And now I’m going to show you a graph of a 42 year old woman’s hormone cycle.
When we do our saliva testing we collect 11 specimens during a 28 to 37 day period. The readings are received from the lab and they’re plotted on a graph and we connect the dots in order to show a picture of this woman’s cycle. There are no two women that have the same cycle.
This is her estrogen level, the dark line, and the broken line is the progesterone level. In this slide you can see that her estrogen levels are just like the original demonstration graph the we showed earlier, and on the 11th of the month the estrogen levels rise, that’s ovulation and then they drop off, so this is almost a perfect estrogen level. But her progesterone levels start very low, they only go up for a short period of time and then they go back down, so she’s not producing enough progesterone.
During this period and this period, she is estrogen dominant, meaning she has a lot of estrogen and not enough progesterone. Women who are estrogen dominant show the symptoms of anxiety and depression, and hot flashes, and mood swings et cetera. And when I did this lady’s question and answer period, those were the dominant problems that she was facing.
OK, the unusual thing about this young lady is that she had a hysterectomy two years before we did this test. Everything we had learned in school and that everybody (I believe) thinks is still going on is that if you take a woman’s ovaries out, she needs hormone replacement to replace all her hormones, but from this graph you can see that she’s producing hormones and they’re cycling the same as it was before her hysterectomy.
Women cycle until they die. It never stops. They may not have periods because they stopped dropping eggs, but the cycling goes on. Not every woman’s cycle is good and that’s why all these women are having different kinds of problems.
That’s the basis of what I’m trying to do here, because, we have an endocrine system. The endocrine system consists of your female hormones, which is DHEA, progesterone, testosterone, estriol, estradiol, estrone, and the rest of the hormonal system consisting of your thyroid, your adrenals, your pituitary, your hypothalamus, your pancreas, your salivary glands, your lachrymal glands, the peneal gland. There is a whole slew of glands. They’re all in a system and the first thing you learn in physiology about the hormonal system is that it’s a balanced system. Meaning that every hormone in that system is depending upon the other. So that if one goes out of balance it causes a shift in all the rest.
For instance, if your progesterone level is lower, you will cause changes in the rest of your endocrine system, so your thyroid may slow down. If your thyroid slows down, your metabolism slows down, you start gaining weight and you feel tired and sluggish all day.
If your adrenal glands start speeding up, I think everybody has an idea what fight or flight is, but if you were walking through the woods and a bear comes out from behind a tree, you get a rush of adrenaline, your heart beats faster and you run. Fright and flight.
But what if you’re walking through the woods and there are no bears, and it’s a beautiful day and the birds are chirping , and the sun is out and your adrenal glands are pumping out adrenaline, you have anxiety for no reason. There is nothing chasing you, and you still are anxious.
Women who are going through perimenopause or have unbalanced endocrine systems are all in the state of anxiety all the time. That’s why they get prescriptions for Paxil, Prozac and Zoloft. The problem is that Paxil, Prozac and Zoloft are used to lower serotonin levels in your brain. Which means that it dulls your brain, and you don’t realize that you’re in a state of anxiety.
For a while you think you’re doing well; the doctor gave you the medicine; you feel good, but the truth is that the anxiety problem which is in your adrenals is getting worse.
Eventually those drugs stop working, you run back to the physician, and he tells you, “We’ll put you on another drug.” They have Wellbutrin and Zyprexa, Effexor and you go on. And women who have unbalanced endocrine systems are usually on three or four of those drugs all the time, trying to stabilize their anxiety. It is not a mental problem. It has to do with your adrenals, so the way to solve the problem is to bring your endocrine system into balance.
Endocrine Glands
• Hypothalamus
• Pituitary(s)
• Thyroid
• Adrenals
• Pancreas
• Gonads
• Salivary
• Lacrimal
The next gland that I want to talk about the Hypothalamus. It regulates your autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is your eyes blinking, your heart beating, your lungs breathing in and out; all of that are things that you don’t think about everyday that are happening to your body.
Well one of the things that are regulated by the hypothalamus is your blood vessels, and that controls your body temperature. So if your blood vessels open when they shouldn’t, blood rushes to the surface of your skin and you get something called a hot flash. If they stay open all the time then you have sweats. If they shut down then you could be freezing. You see a lot of ninety five year old women wearing sweaters when it’s ninety degrees outside it’s because their blood vessels are not opening enough and warming up their body.
The next gland is the pituitary and it has to do with aging. The pituitary starts giving off growth hormone when you’re young and you start growing up. It helps you grow until you become about thirty eight years old. At thirty eight years old, approximately, the pituitary starts slowing down in giving off growth hormone. It’s not an immediate thing, so as it slows down that’s how you age.
If you affect your pituitary gland and cause it to slow down faster, you’re going to age faster. If it slows down slower, you’re going to age better. That’s why you see some women who are sixty years old and look terrific and some of them look like my grandmother. That’s all because of the way the pituitary was acting when they went through menopause and beyond.
The next gland is the pancreas. Very important because the pancreas gives off insulin. If your pancreas starts secreting too much insulin it’s going to sensitize the cells in your body because insulin has an effect on every cell in your body. If it causes that to happen, that’s called insulin sensitivity, which would mean that your cells will require more and more insulin all the time, demanding more from your pancreas. And after a while there is not enough insulin to take care of the sugars in your body and those sugar levels will rise. If they do a blood test on sugars, they’re going to find out that you’re a diabetic.
So the way to prevent diabetes actually would be to check people’s insulin levels when they’re younger, (which they don’t do,) see if they’re rising, and then change their lifestyles when they’re young, and you may be able to prevent diabetes.
On to the salivary glands, and the lacrimal glands which affect your eyes and cause problems in women. So a lot of women who are going through menopause have dry eyes, and dry mouth, and all of this is reversible.
By getting your endocrine system into balance we’re able to get a lot of these glands to go back to what they were doing and those symptoms disappear.
Bringing your endocrine system into balance – part 2 of 3
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