Dr. Maupin on KMBC in Kansas City on Monday, May 9, in a story about the benefits of bioidentical hormone pellets.
Low testosterone in men causes a variety of poor health conditions.
Download the transcription of this podcast.
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Andropause, Bioidentical Hormones, Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), Medical Care, Pellets, Symptoms, Testosterone, Treatment No Comments
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Andropause, Anti-aging, Bioidentical Hormones, FDA Regulation, Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), Medical Care, Menopause, Pellets, Research, Symptoms, Testosterone, Treatment No Comments
Discussion of a CNN Health article that says anti-aging medicine is risky.
Download the transcription of this podcast.
In episode 62 of the BioBalance Healthcast we continue the discussion we started in the previous episode that reviewed an article titled “The risks of anti-aging medicine” that was published on the CNN Health website on Wednesday December 28, 2011.
The author states that anti-aging doctors are generally not as well trained as other medical specialist. I am an excellent example of the many anti-aging doctors who are well trained and qualified to offer these services that include advancements that make it possible for us to live longer lives. Anti-aging treatments—especially bioidentical pellet therapy that we offer her at BioBalance Health—let’s us enjoy better health and mobility for many years past the onset of menopause in women and andropause in men.
Dr. Thomas Pearl, quoted in the article, was referring to treating geriatric patients, which is not what I focus on. Instead, I normally start hormone therapy long before patients reach that age, and not when they too old for the therapy to make a difference. By offering this therapy, doctors can prevent many diseases that are secondary to hormone loss. Many diseases can be offset for 10-20 years with bioidentical hormone pellets.
HRT is a treatment for a syndrome, not symptoms, and often save money and time. Chelation therapy for heavy metal toxicity is not offered at BioBalance Health. Chelation has risks of renal and liver problems. There are alternative supplements to rid patient of heavy metals. Baby boomers have higher chance of heavy metal toxicity due to lead, mercury, and other harmful substances in food and the environment.
Compounding pharmacies used to be popular 70 years ago before drugs were made by pharmaceutical companies. Current compounding pharmacists have the ability to compound drugs prescribed by a physician. I supervise the use of compounding pharmacies for my patients. My estradiol and testosterone pellets are made at a compounding pharmacy that is reputable and trusted. If your physician writes a prescription for a drug and sends you to a compounding pharmacy, be certain he/she has a relationship with the pharmacy they use. The FDA does oversee compounding pharmacies.
The article sites information based on the Women’s Health Initiative study which since released has been discredited. Dr. Goldstein is using a bad argument, a bad study, bad information and miss-representing the use of bioidentical hormone therapy.
To wrap up our podcast, we discuss the term “the standard of care,” which means the least amount of medical treatment that is acceptable by a physician. It’s the lowest standard of care you can give and not get sued.
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Andropause, Bioidentical Hormones, Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), Pellets, Symptoms, Testosterone, Treatment No Comments
Are you a candidate for Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy?
(An excerpt from my upcoming book, “I’ll Have What She’s Having! Testosterone.”)
Women in their 40s and 50s experience drastic changes in hormonal function that can result in a precipitous loss of physical, mental and emotional health. This is not ‘all in your head’ (as many of us have been told); it is a fact, and it has not been adequately addressed by the medical establishment, which is happens to be disproportionately male. I’m here to tell you that after years of severely incapacitating hormonal imbalance, I’m back! I have regained my health and life, and so can you—through a new and superior form of hormone replacement, bioidentical estradiol and testosterone pellets inserted under the skin.
I’m an Obstetrician/Gynecologist in practice for 25 years. I’ve written this book for all women who have experienced the drastic and debilitating effects of hormonal imbalance related to menopause, but have not received help through conventional treatments. I was one of those women.For 25 years I considered it my calling to take care of my patients in private practice, dispensing preventative care, delivering babies and operating on patients in need of my surgical expertise. At the age of 40, however, the symptoms of hormonal imbalance began to drastically affect my health and my ability to continue my life’s work. My personality and energy seemed to have drained away. I lost the ability to enjoy deep, restful sleep. I developed insomnia, which led to impaired stamina, chronic fatigue and difficulty thinking clearly—something that is crucial to my ability to care for my patients.
I had been listening for years to my patients’ similar complaints as they approached menopause and asked, ‘What is wrong with me!?’ Until a few years ago I did not know the answer, and had to tell them so. Now I was asking the same question, and in my need for answers I sought medical care from doctors I respect. They told me I was ‘old’ at 47. I tried conventional hormone treatment without success, and continued to struggle.
