Dr. Lee:
One hundred
and twenty five doctors were there and I spoke from 10:00 in the morning
to 5:00 in the afternoon on this topic with a lunch break and a tea break.
Mrs. Allen said: "Well, you've only got an hour or two at the most
here but fortunately Georgia women are a whole lot smarter than those doctors
in England, so we can get it all in - in an hour" (Laughter). It's kind of strange being here. I was thinking last night I probably
have a better idea of what you people are doing here than my being here.
I think that the people that are here today have an awareness that there's
a problem shaping up in this country having to do with women's hormones
and part of the problem is that the response by conventional medicine is
not working well.
There's something wrong here. Something wrong is going
on and women realize that they have to educate themselves. They have to
acquire knowledge. They have to make tough decisions in their lives because
there's some bad things that are happening to women that they're not prepared
for and the response of the conventional doctor is actually part of the
problem as I've already explained. So I think I know why you're here. Why
I'm here is a little more difficult to explain. I was in family practice for 30 years in Mill Valley and I must say
it took me, I may not be the smartest kid on the block, but within about
10 years I figured out that medicine the way we practice it, isn't as intelligent
as it ought to be. We tend to have to wait until somebody gets diabetes,
or has his fracture, or has breast cancer or heart attack or stroke, and
then we're supposed to step in and try to fix it.
It struck me that it
would be a whole lot smarter to try and figure out where these things come
from and then to alter people's choices, their lifestyle choices that they're
making to try and optimize their chance of being healthy and minimize their
chance of getting diseases. Because many of the things that we do end up
with are things of long standing that gradually accumulate and gradually
pass into some threshold where the disease becomes manifest. In my case I was sensitive to this because my father who was the only
doctor in a little town in Minnesota had his first heart attack at 44 and
died at age 49 when I was 15 years old. Now when I got to medical school
I discovered that you don't get a heart attack, or
get a fatal heart attack
like that unless you've spent years and years and years accumulating the
cholesterol plaque building up in your arteries. So I tell you, at that
moment I quit drinking whole milk.
I haven't had a glass of milk since
1955, because the family history of heart disease in my family is awful
high. My dad, my two uncles, my only male cousin, they all had serious
heart attacks in their early forties or late thirties. I'm the first Lee
in our family in three generations, the first male Lee to not only break
50 but break 60, I'll be 66 in another week or so. (Applause) So, either
I'm doing something right or I'm adopted. (Laughter) But at any rate, my interest turned to preventive medicine, and this
has led me into all sorts of studies that I never dreamt of when I was
in medical school. Medical school is more like a trade school, I have to
admit.
They teach you how to diagnose problems and that means to classify
them by their signs and symptoms and to respond with a treatment to treat
whatever the sign or symptom was. If you have a bladder infection you get
sulfa, if you have hypertension you get a diuretic, and so on. There wasn't
much thought given to spending time tracking down where these things come
from. So I accidentally got involved with the progesterone in a kind of peculiar
way I guess. In my practice, after you've been in practice 20 years, people
who were 40 when you started are suddenly 60. People who were 30 are suddenly
50. Of course YOU don't change but all of a sudden you've got older people
to take care of. Osteoporosis was my entrance into the field of progesterone.
I thought I knew as much as anyone else about estrogen and progesterone
in practice. But I had these people developing osteoporosis. We had a doctor in town who developed a clinic to measure bone mineral
density - Dr. Malcolm Powell. He had been a professor at UC and developed
a way of using photons. Like kids at Halloween used to shine a flashlight
through their hand and you could see the dark areas where the bone was
and the pink areas where the light went through? He had a machine that
could measure how much light was lost in passing through, and the loss
of the energy of the light beam could be calibrated to the density or the
mass of minerals that were in the path of the beam.
Then later the X-ray
folks developed a very light dose X-ray to do the same thing. They could
measure the mass of the minerals in the path of the beam of any bone in
your body. So we had these tests, very accurate, they're about 96-97% accurate,
to measure bone mineral density loss and I had these people with osteoporosis.
