market pharmaceuticals was to teach the doctors to use them. So Flexner went around to various medical schools such as the Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins and offered financial incentives to these institutions to change their curriculum to educate their doctors on the use of pharmaceuticals. The schools received a huge influx of money and changed their curriculum so that now today when patients come into their doctor’s office with a chief complaint (which is a symptom), they are given a prescription for a drug or drugs.

SS:
And we, the patients, got used to this fast reaction.

HS:
That’s the problem. So in medical school today, you are taught when you go into your clinical years that everything starts off with a chief complaint. If there is no complaint, health care (the way it is practiced today) has nothing to offer the patient. What has been
lost in this approach is the understanding that a patient can be very ill yet still be walking around with no symptoms.

SS:
So when patients come in to see you who are in their forties, fifties, or older and are just not feeling their usual vitality, what are the first things you start thinking about?

HS:
Their complaint might just be that they are tired or not as sharp mentally, or they have gained weight (that one is universal), or there is a loss of libido. So I start thinking outside the box: How can I reverse the underlying disease? I check to see if their cholesterol is high or if their blood pressure is high. As I mentioned before, high circulating insulin levels, which is known as syndrome X or metabolic syndrome, is common. Although this syndrome has received much notoriety in recent years, physicians do not routinely test for it because you must do a glucose insulin challenge test to identify an insulin problem. Those people may have a normal fasting blood insulin and normal fasting blood sugar; when challenged, they will show a very high insulin level even though other indicators appear normal. Unless you challenge those people through testing, you don’t detect it. But it’s so often the explanation for weight gain, high cholesterol, or high blood pressure.

As a doctor I have to ask myself: What has changed in these people? It is usually a decline in their hormone levels that is associated with an increase in insulin resistance. In other words, their bodies need to keep churning out more insulin in order to keep their blood sugar under control.