My lowest point came after a hysterectomy and the loss of my ovaries. I no longer recognized myself when I looked in the mirror. I felt depressed, hopeless and helpless. It took all my strength to fulfill my responsibilities as a physician, and my role as wife and mother. In short, I was losing my professional and personal identity. I continued to research the problem of hormonal imbalance and concluded that conventional medicine had failed to comprehensively tackle this issue so crucial to women. Finally, I was forced to face the devastating possibility that I would have to reduce my commitments or perhaps resign my practice altogether.
It was with this somber awareness that I was at the hospital one day preparing for a patient’s delivery, when help came to me, in the form of a labor and delivery nurse who knew of my interest in hormone therapies. She asked if I would be open to a new form of hormone treatment. Her brother was an Ob-Gyn in California and wanted to train a doctor in St. Louis to provide perimenopausal and menopausal women with a better treatment. I was headed into a C-section, but I could not stop thinking about this. I soon contacted the nurses brother, and our association began. He became my mentor, not only teaching me how to treat women in distress, but also treating me. I was feeling like my old self just 24 hours after the insertion of natural bio-identical estradiol and testosterone pellets!
This doctor trained me to do what he was doing and I have now embraced a new calling—helping other women become whole again through the use of this superior form of hormone replacement. This has led me to form a new practice, which I call BioBalance Health, and is why I’ve written this book—so as to reach many more women than I could hope to treat solely through my practice in St. Louis.
The ‘secret ingredient’ in this therapy is testosterone, which is not normally included in traditional hormone replacement. The male-dominated medical profession and the FDA have resisted the use of testosterone for women because of antiquated ideas about female sexuality. Money is another factor standing in the way of this treatment being widely offered to women, because of the method of delivery (subcutaneous pellets). Patented synthetic testosterones are taken orally and have severe side effects. However, if a hormone replacement cannot be patented, it is not profitable and money is not provided for research. The pellets I use in my treatment contain natural hormones which cannot be patented; therefore, no drug company will be able to make money from the production of this form of hormone replacement. It is not a great surprise, then, that the FDA, which is constantly under pressure from pharmaceutical companies to make decisions that are financially advantageous to them, has not approved this type of hormone therapy for women (whereas it is approved for men!).
Mainstream medicine has not addressed hormone imbalance until relatively recently, as female doctors have finally entered the field of gynecology. Business and medicine are still mostly run by men, and the vast majority of the teaching physicians who have trained the present generation of doctors are men who believe our symptoms are in our heads. Companies owned and run by men spend research dollars on their own diseases, which is why business does not presently pay for this treatment through insurance or the research of bio-identical hormones – it does not obviously benefit men, as erectile dysfunction drugs do. However, I believe men would advocate the use of funds to research bio-identical hormones if they realized how much pain, money and sexual frustration it would save them by helping their wives become healthy.
My goal in writing this book is to provide you with the knowledge you need to make an informed decision about hormone replacement, a decision that is of vital consequence to every woman’s health in our later years. We’ll start out with a basic overview of our hormonal system and the changes that naturally accompany aging, followed by a discussion of the symptoms of hormonal imbalance. Next we will look at the history of hormone replacement therapy (including the controversial findings of the 2002 study that frightened so many women into stopping hormone replacement) and talk about the crucial differences between bio-identical pellets and traditional forms of HRT.
We’ll then revisit the symptoms of hormonal imbalance to discuss the range of results that can be expected using the various treatment options available. This will help you determine if hormone replacement with bio-identical estradiol and testosterone pellets is a treatment you might benefit from and would like to look into further. I’ll walk you through the simple procedure for this treatment, and we will frankly discuss the risks involved and look at certain diagnoses that might be improved with, or, that contraindicate hormone replacement.
We’ve provided an FAQ and glossary of terms, as well as a virtual consultation form like the one used by my patients, which you can fill out and take to your own physician, or mail to our offices at BioBalance Health in St. Louis.
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Affects of imbalanced hormones can go beyond the physical.
Download the transcription of this podcast.My new patients often tell me they think they’re crazy as they describe how they feel and their symptoms of aging.
In episode 27 of the BioBalance Health Podcast relationship therapist Brett Newcomb and I talk about how our patients can think they’re crazy because of how they feel and what they might hear from their physicians, friends and family members. There’s usually something gunuinely wrong with these patients—physiological changes caused by hormone imbalance. We discuss these menopausal and andropausal changes and how they can be treated with bioidentical hormone pellet therapy sometimes counseling.
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Andropause, Bioidentical Hormones, Estradiol, Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), Menopause, Pellets, Symptoms, Testosterone, Thyroid, Treatment No Comments
Treatment for symptoms of menopause: bioidentical hormone pellets.