The dilemma was in 1976, that if we give estrogen as we were taught,
you increase the woman's risk of breast cancer and cancer of the uterus.
This didn't seem right to me, I couldn't imagine mother nature making this
dilemma. There's something wrong here. But there it was, there was very
solid evidence that unopposed estrogen is the only known cause of cancer
of the uterus and it was probably the cause of at least 30% of the breast
cancers. There was a meeting at the Mayo Clinic in 1976 called the Consensus
Meeting. Experts from around the world gathered and said women should
not be given estrogen unless you give some progesterone along with it because
they found that progesterone protects against those cancers. That mother
nature had always arranged for those two hormones to be made at the same
time. The ovary makes both hormones. Mother nature did not decide that
women should be on estrogen by itself month after month, year after year
and yet that's what doctors were doing.
They were putting women, post menopausal
women on estrogen for their bones and they were creating cancer of the
uterus and breast cancer. So when the Mayo Clinic said that progesterone
should be given, it turns out here was no company selling natural progesterone,
real honest-to-God human female progesterone.
They were all making synthetic
analogs that worked like progesterone in the sense that they could be used
for birth control pills. So they jumped in and started advertising to the
doctors, "Oh, we have a good progesterone here, use ours" so
Provera came in and Megastrol came in and all these synthetics we'll be
talking about came in. Well, that was all right but a lot of doctors weren't using progesterone
if a woman has already had a hysterectomy. The doctor would say: "Well,
she can't get cancer of the uterus, she's already had a hysterectomy. So
they would still be giving unopposed estrogen. I saw these patients who were on estrogen and they were getting swollen
breasts and fibrocystic breast disease, they were getting fat around their
middle, their hips, their abdomen, losing libido and getting depressed.
When they traveled any place and they were sitting any period of time their
feet would swell they'd have water retention and all that. And it struck
me that there's something wrong here. Also I had patients who couldn't take any estrogen because they've already
had breast cancer or diabetes or vascular disorders or obesity, there's
all sorts of counter indications for estrogen, gall bladder disease, migraines,
hypertension, it goes on and on.
So I had patients with osteoporosis who
couldn't take estrogen and I was wondering, "What can I do for these
patients?" "I can tell them to eat a good diet; I can put them
on calcium; I can put them on Vitamin D; I can try and get them off cigarettes"
and all these things you're supposed to do. But we knew from the bone mineral
density that that was not enough. Bones needed something or they were going
to get osteoporosis. So in 1978 I attended a meeting, actually I was giving a talk on hypoglycemia
and Linus Pauling was there giving a talk on Vitamin C, when Dr. Ray Peat,
a Ph.D. from Oregon was there giving a talk to doctors challenging them,
saying, "Why aren't you all using progesterone, the second female
hormone?
It's readily available, they can make it from yams, they can make
it from soy, they can make it from 5000 different plants, it's identical
to what the humans make, it's been out for 30 years in face creams, cosmetics,
it's wonderful for the skin, it's available, the FDA can't find anything
wrong with it, why are you using only estrogen for post-menopausal ladies?
At menopause the ovary doesn't make any more eggs, doesn't make very
much estrogen, your periods subside and we call it menopause and the doctors
are just using estrogen and Ray Peat was up there saying, "Look, I
have a list of 250 references and they show that progesterone is a very
important hormone and he lists all these important things, it's available
over the counter, it's absorbed through the skin, and I was sitting there,
just my mind was blown by this. I said everything he's saying is right.
That all makes sense. The ovary makes two hormones; why aren't we giving
the two hormones? So I got a hold of Ray Peat afterwards and I said, "I'd sure love
a copy of your list of references, I'd like to look into this more."
I did, and I found more references because every paper you get has another
150 references in it. So I accumulated quite a library of these references,
and I found everything he said was collaborated by the references he had.
