Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones (48 page)

SS:
And all this without drugs?

WF:
Nothing—absolutely nothing but vitamins, tinctures, eating right, and getting rest. The only foods he removed from my diet were peanuts, and corn and dairy for a while. Instead of yogurt in the morning, he told me to take goat’s milk yogurt.

By the second month, it was like, Oh man! I don’t know what’s happening to me, but I’m feeling really, really good. I had so much more energy. I jumped out of bed in the morning and started getting things done, not even thinking about the fact that there was no pain and no fatigue.

SS:
Now, where are you hormonally?

WF:
After two months, Dr. Galitzer said it was time to do a hormonal panel. We hadn’t yet dealt with estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. My tests showed that I was low in all three hormones and definitely needed replacement. He put me on estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone cream. I cycle progesterone on days 14 through 28. I needed more testosterone than any of the others. I was so low in that hormone.

SS:
So what is your life like today? It’s been a year since you started all of this with Dr. Galitzer.

WF:
Suzanne, let’s put it this way: I came from feeling like I had one foot in the grave, and today I am like 95 percent superwoman. I still have days when my back gets weird, but we’re still working on this. Dr. Galitzer is looking into Raynaud’s disease, a disorder of the blood vessels that supply blood to your skin. But I know that whatever I have, Dr. Galitzer wants to lick it for me.

SS:
He will. He’s like that.

WF:
My husband is the happiest person in the world. We have our life back. All I know is that I went to doctors for ten years, and in just three short years, from hearing you speak, and listening to Dr. Schwarzbein, then reading your book, and finding Dr. Galitzer, I have gotten rid of 95 percent of my pain. I have my libido back. I am happy again. I am eating meat, chicken, and fish. I got hormonally balanced and detoxified.

I now realize that diet is mandatory, first and foremost. If I hadn’t already changed my eating by the time I walked into Dr. Galitzer’s office, it would have taken a lot longer to fix me.

Diet matters. It is the easiest and most significant change that we can make in our lives. It was my first step to wellness. As I learned, not everyone can be a vegetarian. For me, it was literally making me sick.

Hormones matter. They are not understood immediately. But every woman needs to know that hormones rule and can wreak havoc on our lives. I am not just talking about the sex hormones and menopausal symptoms. I am talking about the major hormones that affect our overall health. Also, every woman needs to understand the side effects of birth control pills. This knowledge was my second step to wellness.

Women need to understand that when you lose your hormones, things go wrong in your body that you would never connect to hormones. I have so many friends who are on sleeping pills, antidepressants, and anti-inflammatories. These are all solutions for the doctor, but not for the patient.

People need to understand the importance of lifestyle and nutrition and then to understand that their body is a temple. If you’re good to your body, then find one of these doctors who is more forward-thinking, and you can get your life in perfect balance. It takes work and determination and a belief that there is a better way than drugs. Learn about chemical imbalance and what causes all the acidity and toxins in your body. Stress and sleep matter, too. Learn to balance your stress and get more sleep.

As I said, the first time I heard you talking to these women about hormones, I didn’t make the connection to me. I had a stressful childhood, and it caught up with me as an adult. Stress is such a part of all of our lives, and it makes us sick. I hope a lot of people read this book. It helps to know that others have gone through these things because it gives hope.

SS:
Yes, information is empowering. We have all gone through what we’ve gone through, and these problems, whether they be physical or emotional, are opportunities to learn a great deal. Look at what this journey has done to your life.

WF:
What I have learned from my journey is that there was a thread of truth in what all the medical doctors were saying about my slowing down and not being so type A. What they were really saying is my adrenals were burning out, and it was leading me down the path of physical destruction. With this hormonal imbalance, my poor
vegetarian diet, lack of stress management, and poor sleep compounded the problem, and it slowly began manifesting itself in physical pain until I could no longer bear it.

I can’t get my forties back, but Dr. Schwarzbein, Dr. Galitzer, and you are my angels! In a relatively short period of time, I have regained my quality of life. I’m still young and can look forward to wonderful, physical years ahead. I can’t say enough good things about Dr. Galitzer.

As we continue to heal my body on a cellular level, he has now added an additional component—a very advanced chiropractor. I say “advanced” because he is not only dealing with my structure, he is also dealing with my intestinal tract. He believes I have gluten intolerance and that my years of being a vegetarian wreaked havoc on my body, creating toxins that have greatly contributed to my chronic back pain.

All the medical doctors I had seen were saying that I should not be in pain because I do not have any major disk problems. Well, they were right! I have a structural problem that probably stems from an accident I had as a child. I also have this intestinal problem that I actually created! Although on my ten-year journey I had been to chiropractors, not one was able to help me. I now understand that my body was too toxic and my hormones too out of balance for the adjustments to take hold.

I have made some further changes to my diet that may be temporary or may be lifelong. I’ll have to wait, and I am taking supplements to heal my stomach. But the bottom line is that I wake up every morning happy and grateful. I have my life back, and I will never return to the old one.

I will be forever grateful to you for all the work you do on behalf of women’s health. Your books explain the importance of diet, exercise, sleep, stress management, and hormones in a language that we can understand. You are incredibly honest in sharing your life experiences, and it has been a generous gift to so many of us. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!

SS:
Thank you. Yours is an important story with a beautiful ending.

CHAPTER 26
D
R
. P
AUL
S
AVAGE:
N
UTRITION AND
H
ORMONES

Dr. Paul Savage is the chief medical officer of BodyLogicMD in Chicago, Illinois. He founded BodyLogic to share what he has learned from his personal journey about health and to dispel misconceptions about hormone therapy. His website is
www.bodylogicmd.com
, and his phone number is 1-866-535-2563
.