On February 15, I was guest for the second time on the Dave Glover Show on FM Newstalk 97.1. The first time I appeared on the show, March of last year, we discussed men and the symptoms of aging they experience due to hormone imbalance and how the symptoms can be treated with bioidentical testosterone pellets. This time, our discussion centered around menopause, the symptoms women experience during that period of life, and why bioidentical hormone therapy with all-natural pellets is the best way to treat many symptoms associated with aging.At the onset of menopause, women sense the physical changes in their body and the change in the way they feel. Often times, their husbands notice the changes as well. As hormone levels drop, women loose their sex drive, they start feeling fatigue, and gain weight, especially in the belly.
Mainstream medicine hasn’t yet fully realized the answer, but at BioBalance Health, we have and administer the solution for many of the symptoms of menopause—bioidentical hormone replacement.
Within several weeks of pellet insertion sex drive comes back, we get our waistline back; we’re counteracting the first step in again, which is a lack of testosterone. Women lose testosterone and progesterone, then estrogen, estradiol, the young women’s estrogen. Menopause is forever but we don’t have to live with its affects.
At BioBalance Health, we replace what’s missing; testosterone, progesterone, and during menopause, we replace the estradiol in a non-oral form. Hormones taken orally get changed into something else that’s not good for you. In non-oral (pellets) they don’t get broken down, staying in their purest form.
I was ask to describe the insertion process. Insertion is virtually painless. The pellets serve as a reservoir, providing the hormones over the next three to four months for women, and around six months for men.
A caller asked about the negative side-effects. Testosterone has no cancer risks, a little facial hair but that can be treated. And considering the overall benefits, a little facial hair is no big deal. Estradiol taken orally offers risk of breast cancer, but as long as it is taken under the skin, there is no added danger of cancer.
The process of treatment starts with a blood test, a check of the levels of estradiol, estrone, thyroid, and metabolic profile and CBC, to rule out other problems.
ellets are compounded by a pharmacy. I calculate the correct dosage and then cut the pellets for proper dosage before insertion.
Another caller described his wife is crazy, with ups and downs, and she is driving him nuts and she won’t see a doctor. The conditions that cause this won’t likely go away, but most women who don’t get treated get used to it and get less upset about their unbalance condition.
How much sex drive comes back? Using results of the blood labs, I attempt to return the patients hormone balance and libido to the what they may have had at age 25.
A caller stated that wife was diagnosed with Graves Disease (hyperthyroidism), her thyroid was destroyed and three months later had a hysterectomy. I’ve found that women without uterus are great candidates for bioidentical hormone replacemet, and they are the most grateful patients because their comeback is so drastic.
We replace thyroid to the normal level. If thyroid is low, and body temperature is not 98 or above, the body’s enzyme system doesn’t function.
Who would not be a candidate? Based on the lab results, if the indications don’t show hormone deficiencies, I won’t treat with testosterone.
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Andropause, Bioidentical Hormones, Botanical Skin Care, Menopause, Pellets, Symptoms, Testosterone, Treatment No Comments
After we balance your hormones, we treat your skin; You’ll look as good as you feel!
Download the transcription of this podcast.In episode 24 of the BioBalance Health Podcast Brett Newcomb and I present an overview of the reverse-aging services offered at BioBalance Health.
Soon after I discovered and found success with bioidentical hormone pellets for treatment of symptoms of aging, I began to offer additional treatments that contribute to the reverse-aging process. I use a detailed process to find the most natural and highest quality vitamin supplements including DIM, B12 and Vemma—a liquid general vitamin that improves the immune system and decreases cardiac CRP and blood sugar.
At BioBalance Health, we also focus on weight loss and lifestyle changes that solve a range of our patient’s health problems.
Skin care is another service we offer at BioBalance Health. I have developed my own line of botanical skin care products which assists in making patients look as good as they feel.
Laser and atheistic services are available at our St. Louis office. With three laser specialist and an esthetician on staff, patients can get treatment including removal of hair, brown spots and wrinkles, and reduction of stretch marks and scars.
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Andropause, Bioidentical Hormones, Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), Menopause, Pellets, Sexuality, Symptoms, Treatment No CommentsAs a medical doctor I treat men and women in the area of hormone replacement. I spend my day consulting with patients who have lost their sexual desire. In most cases, the loss of libido is a chemical issue; a direct result of the amount of testosterone the body produces. In men, testosterone is produced in the testes, and in women, the ovaries. Our bodies respond to the loss of testosterone with an increasing waist line, poor sleep, loss of muscles, lack of motivation, increase in depression and anxiety.