This was very impressive to me, because this doesn't always happen in medical
papers. You know, in medical papers, some doctor might do something, he
might make some observation, but then he goes and makes a conclusion, and
in the process of making a conclusion all sorts of underlying assumptions
come in to play.
A lot of times in medical papers there is so much that
is still unknown. If they don't recognize the underlying assumptions, their
conclusions can be wrong. Medicine is not nearly as scientific as you might
think, because there's so much that is unknown. The whole essence of life
is impossible to understand in scientific terms. But at any rate I was impressed with what Ray Peat had, so I told my
patients, I said, "I want you to go to Dr. Malcolm Powell's office
and do a photon bone mineral density test and then I want you to go to
the health food store and pick up some of this cosmetic cream." It
was called "cielo" at that time, it means "blue" or
"heaven" or "sky" and I want you to use that and rub
a little bit in every day and then a year from now we're going to check and see how your bones are doing. So over the next two or three years I did this and to my amazement, all of
these women who had bad osteoporosis, otherwise I wouldn't have been willing
to do this extraordinary thing, their bones were all getting better. Then
I looked at the people who were on estrogen, their bones didn't get better.
It was just that estrogen slowed down the loss. You see the difference?
Estrogen does not reverse osteoporosis Bone is interesting tissue, it's always being made, remade, unmade,
made over again, just like skin, just like hair, just like the lining of
your stomach, bones are constantly being made, unmade and then made anew.
The cells that undo them are called osteoclast and they dissolve them away.
When they find old bone, subject to more crystallization, fracture risk
higher, these cells identify the old bone and they dissolve it away. Little
pockets of it here and there. Behind them come the osteoblast. The osteoblast
comes in and makes new bone where the old bone had been removed. In fact
the new bone can't be made unless the old bone is removed first. So it's
very, very important to have this happen. What estrogen does is to slow up the dissolving away of the old bone.
It does nothing to make new bone. The function of progesterone and testosterone,
which is the same in this action, is to tell the cells that make new bone
to get to work and make new bone wherever there's a spot for it.
So you
are increasing new bone formation when you get progesterone, or testosterone.
So my patients all did very well even though they never took any estrogen
at all. Pretty soon I accumulated quite a number of these people, and of course
they were telling other people. So other doctors' patients were coming
over to my office and saying: "What do you do?" And I was telling
them to go get some of this cream over the counter and put a little dab
on and they said "How do you know how much to give?"
And I said:
"Well, I certainly don't know, we're going to see what the tests show
up a year later, but I know it can't hurt you because during a regular
monthly cycle, the ovary normally makes 20 milligrams a day. From ovulation
time until the time of your period. And during pregnancy the placenta makes
it, and it makes up to 400 milligrams a day.
So the safety range is somewhere
between 20 milligrams a day and 400. You can't miss. A little dab of this
cream is about 20 milligrams. So you're in the right ball park, and the
only way we can tell is if we check the bone mineral density at the end
of the year. So we did and then I began learning things from these patients. They
told me their energy level was higher; they told me that they could do
a whole lot more work and that they could use up their body fat, their
body fat was slimming down, they were able to turn body fat into energy.
Estrogen on the other hand turns the food energy into body fat. That's
why they give it to steers. You understand, they castrate the steers, put
them in feed lots, feed them sorghum and give them estrogen. Steers you
see, are sold by the pound. So the function of estrogen is to lard in a
lot of fat with the meat in a quick time, and also to retain water.
By retaining water the weight goes up so you get more per pound when you
kill the steer for meat. That's the function of estrogen, and that function
is prevented when you take progesterone. Progesterone allows you to use
the fat for energy. The women were teaching me that their
fibrocystic breasts had returned
to normal breasts. The women were teaching me that those that had developed
some acne and pimples like teenage boys get, here they were post-menopausal
women, that their skin had all cleared up. The women showed me that where
their hair had been thinning, they now had full, luxuriant hair again.
