The 2009 “Yes … We Can Think Outside the Box” Conference on Science-Based Medicine is available for purchase. Presented by The Robert Fishman Institute for Training & Research and sponsored by Life Extension, For Longer Life – this 6-Disk DVD Set features the keynote speakers from last year’s symposium and comes with 2 Bonus CD’s filled with all of the presentors slideshow files.

Now’s your chance to catch up on what you missed. Plus, enjoy the benefit of sharing this valuable information with others! Cost is only $99.99 plus $5.95 shipping and handling. To purchase CLICK HERE.

Here’s a sampling of what the DVD set has to offer:

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)
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As I get each one of your symptoms down to zero, that means your endocrine system is coming into balance. When it’s in balance you will stop having symptoms. That usually takes anywhere from three to six months, and then you should be in good condition to maintain for the rest of your life.

There are no two women that are the same, so it’s been wrong that in the last fifty years we’ve been treating all women the same, giving them all the same medications, when they’re all totally different. Every woman should be treated as an individual, their hormones should be regulated as individuals. That’s what I do.

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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…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.. Continue Reading