For women, a decrease in testosterone, occurring up to 10 years before menopause, usually leads to a loss of libido. This is demonstrated through our thoughts, our need to be touched, and in our sudden lack of interest in conversations about sex and in sex itself. In women, the decrease in testosterone usually begins around the age of 40. For men, testosterone levels begin decreasing at the average age of 45. This decrease is referred to as andropause. It is accompanied by the loss of mental clarity, loss of exercise stamina, an increase in abdominal fat, poor sleep and anxiety. Furthermore, it can include a loss in morning erection, decrease in the quality of erection, and a change in the length of time one is able to sustain an erection.
I treat men and women ranging in ages 40-70 who are happily restored to their youthful libido with the addition of bioidentical hormone therapy. These treatments involve inserting rice-sized pellets into the hip every 4-6 months. There are almost no side effects and they greatly improve quality of life and relationships. Before seeking a medical doctor, I encourage you to try regular aerobics, losing weight, and taking the supplement DIM (di-indolemethane; causes a decrease in estrone which is the hormone that binds up and inactivates testosterone).
If you are interested in testosterone pellet therapy, please visit the website for my practice, BioBalance Health, at www.biobalancehealth.com to learn more about treatments. We treat patients from all over the world and I would love to help you.
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Andropause, Bioidentical Hormones, Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), Menopause, Pellets, Sexuality, Symptoms, Treatment No Comments
Download the transcription of this podcast.Hi, I’m Dr. Kathy Maupin. I’m the medical director and founder of BioBalance 4 Women, BioBalance 4 Men and BioBalance Health. I’d like to introduce you to Brett Newcomb. He and I are going to talk on this podcast about aging, menopause and andropause, and that has to do with the hormones that are in our body and leave as we age, and the effects that has on us and our sex lives and our social lives.
Brett Newcomb: I’m really anxious today to hear about the science of this. Most of what I think I know about these things is anecdotal and it comes from the stories my clients tell me or it comes from my own experiences as I have aged, in trying to figure out what is natural, what is normal? Is this a result of bad choices on my part? Am I eating too much sugar or do I need to exercise more? Is it a culturally defined thing? For instance, the physiological mechanisms for food taste are going to be the same, but culturally, we interpret stimuli differently. So a child that is punished by having to drink hot sauce is going to be devastated, is going to be burned and it’s going to be hot. He isn’t going to like spicy foods. But the child who is raised in a family that teaches these are really good things, “Here try this Tabasco sauce or eat this hot pepper and you really like it, here’s hot chocolate or hot coffee, this is enjoyable,” as opposed to “this is punishment.” If I told my child, “If you misbehave, I’ll put boiling water in your mouth,” physiologically it’s the same process, interpretively, it’s different. So we have to define the reality of what we experience. So what I want to hear from you today is the science of all this. You know it and I don’t.
KM: You always give me a whole new task the minute you start talking. I was going to just talk about how the patients that come to me are unhappy about aging, and they’ve heard that I can fix it. That’s the simplistic culmination of what I do. I look at a patient and they want to have their hormones back, they want to be young again, they want to have sexual thoughts and feelings again, they want their marriage to work.
BN: And that is the buzz in town. In the last two months I’ve heard your name come up in three or four different remote unconnected places where men and women are talking about what they’ve heard about what you can do. So the word is spreading.
KM: That’s good. Because everyone else, the status quo is, you’re old, suck it up and get used to it, you got 50 years to be old. When they told me that, and I’m a physician and I know a lot about hormones and nothing I knew before that worked. And when they said you’re lazy, fat and crazy, I said my psychologist said that I’m not crazy, and, yeah, maybe I’m fat and I become lazy because I feel terrible, but that’s not me. I want me back. And getting me back is what I found out. I discovered how to do that and that was through finding out about every hormone that was missing and replacing it in the most natural way, on-oral way, and a way that is under the skin, pellet therapy, that’s what I do.
BN: Talk about what non-oral means.
KM: When we take pills to replace a hormone, hormones go through our liver on the first pass, first through your stomach through your liver and it’s changed before it ever gets to your body. Many of the side-effects that we have when we take the hormone orally or many of the problems with just having it be effective has to do with it being broken down first into components that are not helpful to us and sometimes hurt us.
BN: So it metabolizes differently or less effectively if you take it orally. But if you take it as a pill or sub lingually under the tongue…
KM: Sub-lingually is better than a pill because it goes directly into the bloodstream, however when it goes through the mucosa of your mouth into your bloodstream, it changes a little. So that change makes it less like the hormone you used to make. We also give them vaginally or transdermally, like on the skin. Those two are better than oral because they don’t go directly through the liver.
BN: But all of those metabolic absorption processes change the hormone in some dimension. And they are less effective than what we desire, even it it’s a natural hormone. So what about what you do that’s different from those things?