The women told me that they had previously been bothered by fibroids, and
the fibroids were coming down and their doctor couldn't figure out why.
Those that had water retention didn't have it any more, their edema had
gone away. Those that had had muscular aches and pains had gotten better.
I could never understand this until just July of this year. There was
an article in "Science" the journal for the American Cabinet
for the Advancement of Science. It was an article about how the Schwann
cell makes the myelin sheath that covers and protects all the nerves as
they pass through your body.
There are little cells every couple of centimeters
that makes a covering, an insulation called myelin that protects the nerve
from damage and it protects the nerve so it doesn't short circuit and lose
it's electric impulse when the nerve impulse comes down. Turns out the
Schwann cell can't do this unless something interferes with this progesterone
receptors. Progesterone is necessary to make the myelin sheath. Now who
ever new that before? One of the problems in medicine is that they tend to label a hormone
by some presumed function. A sex hormone, thyroid hormone, they don't realize
that the reality is that the body is so much more complex that to label
it by one function means you do not understand what that hormone does.
They do so many things. In my research over the years, learning about progesterone, I discovered
brain cells concentrate progesterone and testosterone to levels 20 times
higher than the blood carries. Now, brain cells wouldn't do this unless
the progesterone or testosterone has some function in the brain cell. Why
go to the work of drawing that progesterone in, holding it against an osmotic
gradient, getting it through the cell membrane into the brain cell unless
there is some reason for it? So now I understood why some of my patients who gave this to their elder
mothers and aunts who were in nursing homes - they gave it to them for their
bones or because it's so wonderful for skin, it hydrates skin again, makes
skin much better - these elderly women all became much more alert and aware.
Women who were content to just to lie in bed all day and couldn't keep
track of the conversation with their niece or whatever, after a week or
so of being on progesterone they're up leading discussions on the headlines
and the latest in book reviews. I had a doctor come all the way from South Hollow, Brazil. He gave it
to his 92 year old mother and his mother resumed being an intellectual
giant again where before she had become a baby-like cripple, and he specializes
in the care of the elderly. He came all the way up from South Hollow, Brazil,
to a little town where I live, Sabasco, California, to spend an afternoon
talking to me about it. It helps brain function. So I was learning all this from the patients. It's not in the books.
When I eventually did write a book about it, people said they took it to
their doctors who said: "Well, this doesn't agree with things that
I read in my books, it's not in the other books;" and I said, "That's
right, if it were already described I wouldn't bother."
But I was
doing something people hadn't done before as far as I know. I wasn't doing
it on 1 or 2, I was doing it on everyone. I probably have more experience
giving natural progesterone to people than anyone you're ever going to
meet. I've been doing it since 1978.
I retired in 1989 but my old patients
keep me informed and people are calling me all the time since the book
came out, I get 50-60 phone calls a day. I'm in touch with people
now more than ever in my practice. So then I decided, here I have all these people on estrogen and they're
not getting better. I'm slowing up their bone loss but I'm not doing anything
to reverse it. Why not add some progesterone to them? This is when I learned
one of the most important lessons. When I give this to a woman who's doctor
has her on estrogen, turns out the dose he has ordered is ALWAYS, 2,
4, 8 times too much.
And I was trying to figure out, is the doctor
that dumb? What is happening here? Why is it that when I give progesterone
they get estrogen side effects? They get breast swelling, they get water
retention, they get headaches, their feet swell, that's estrogen. Well, it dawned on me finally when I looked it up. Turns out when you
have the same hormone all the time like estrogen, unopposed by progesterone,
the estrogen receptors tune down. Just as if you're working in an office
where there's too much noise. After working there for six months you end
up not noticing the noise.
