Hi, my name is Bob Fishman. I’m a Pharmacist, a Clinical nutritionist, and a Hormone Counselor.
I’m sure you’re wondering why a pharmacist is doing this type of work. You would normally feel like you had to go to a physician to find out what’s wrong with you, but I’ve been doing this for 15 years, I’ve seen over 3600 women and all of them have come here because their friends have sent them, or recommended it. So, somehow or other I must be doing the right thing.
It all started when I was a young man, about 14 years old in geometry in high school; I was talking to my geometry teacher, she was trying to help me with a problem I was having trouble solving. And there was a young man in my class who was pretty bright and he came over, interrupted and told the teacher that he found a theorem that was wrong. She gave him a dissertation on why theorems can’t be wrong. We’ve all heard it when we took geometry. He said he really didn’t care, he could prove that this theorem was wrong, and he proceeded to write all over the blackboard, his formulas, and it was well above the head of my teacher, and myself. And the rest of the math teachers in the high school came in and nobody could figure out what he was talking about .
It was recommended by one of the teachers that went to Princeton that we take him down to Princeton that was about 15 miles from where we were. There was a very, very smart math professor there named Albert Einstein, and Einstein went through his work with this young man, and when they finished he said that he was absolutely right. He received a scholarship to Princeton and was gone and this episode just stood in the back of my mind for many years.
About 35 years ago, as a pharmacist I was filling a lot or prescriptions for Premarin and Provera, Prempro, and birth control pills, and women were having lots of problems. They weren’t doing so well. Just small percentages were successful. The rest were having all kinds of problems and I began getting a lot of questions every day from women who didn’t understand what was happening to them. And basically what I knew about hormones at that time is the same thing that a physician learns because we took classes together. We learned all about this at the same time. The theories that were given to us, we accepted. But it bothered me as a businessman that I was spending all this time answering questions and not getting paid. So I decided I was going to become a hormone counselor, put up a sign and I was going to charge for what I was doing. So it was basically a business decision. It had nothing to do with trying to help anybody.
I put up my sign and got three women who were probably very desperate or they wouldn’t have come to me in the first place. …l spent a little time asking them questions, and I wasn’t allowed to do blood tests: pharmacists at that time weren’t allowed to do blood tests, or any kind of testing except saliva testing – which was something new. Nobody ever heard of saliva testing, neither did I, but it was something that I could do, and it was easy to follow the directions, so I took the three saliva tests of these women;, sent them off to a lab and when they came back something outstanding came to me, and that was that all three women had lots of estrogen.
Now there had to be something wrong when the physician that was prescribing estrogen and it shows that she had plenty of estrogen. So either my test was no good or their blood test was no good. Something was out of whack.
So, I spent about 6 months researching saliva testing. I sent away because we didn’t have computers at the time so I had to write letters and get all their studies and all their research, and I spent 6 months researching all of this. And when I got I got finished, I thought that saliva testing sounded pretty good to me. And so I set about, in my own best interest to see what was wrong with blood testing.
So what is wrong with blood testing?
I wasn’t about to start a war with the medical profession, so I just did it for my own best interests, and I had a friend of mine who was a gynecologist run – every time he ran a hormone panel, I had him run a 24 hour urinalysis at the same time.
The results were that each of the 12 women (tested) that the blood tests showed very low estrogen levels, and the urinalysis showed lots of metabolites of estrogen.
Everything that metabolizes in the body shows up in the urine; that’s why they do drug testing in urine. So I knew that the amount of estrogens in the urine, that were so different from in the blood, you had to think how did it get from the blood to the urine if it wasn’t there?
So, those estrogens had to be in the human body someplace else: most likely in all the cells and body fluids. And so at that point I knew that there was something really wrong with blood. And if you think about it, if you take 10cc of blood out of somebody’s arm, you’re not going to, how would you know what’s going on with the whole rest of a person’s month and their levels of hormones.
I’m not to sure that it doesn’t also effect all the other things that they measure in the blood, but, because I’m only dealing with hormones, we’ll just talk about hormones.

Ovarian and Menstrual Cycles
This graphic shows the estrogen and progesterone levels in a normal 20 year old’s hormone cycle. The green is the progesterone and the brown is the estrogen. So at the beginning of the cycle the estrogen levels rise up somewhere around the 5th of the month and by the 11th of the month they reach a peak. That rise in estrogen is to prepare the egg for fertilization. That means the eggs are in your ovaries. The positive and negative charges have to be put in the right place. The genes all have to be lined up, so that you get a healthy egg running down your fallopian tube.
11th of the month is ovulation
About the 11th of the month when the estrogen levels reach their highest point, that’s called ovulation, the eggs go down the fallopian tube and two things can happen. One: it gets fertilized, and Two: it doesn’t. If the egg is fertilized it goes into the endometrium where you see the green on the chart showing the high levels of progesterone rising up at the same time. That’s to form the placenta in the endometrium. So if you have a fertilized egg going into the endometrium and you have enough progesterone, you have an egg that’s going to gestate.
If the egg is not fertilized, then both the egg, and all the estrogen and progesterone are cleaned out of the endometrium and that’s called menses. Menses is the process of eliminating eggs in the female
Which brings you to the point that you have to understand that menses and the egg only happen together, so if you run out of eggs you have no menses. For instance, if a woman has a hysterectomy and they remove all of her eggs, then those women never have periods again.
If you get pregnant and an egg is fertilized then the periods stop for the 9 months that you’re pregnant and maybe a month or two after until the new eggs start coming down. And if you’re menopausal, peri-menopausal, and between 42 and 55 or so, it varies, and you start missing periods that means that you’re running out of eggs. And so maybe one or two months you’ll miss a period, then an egg will come, and I’ve seen women after four or five years of not having periods, at 55 or 56, drop an egg and they have a period.
So the process of eliminating the egg is what menses is all about.
Now during all the years I’ve been doing this, I noticed that when women don’t have enough progesterone, and they can’t make a good placenta, it shows up on my questions and answer sheets, that these women are the ones that have miscarriages. Miscarriages are caused by the lack of progesterone
A miscarriage is caused by lack of progesterone
So a woman who has very bad periods; the kind that are very painful, keep you out of school or keep you from going to work: those are the women who have miscarriages.
Link to part two (text)
Click here to watch the video