KM: I have the benefit of trying all of that because I used all of those things to help patients for the last 25 years. Since I started practice I knew a lot about that because I had a relationship with the pharmacist that helped me figure out people I couldn’t figure out with the traditional method. So I used all these other things on patients. Some worked some didn’t. And I found a lot of research on them. And I thought that that was as good as it got, but when none of those worked on me, nothing made me feel normal again, nothing brought me back to health again until I found bioidentical hormone pellets, which are placed under the skin in the fat of the hip or the love handle for men. For me it was in the hip were all women have a little fat. It dissolves directly into the fat, into the blood system, and it is not changed at all. It is just like your ovary or testicle made it. It goes directly into your body and does what it’s supposed to do, crosses the blood brain barrier, and stops migraines. I had terrible migraines that started before that at 40 and ended when I had the pellets. So all of these things, got better because I got my hormones back in the most natural way. And that’s what bioidentical hormones do and that’s what I do.
BN: So the pellets create an absorption ratio that endures over a period of months. It’s not like taking the pill or using the salve and for the next 10 or 15 minutes you’ll have the benefit of it and then it’s gone again.
KM: Whenever you’re given any kind of medication and told to take it, every six hours, that means half of its gone in six hours and you have to repeat it. My pellets are given every four months on the average to women, and every six months on the average to men, so you have the same dose every day. And it doesn’t go up and down every day and it doesn’t go up and down every 4 to 6 hours
BN: So your patient doesn’t ride the hormone storms anymore.
KM: Right. You don’t need to have the ups and downs after they’re done procreating. After they’re done with pregnancies. All that up and down that made us crazy or PMS, we don’t need that now because after menopause, after were done having children, we don’t require that. That was only meant for having children. We do better, just like man, having the same level of hormones every day.
Rick: This isn’t about fertility enhancement. This isn’t about helping you have children. This is about normalizing and stabilizing your physiology for a generation or more beyond what your body history would have allowed.
KM: That’s correct. I have in the past taken care of infertility with natural hormones. This is different. This has to be when you’re done with your fertility, and in general when your fertility goes away that’s the same time as women are testosterone, our growth hormone and estradiol starts going away.
BN: In last week’s conversation about anthropology and about the aging process, and how our society lets us live longer than what generations and generations have expected. So now we have to make these adaptations that you’re talking about that we no longer have to be focused on the issue of fertility and procreation. Now it can be about stabilizing your sense of self, your sense of completeness, your sense of being a sexual being, an attractive being, of being able to have libido or lust as being a part of your identity that isn’t just limited to the stage or age of procreation.
KM: That’s right. We are mammals. We are mammals as a group. Humans are very specialized mammals. I don’t ascribe to the fact that we became human beings. We’ve always been human beings. But we have the same rules as other mammals. Mammals don’t live beyond their reproductive lives. We were meant as mammals are, to fill the earth with people, they’re meant to fill the earth with other mammals. That’s what we were made for. We were made to stop our lives when reproduction stopped, but we’ve become so brilliant, we’ve decreased the rate of heart disease, we’ve stopped having half of the women on the earth die of childbirth. Most women died of childbirth. If you go back in your family tree, men had all these different wives because women died in childbirth. Men got another wife, and had more children.
BN: That’s that adaptive process. In very primitive societies everyone is occupied by the demands of food gathering and security. And the more complex the society becomes, the more people begin to peel away from directly producing food. And so you get the development of the priestly class, the development of artisans and artists, who earn their living and acquire their food by acquiring and producing nonfood items. So we adapt over time and part of the adaptation that you represent is the adaptation that comes from scientific growth and knowledge. Susan Berman talks about neurotransmitters and testosterone having a role in the way neurotransmitters function. All this in the brain begins with or it hinges off of testosterone. So if we stop generating testosterone, according to the normal physiological curve, then we are going to have brain changes that then affect the rest of our body, the rest of our system, the aging domain. So if we can fix that, by safe and healthy acquisition of bio identical hormones, then we can’t interrupt that decay or decline process.
KM: People who have peaked at 40 in their knowledge and their creativity can continue to be creative and productive until they’re 90 if they have the hormones back that let their brains work. Right now, half of us end up in nursing homes with dementia because we don’t have any hormones. If a female takes estrogen and testosterone, she delays any dementia or Alzheimer’s by 20 years. If she just takes estrogen, she delays it by 10 years. If she just takes testosterone she delays it by 10 years. If men take it, 10 to 20 years, by getting their testosterone back. This is then causing everyone to have a more full life and we can then be functional and we can actually, instead of just dying after we’ve been somewhat functional and contributory, we can contribute to society longer.
BN: Yes, and we can be creative longer.