Then you go away for two weeks and come back
and say, "Oh my God, how could I have been working here without realizing
all this noise is here?" Same thing happens with light. You've been
out in the bright daylight sometimes and you go into a matinee movie and
can't see anything for 45 minutes, your eyes have tuned down, constant
exposure to the same message tunes down the message and hormones are like
messengers. Every cell that they work on - it does so because there's a receptor -
binds and unites with that hormone's molecule, and goes
to the nucleus and creates the effects of the message. But it takes binding
with that receptor. When you have unopposed estrogen, the receptors tune
down. When you add the progesterone, the receptors come back to full force
again - full efficiency. So, I learned that every time I added this to a woman already on estrogen,
I had to tell her to cut her estrogen at least in half. Then later she
could cut it down even more because the progesterone was handling so many
of her problems. She didn't need all that much estrogen. Then I had some
ladies who kept cutting it down, cutting it down and pretty soon they weren't
taking any, and they were doing fine. No hot flashes, no vaginal dryness,
no problems, they were doing fine and I said, "How can this be?" I was taught in medical school estrogen goes to zero. So I went to the library and looked up the original references of people,
primary references. Somebody measured estrogen levels for five (5) years before
menopause and then five (5) years after menopause and you know what they all found?
Every single one? They found the estrogen only drops about 40-50%! It doesn't
go to zero!
Women continue to make estrogen even if they have their ovaries removed! How do they make it? The fat cells make it. The body fat converts
to one of the hormones that the adrenal gland makes, into real estrogen.
The greater your need for estrogen, the more it makes. The body's not dumb.
The body has this backup mechanism and it works.
In fact, the tests show
that a fat lady after menopause makes more estrogen than a skinny lady
does before menopause. Isn't that something? And you have all these doctors
giving fat ladies estrogen! There's something wrong here! (Laughter) It
became more and more apparent to me, I learned all this from the patients.
Then I would go try and find a reference to try and explain it, try
and understand it. People say, "What kind of doctor are you?"
they want me to say Family Practice or Internist or Surgeon or whatever.
I say, "I'm the kind of doctor who is a puzzle solver. I can't walk
by somebody doing a puzzle without trying to figure out what the puzzle
is or adding a piece here and there.
I'm the kind of a doctor who, when
he hears three doctors out of four prefer hydroprophin or something else,"
I always wonder, "What does that fourth guy know that the other three don't?"
(Laughter) Don't you have that? But I think I have this compulsion to solve
puzzles, especially in natural science type things, and then I get a compulsion
to want to tell people what I found. I figured out that's what I'm doing
here. I have nothing to sell, I don't have any interest in any of the companies
that make these creams. I wrote a book two years ago. I first wrote a series of about five or six
papers but the American journals wouldn't publish them because they said,
"Dr. Lee doesn't have a control group." I was showing them that
people with osteoporosis get better when you add progesterone. That's never
happened before in the history of womankind.
There isn't any other study
that shows that, and that estrogen doesn't do it. It's kind of like if
somebody says, "All sheep are white." You do not have to do a
double blind control, all you have to do is find one black sheep. Right?
And you've disproved that.
If you say osteoporosis cannot be reversed and
I do it on 100 patients, I don't need a control group, I'm doing something
that's reversing osteoporosis and they ought to be looking into it. I wasn't
in a position to do the double blind studies because people were coming
to me for advice on how to use the progesterone they could buy over the
counter. I've learned all these things that I'm trying to tell, so I wrote the
papers and the first one was published in an Australian journal which is
recognized around the world, International Journal of...something with
nutrition, but it's a real good journal around the world. The next one
was in the English journal, Medical Hypothesis. The next one was in a Canadian
journal and bit by bit this was getting the news around. Then there was a letter to Lancet. Lancet had shown these hormones are
well absorbed through the skin, so I wrote, "Yes, I know, I've been
doing this, and it reverses osteoporosis," and they published it.
Then I began to get letters from doctors all around the world, and my wife
said, "Why don't you put it all together in a book." I'd given talks at our local hospitals, Marin General, and Ross Hospital,
showing these bones getting better on these people. I mean, I ordered the
tests but I had nothing to do with making the tests, and the people were
using the progesterone. There was no way I could interfere with the results.
