Hi Lyn,
My Doctor strongly encouraged me to get a testosterone pellet inserted into my hip to address my hormone issues. It just didn’t feel right to me so I went to my integrative and functional wellness doctor and asked if he would do creams or anything different from pellets. He decided to try patches/creams for the estradiol and testosterone and will do oral progesterone. This is a very well-known and well respected doctor in my area and one of the only doctors who believes in bio identical hormone replacement.
Janice
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Hi Janice,
You are correct. This is better than pellets. But it is a far cry from hormone balance by refilling hormone receptors. Refilling depleted hormone receptors as we age also helps prevent disease. I assume your doctor uses blood work to determine hormone levels. Blood work simply provides a number. This isn’t really information that is all that useful. Your doctor’s ‘strategy’ of using an estrogen patch means you aren’t able to regulate dosage, and an estrogen patch is all estradiol. When we compound our estrogen creams (used vaginally) we use a combination of estradiol and estriol. The estriol calms down the estradiol and also travels to the breast tissue to help reduce breast cancer because estriol is our calming, gentle estrogen. Testosterone cream is way better than pellets because the dosing is more in line with what the body can easily absorb and handle for the benefits it provides, and will not have the negative side effects of a testosterone pellet with supra-physiologic dosing. I like this part of their strategy. Progesterone capsules are a problem for me. Because I am a compounding pharmacist’s wife, I understand that progesterone capsules convert to allapregnenolone for sleep and very little converts to progesterone. What little bit does convert, stays in the body about 8 hours and then it is gone. Combining these capsules with your estrogen patch, with little actual progesterone to balance it, will leave you estrogen dominant. This promotes not only weight gain because estrogen is a fat store, but more importantly, this estrogen dominance can increase your risk for developing breast cancer.
I hope you see my issues with this approach. It concerns me that this is the best you have got in your area. But I hear this all the time from women around the country. Which is why many of them find a way to come in and see us.