KM: The women come in and say, “I can’t do anything.” They are in survival mode. They’re depressed. They’ve gained weight, they don’t feel like going out, they don’t feel like going out and doing anything, they don’t want to have sex, their marriages are on the rocks, and they want themselves back. Well, imagine living like that for 50 more years. Medicine can keep you alive 50 more years, but you’re going to be alive with half a brain, unpredicted and miserable. My goal is to a go upstream and find out what is the first thing that changed. And the first thing that changed was testosterone. When the testosterone goes down, your neurotransmitters decrease and that begins the cascade of aging. It’s like a domino effect. The dominoes start falling and they don’t stop. So by replacing testosterone we stop the dominoes from falling. Now, there are other changes that take place. If we replace testosterone to 70 and someone’s deficit was at 40, we replace it at 70. Even though testosterone increases growth hormones, it stops doing it enough. We have to then add growth hormones or some other hormones that are not being stimulated enough by the testosterone to keep people productive and healthy and happy. I don’t know if this is going to add one second to someone’s life, but I can promise you that it will add to the quality of their life.
BN: What I like about what you do, again anecdotally, there are always anomalies there are always free radicals, there are people who are 99 years old and creative artists. We look at them and say isn’t that normal. And say I’m abnormal, what’s wrong with me. What you do is run lab tests and you can determine what the counts and amounts are and you can begin to adjust some of those things. People can see if it works for them, if they feel better or not in a matter of two or three weeks.
KM: And then we do another lab test, and I found out what is different about this person, because we all have genetic problems, enzyme problems, thyroid for example. Thyroid runs the heat of your body. Thyroid is so important.
BN: That’s going to be in the next conversation. We’re going to talk about thyroid and the role that it plays in all of this and how it complicates what you do and what people experience.
KM: One of the biggest things I run into is with testosterone, for both men and women is, in general, regular doctors who are not trained in this—you have to beg for the training, you have to look for it. You don’t just go to residency and get this, because this is ahead 20 years. We are in front of what normal doctors are doing by 20 years, because they’re just looking to fix the symptom. That’s how I was train, that’s how we were trained to treat the symptom not the person. And that in itself is defective in terms of thinking for a physician. We have to fix the whole person for the person to feel well. However, what happens is there’s a ton of research on testosterone in both men and women. It is in the endocrine journals, in the anti-aging journals, many journals you wouldn’t expect. Ophthalmology, dry eyes, testosterone treats dry eyes. In the neurology journals, testosterone treats migraines after 40. They’re in all these different journals. The statement that is classically brought back to me by a patient from her internist or from her family doctor or her specialist is, “There’s no research.” Well I have stacks of research and it’s all by medical journals it’s just not the medical journals these people read. So this is well researched. The researchers out there and accessible.
BN: The research is out there, and the people who have questions, you can steer them to the research.
KM: I have bibliographies, I send them to doctors with abstracts. I’m certain they don’t read them. Because they don’t come back with a different answer. It’s not their specialty.
BN: They’re busy plugging leaks in the dike, and they’re trying to work from a different angle of approach to solve the same problems you’re trying to solve.
KM: And I need them to work from that perspective. I’m working from prevention, but that doesn’t mean nothings going to get you. Something may still happen because of the world we live in. There’s a doctor named Lobo who used to be out of Atlanta, the University of Georgia. Now he’s at Columbia University. He used to write tons about testosterone in men and women. He used to replace testosterone with pellets. He was my hero because he came out in the OB/GYN literature. He had a series of six articles back in 2006 that said hormones and sexuality should be treated with testosterone and it’s safe. Then he went to Columbia in New York, not one more article on testosterone. So it’s not that he’d doesn’t believe in it, I’m certain of that. His articles were well researched and he saw, his website had great testimonies of his patients. However I just think that Columbia is mainstream. It doesn’t want to be that far ahead. Now that’s my supposition, I love this guy. Seriously, he’s my hero because he did research in my own specialty, in OB/GYN. An OB/GYN’s are kind of the gods of hormones, because we do infertility. We understand both male and female infertility. We’re the specialty that takes care of that and that’s his specialty. He’s in reproductive endocrinologist. We get this part it’s just that they don’t carry it through to the menopause replacement kind of thing. They’re all afraid of giving hormones.
BN: And because culturally all the red flags about hormones and replacement are out there as part of the conventional wisdom.
KM: However it’s not.
BN: Conventional wisdom is often neither conventional nor wise. Unfortunately that’s true.
KM: You have to read the studies, like the WHI study was wrong, I mean it was done poorly. It was a bad study. It said that HRT causes breast cancer, when in fact it was Provera that a progestin that causes breast cancer, not the estrogen portion.