The doctors would say, "Wow, they've never seen anything like this
before;" but none of them would do it in their practice. Here it was
available, they all had patients with osteoporosis they were still doing
the same dumb thing.
But one by one, they would call me and they'd say,
"John, my mother-in-law is visiting and she has terrible osteoporosis,
how is it you use this cream?" or they'd say, "My wife has PMS,
how do we do this?" or, "My wife has fibrocystic breast disease,"
or, "My wife is having to take thyroid." Progesterone helps the
thyroid hormone work. Estrogen interferes with the thyroid hormone. This wasn't my discovery, this was described in the 50's in a study
in Lancet. It doesn't interfere with the gland, it interferes with how
the thyroid hormone is working. So the person acts as if they're low thyroid
but the blood tests of T3 and T4 are okay.
But the doctor often ends up
giving more thyroid and can overcome this sluggishness of the thyroid by
giving more of it. So he thinks he's doing a good job. And he can do that,
forcing more thyroid hormone than the cells really need. But then you set
up the stage for Hashimoto's thyroiditis. And THAT was described 30, 40
years ago. No, it became apparent in my practice when I would measure progesterone
levels, that progesterone deficiency is a very common malady, long before
menopause. This is never taught in medical school. No one ever thinks of
measuring progesterone levels. They'll say, "Well, after 43 or 44
it's harder for you to get pregnant, and you may have periods till you're
55," but they never say "It's harder for you to get pregnant
because the ovary isn't making progesterone." Let me tell you a little bit about what progesterone does. The main
purpose of progesterone is to procreate the species. First you have the
hypothalamus, then the pituitary sends down signals to the ovary to get
to work to start the period over again. That signal is called FSH, follicle
stimulating hormone.
Follicles are little nests of cells in the ovaries,
each containing the capability of one egg. One egg is already made and
resting in there. It has to be developed, made full and then when one is
released, that follicle becomes the corpus luteum, which then becomes a
factory for making progesterone. But anyway, the first response of the ovary to follicle stimulating
hormone is to make estrogen and at the same time 150 follicles or so are
developing an egg. When the first egg is released and the progesterone
starts being manufactured, that progesterone tells the other follicles to
relax, quit, they don't have to do their job because this one has one good
egg out.
When that egg meets up with the sperm, it is able to signal back
to the ovary, "Don't stop your progesterone manufacture, make more.
Progesterone is necessary to maintain this sequetory lining in the uterus.
The uterus develops this nice bloody lining as a nest to be able to nourish
the fertilized egg and to sustain it and if you have a fall off of progesterone
at that point you will initiate a shedding, like a monthly shedding, and
you will lose the pregnancy. So the ovary is very important, it has to
make more progesterone at that point. The fertilized egg in the blastula stage, there may be only eight cells,
signals the ovary, make more progesterone. Isn't that amazing? But the
first business of the fertilized egg is to tell the ovary to keep on making
it. Then, as the ovary does that, and the embryo develops, then the placenta
develops and the placenta gradually takes over the function of making progesterone,
and it makes more and more and more as the pregnancy goes on.
So that in
the last three months of pregnancy instead of making 20 milligrams a day you're
making 400 milligrams a day. There's no other hormone in your body that
is made in such a prodigious amount. That's a ton of hormones, and it doesn't
hurt anybody. In fact, women are healthiest in their last three months of their
pregnancy. Think of that. So here's a hormone that's absolutely necessary for the embryo to survive,
from conception all the way up to time of birth. That period of time is
called gestation time. We all know that, gestation time. The hormone that
promotes that is pro-gestation hormone, progesterone. There's no mystery.
