Hormones and Your Health

T.S. Wiley before the Special Committee on Aging in front of the United States Senate April 19, 2007

I prescribe to my patients a new method of hormone replacement therapy(HRT) called the Wiley Protocol for women to use as a more accurate form of replacement for lost endocrine function. The remedies available to women suffering from hormone deficiency are woefully inadequate. The commercial pharmaceutical offerings are either bio-identical and too low in dosage to have efficacy, or synthetic drugs, far too dangerous to take. Here in the United States, there are over 40 million women between the ages of 40 and 60.

Worldwide, about 25 million women enter menopause annually. It is estimated that by the year 2030, that number will increase to 47 million women per year. Since 1900, in the developed countries, the life expectancy of women has increase from age 47 to well over age 80, however, the average onset of menopause has remained at 50 as recorded for the last 150 years. That means, overall, women are living at least thirty years longer than they did at the turn of the century.

Our society has never felt the impact of the majority of women living 30 or more years in a hormone deficient state. It won’t be pretty. Right now, modern medicine keeps us propped up with antibiotics and surgery, thanks to blood transfusion and anesthesia. But just being alive does not assure “quality of life.” Without it, extended lifespan is far less than a gift. It’s estimated that eighty percent of women experience a variety of transiently debilitating symptoms in menopause and 30% of those are classified as severe.

About ten years before women ever have a hot flash or a migraine, we have odd, too-short menstrual periods, we’re up half of every night and we start to look old. And almost as soon as we start to look old, we start to feel old. Exhaustion coupled with plummeting sex hormones creates a life in tatters and a mind like Swiss cheese. Sex would be a memory, if we could remember anything. Our joints twinge and, worst of all, we can’t fall asleep or stay asleep. It is anecdotal common knowledge that older people wander around all night limping and bumping into things when they should be out like a light.

Given the evidence that these symptoms of menopause, which can begin for women as early as their late thirties, are the same as the daily challenges the elderly face -- that we become, in fact, “old” when our hormones start to plummet -- we can probably assume we’re going to be sick, too, if we aren’t already. Because it is, again, anecdotal common knowledge that old really equals sick in the preponderance of cases -- and sick and old in our culture means usually means cancer, diabetes, heart disease, glaucoma, depression, even Alzheimer’s, and since we’ve established that menopausal symptoms are the same symptoms “old” people experience, then, menopause must really equal sick, and since all those outcomes above of “sick” can be life-threatening, menopause, itself, must really be life-threatening.

If menopause might really equal cancer, diabetes, heart disease, glaucoma, depression, and Alzheimer’s, why is it, then, that in those ads for “menopause products”, and in the health advice from the North American Menopause Society (NAMS), the Women’s Health Intiative (WHI), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), no one ever mentions any of the life-threatening disabilities associated with hormonal decline and urges women to accurately replace those hormones that have gone missing?