BN: And those are the questions that people have. This is the place where we want to invite people again, when they listen to these podcasts and it stimulates the question, some area they have questions about, they can contact us and we will respond to those. How can they do that?
KM: Go to my website which is biobalancehealth.com, and you can also go to back to the podcast, or to the contact page and send us an e-mail or call us. Sometimes we respond on the blog. Or we respond to the e-mails. Those are ways you can contact us. Also on my website, you’ll find the bibliography on it so that all the articles I have have been able to put in the biblical biography, there are new articles that come out every day in the journals.
BN: If they want to satisfy their questions with generic research they can get that off the website. If they have a particular question for you or for us, they can contact you on your website.
KM: We welcome that, we love to talk about that. I would love to go over the different studies that prove that what we’re doing is right. But I don’t really need that proof, I see it every day when people walk into my office and say, “you saved my life,” “you save my marriage,” “you saved me,” “I’m back.”
BN: That brings us full circle. Now were talking about both the anecdotal reportage and the science which is causing the work you do to become more normal and more widespread. People are talking about it and what you accomplish.
KM: That’s why I’m writing a new book. There are many books out there about hormones but there is no book about the best hormone replacement which is the pellet therapy. That is the best way to get your hormones back.
BN: coming to bookstores near you.
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Andropause, Bioidentical Hormones, Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), Menopause, Pellets, Symptoms, Treatment 4 Comments
Download the transcription of this podcast.Dr. Kathy Maupin: Today, Brett Newcomb and I will discuss bioidentical hormones, differences between them and why I prefer biobalance pellets.
Brett Newcomb: I’m a visual thinker, and it’s sort of like the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning styles. As I understand it, traditional medical protocol is I get sick, I go to the doctor, they identify my symptoms and they try to backtrack to what went wrong and patch it or fix it. And where medicine seems to be going today—at least in my conversations with you the medicine that you practice seems to be moving towards a more holistic or preventative understanding of illness and particularly referencing your speciality which is the aging process. So one of the things you’re trying to do is to look at how do we avoid symptom chasing and how do we set up protocols that look at the whole of the person and do the best job that we can do to keep them as recognizably and healthfully them as opposed to deteriorating shadows of themselves. In our conversations about that what you’ve talked about is a cascade of events of deterioration that seems to begin with changes in sex hormones. You had mentioned to me four of five cascading event sequences that began with that. And before we talk about delivery mechanisms for hormone replacement, maybe we should talk about why that is treatment that you use and why that’s a goal you have. Could you speak to those cascading events?
KM: The aging process starts at a different time depending on your life and your genetics, but in general the average time is sometime after 40. That is when the sex hormones decrease. Testosterone goes first in women and then estrogen. In men, testosterone is their main hormone, that’s the hormone that starts decreasing at 40. For men, the magic number is 400 total testosterone is when you get symptomatic, they don’t feel well, they gain belly fat, they lose their sexual prowess.
BN: Do they get moody and pathetic?
KM: Yes, they get kind of moody, kind of girl-like. But it’s not just the total testosterone for men, it’s a free testosterone—free doesn’t mean it doesn’t cost anything, it means that it’s free of binding—it’s not bound to a protein. The way we store testosterone in the body is to have it bound to a protein which inactivates the testosterone. The protein blocks the testosterone from attaching to receptor sites. So when the protein is released from the testosterone, that’s free testosterone. Then it’s open to work.
So we look at free testosterone as a more crucial element and that should be over 129. That’s our magic number for when most people are functional.
BN: So you can do a blood test and get a result back that tells you what the basic testosterone count is and what percentage of those are free testosterone. So when you evaluate a male patient, your are looking at what those ratios are in terms of general well being, positive energy, sense of self, those kinds of things. And you have data points that are visible and predictable.
KM: Yes I do.
BN: So then treatment would involve finding a delivery system that would restore those data points to not some idealized standard, but to whatever level is required by that individual to feel rejuvenated as themselves. Is that the goal?
KM: That’s the goal. One of the problems with that goal is that we don’t have a total and a free testosterone from when they were 30 or 29 when they felt very good.
BN: So it’s going to have to be experiential, they’re going to have to feel it and be able to articulate to you, “wow, I had this surge but it didn’t last,” or “I’m feeling consistently better, and more hopeful and energized and so on.”
KM: It’s the art and the science of it. The science is I need to get men over 400 and over 129, but some men used to be at 800 and at 250.
BN: And that wouldn’t be good for everybody. You want to try to replicate what was my system.