SS:
I am so pleased to speak with you. Please tell me about your organization and what you are doing in Chicago. What brought you into this arena of medicine?

PS:
Even though I am a physician, I came into this new area of medicine because I did not know much about preventive health. You see, as doctors we are not really taught to treat a patient holistically in a preventive manner.

In 1996, I was thirty-eight years old and weighed 264 pounds. I was depressed. I had no libido. I couldn’t get the weight off, no matter how hard I tried. What bothered me the most was that I had trouble sleeping. I would wake up at 11:00, at 2:00, and then pace the floor for two hours. Finally, I would go back to bed and get a couple of hours of sleep, but I never really felt rested. I went to my doctor, and he told me to eat better and exercise.

After leaving my doctor’s office, it dawned on me that I did not
know what to eat, nor did I know how to exercise. Do you do cardio? Weight lifting? What was best for physiology and good health? So I started on a quest: nutrition, dietitians, personal trainers, and so forth. I reached out to anybody who could teach me about health. I spent two years reading about nutrition, funneling through the maze of information out there, and realized how confusing it is. Everybody has a public relations angle or a marketing angle. It seemed the point was to confuse the population about what is healthy and what is not.

In my opinion, there is no such thing as a diet, only a proper nutrition plan. Sometimes you have to go back to what your grandmother taught you decades ago: Eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Have a nap after breakfast; have a nap after lunch. Turn off the TV; go out and play. Have two tablespoons of cod liver oil, and eat all your vegetables. You know, just simple rules.

After two years, I had lost fifty pounds, weighed 210, and had 26 percent body fat. I felt better, but I did not feel well. I was doing an hour and a half of exercise a day with my personal trainer, doing cardio, martial arts, and weight lifting. I was eating five meals a day of very good nutrition, but I could not lose more weight. That experience is what put me on this search.

At the time, I knew nothing about hormones. I did not realize how seriously my bad lifestyle and nutrition all those years had affected my hormone levels. I did not understand the connection, so I sought a bioidentical hormone therapist. He diagnosed that I had hormone imbalance, specifically too much cortisol and low testosterone. After being on bioidentical hormone replacement for five months, I dropped down to 14 percent body fat, my energy returned, and finally I could sleep again. It was amazing.

SS:
Hormones were the missing component.

PS:
Yes. This convinced me how important it is that we not only maintain hormone levels, but also return them to the same levels we had when we were twenty-five and thirty years old. Those are the age ranges at which our bodies operated at their peak—our healthiest prime.

Having had this incredible experience, I decided to leave my position as director of an emergency and trauma center, where I was treating gang members and gunshots and pretty hysterical people all
day long—it was very stressful—and change the direction of my career. That is when I embraced this whole concept of hormones and replacing them naturally. I wanted to learn everything I could about bioidentical hormones, health, and nutrition.

I went to Alabama, Florida, California, Michigan, and New York and studied with a number of various experts on bioidentical hormones until I completed the picture. Finally, I understood that this missing component in health care was why people were not improving and getting well.

SS:
When did you start BodyLogic?

PS:
In 2003. The mission of BodyLogic is to help physicians come into the field of preventive health and age management by teaching them the proper way to help patients through nutrition, exercise, and bioidentical hormone therapy.

SS:
Did they come?

PS:
Did they ever! We now have five clinics nationwide because so many doctors want to come into this field but do not know how to do it.

I got my brother involved in starting BodyLogic. He is my twin brother, who is a retired vice president of AT&T and was also out of shape. He was 240 pounds, still smoking, and still drinking. I taught him the premises of health, and he markedly changed his life. He no longer smokes or drinks, and he exercises five times a week. He is down to 180 pounds and looks great.

When I discovered what bioidentical hormones could do for me, I was convinced of their importance. Once I opened my practice, suddenly there were a few thousand patients who wanted this help, and I needed to be able to have other doctors where I could send them.

SS:
Is there any one patient whose story stands out in your mind?

PS:
Yes. One of the interesting things about hormones is that they are not just for menopausal females. A thirty-two-year-old woman came to my office, tears streaming down her face. She and her husband were getting a divorce. Terrified, she explained to me that she could not control her anger. Each month in the last two weeks around the time of her period, she became (in her words) “a raging lunatic.” She had severe cramps, clotting, and out-of-control moods.
She was afraid to be around her two little boys, and they were afraid to be around her. Her husband was in desperate need, and he sought us out, too.

We diagnosed this woman with severe PMS, which is a progesterone deficiency, in the second two weeks of her cycle. Once we placed her on progesterone therapy for the last two weeks of her cycle, she improved markedly within three months. One day, this woman, her husband, and her two little boys came by my office to say, “Thank you for saving our marriage.”

I see this all the time—the way that hormones dramatically change people’s lives on a daily basis. In traditional medicine, it is very rare for people to come back and say thank you. In the emergency room, I truly saved people’s lives on a daily basis, and rarely did they ever say thank you, but in this field, women are thanking me every day. My patient retention is over 90 percent.

SS:
I know one forty-three-year-old woman who is struggling with her weight. She exercises, goes to sleep early, and tries to watch her diet, but she has about thirty pounds that won’t budge.

PS:
It sounds like a hormone problem and could be estrogen dominance. There are certain things that indicate hormonal imbalance:

1. estrogen dominance, which brings about unexplained weight gain
   
2. cortisol dominance; if cortisol is too high, you will gain weight
   
3. inadequate thyroid, either hypothyroid (low) or hyperthyroid (high)
   
4. low growth hormone