The problem is when people learn that role, they think they understand
progesterone. Instead, progesterone is involved all through the body, from
the nerves, to the brain cells, to the thyroid gland, fat metabolism, energy,
muscle building, just imagine all the things. It's during pregnancy that you can burn your body fat to help the baby grow. Estrogen helps you when you're not pregnant so that you turn food into
body fat; so that gives you survival benefit during times of famine. Women
will outlive men if they live in a society that has occasional famine.
Mother nature is very clever. But when you're pregnant you want to be able
to use that energy for the baby and that's the role of progesterone. There are so many roles. It causes hydration of proper water in the
skin. It protects the cell membranes so the cell membranes can keep sodium
out and allow potassium and magnesium to come into the cell. It maintains
the intercellular concentration of the GOOD minerals and keeps out the
sodium, otherwise if the sodium comes in then the water comes in and you get swelling. Did you know that on all these synthetic progesterone's... we've got
to be clear, there's a little synaptic problem that doctors have with this.
Progesterone, as you all know is the name of the hormone made by the corpus
luteum, the follicles that release the egg. The ovary makes progesterone.
What I did, oh, here it is - in my book, I put that molecule right there.
That is progesterone, nothing else is. When the companies want to give you some progesterone, something with
progesterone activity, they go back to the discovery that Dr. Russell Marker
made in 1938. He found that in plants there are fats and oils called saponines,
where the word sap comes from.
These are fats and oils that plants make.
Now, the plants don't make cholesterol like humans do and other animals
do. But they make sterols that are very similar. Plants don't make real
progesterone. They make fats and oils that are very similar to this molecule.
In 1938, Dr. Russell E. Marker, down in middle America someplace, discovered
the steps of how to convert that saponine into real, honest-to-God natural
progesterone - called natural because it's natural for humans. It's that
molecule. It's able to be made. So these companies that want to sell you progesterone, the pharmaceutical
companies, they can't make any money selling that molecule because it cannot
be patented. That's a natural molecule, you cannot patent natural things.
They deliberately alter this molecule. They add different acetate groups
over here and a methyl group over there and they make something that mother
nature never made. But it may still have one or two of the effects of progesterone,
enough so it will convince the ovary that the other ovary's already ovulating.
They can use it then as a birth control pill. Anything that holds in the
bloody lining can be called a progesterone. It doesn't matter what it is.
They make them out of testosterone, they make them out of horse urine [Premarin],
they make them out of the real stuff. The companies have these huge farms
growing the wild yam in Mexico and they make this progesterone, then they
deliberately alter it into Provera and Megastrol. Now it no longer has
the full range of activity. Plus it's loaded with toxic side effects. That's
what they're selling people. They use this same hormone to make testosterone for males, they make
their estrogens out of this hormone, they can make all of the cortical
sterones, cortisol, the hydrocortisone, and all of these things can be made
out of this molecule just the way the body does. This is the "mother"
of all the other molecules. The body makes this out of cholesterol. The body uses this as a precursor
for all the other hormones. So, throughout the book I show how this happens.
You can't see this, but this is cholesterol, pregnelone and progesterone.
From progesterone you start making all the cortisone's and you end up making
all the estrogens, you make testosterone but without it you can't do that.
So it has a million different roles. That's why I call it 'the multiple
roles of a remarkable hormone.' So I think you get the idea that by my experience with these women,
intelligent women, telling me, teaching me, I have learned an awful lot
about progesterone. I feel an obligation to tell people what I've learned about progesterone.
In Part II of the tape, "What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause," Dr Lee talks about the xenoestrogens - the foreign estrogens - and petrochemical poisoning in our food, water and air. He explains that PMS is strictly estrogen dominance and points out the damage accelerated estrogen production can cause to a woman's body.
He talks about the high calorie intake and sedative work habits that cause high estrogen levels, and why women over 40 loose their shape due to estrogen imbalance. He explains why natural progesterone creams are 40-70% more effective than progesterone pills, and that many creams now on the market are completely ineffective, containing very little or no progesterone at all.
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