KM: The way I do that is by talking to my male patients, asking them compared to others did they have a high sex drive, did they have a frequency of intercourse when they were first married, what was that like? And I’m trying to…
BN: I get that question all they time when couples come to see me, “What’s normal?” Is once a week normal? Is 5 times a day normal? Is 50 times a month normal?
KM: I’m not sure there is a normal.
BN: And they get really frustrated with me when I give that answer. What’s normal for you in terms of your desire curve and what your history has been, and in terms of what’s palatable in your relationship with your partner because of overlapping compromises. Almost always there’s an imbalance in couples. Couples find tolerance zones that make for harmony in their relationship.
KM: So maybe I should ask, “How many times do you want to haver sex, not how many times did you have sex?” Not how many times were you successful. But I’m looking for that and also exercise levels, how often someone exercises because that tells me something about their general need for testosterone.
That’s in the men. I also look at their lab. When I look at their pre-lab, I treat them, I’m trying to get to these goals for the testosterone. I also do post-lab to see if their cholesterol got better. Generally, when their testosterone is low, their cholesterol is high. I look at how their white cell count has improved because with low testosterone we have poor immunity. So their white cell count drops, I look at it and it usually comes back to normal when they have enough testosterone. So I’m looking for normalization of every other..
BN: What about the lipids?
KM: That’s the cholesterol. Not triglycerides. That has to do with their diet. If they have a diet high in alcohol or carbohydrates triglycerides could be high even without testosterone.
BN: So it may not be as effective in counteracting adult onset diabetes?
KM: It is somewhat. Some of the studies that have come out in the last year show it does improve insulin resistance, but it doesn’t improve your diet. I can’t help that.
BN: So if I’m slamming down alcohol that’s high in sugar content…
KM: That’s not my job to follow you around and tell you not to drink. It’s my patients responsibility to do their part.
BN: The post lab results will give you data points that measure all of those factors which then go to the holistic concept of global improvement in quality of life and quality of health.
KM: It’s not just about sex. Are they thinking clearer. Men tend to get anxiety attacks when their testosterone drops. When women get a hot flash, men get anxiety attacks; those floods from the pituitary gland that’s trying to make more testosterone.
BN: It’s like the warning alarm is going of—the pituitary is sending it out—we get anxiety because it’s not finding the free testosterone it uses in the appropriate way.
KM: There feedback system between the testicles and the pituitary. It shuts it down.
BN: Do you get the same kind of data points when you do blood tests on women?
KM: I’m measuring testosterone and estrogen. Progesterone is something that I don’t usually measure. If someone has PMS, I treat them with natural progesterone, but if they’re menopausal and they don’t have a uterus, I don’t need to use progesterone. It doesn’t contribute in my patients to their well-being. With pellets, their outcomes are generally so good that I don’t have to use progesterone unless the patient has a uterus—I’m just protecting that uterus from bleeding.
Women loose their testosterone first, usually forty to forty-five.
BN: In terms of symptoms of change, what does that look like? A women who has lost her naturally-generated testosterone, how she experience herself? Would there be no desire for sex, would there be moodiness, high cholesterol, what would you look for?
KM: You hit most of them. Usually it’s moody, lack of desire, but also lack of fantasies. Orgasms got much less intense or they disappear. Generally there’s just not this sexual feeling. They feel like they’re not sexual at all anymore.
BN: So the disposition to arousal or arouse-ability declines and that makes it harder to get aroused and harder to be responsive because the lights are on but nobody is home.
KM: Right. The neurotransmitters for that area of the brain are just not there, most sexual desire and response are in the brain.
BN: From what women tell you, is that a sudden change that they notice or is one of those gradual declines where it fades away and they would say that’s a normal part of the aging process, I’m going through menopause and I’m getting older?
KM: It’s slow, you almost don’t… I had that when my ovaries were out. I didn’t even notice. I didn’t know exactly why I didn’t care if my husband was home or not, like “Uh, what’s he still doing here?” Really, and I have a lot of people saying that, “You know, I can do this by myself.” And they feel like they don’t need their spouse of this hormone being low.
BN: It’s sort of an adaptive acceptance of their reality without awareness that it happened because of a change or a loss that could be remediated.
KM: They just think they got old. But they don’t know it could be fixed and most doctors don’t encourage them to have that fixed. They would encourage a man to take Cialis, but wouldn’t encourage a woman to get her sex drive back for some reason.
Usually it’s a slow change and that’s where I say that’s kind of like that change God gave us that we say “no” to sex after 40 because we’re not very fertile and our eggs are old, we might have abnormal babies, and we’re not going to live long enough with that 50-year lifespan. That was a long life up until the last 200 years, so you shouldn’t have babies if you’re not going to be able to take care of them. God’s protecting us from having babies because we don’t have a sex drive. It also releases the male to go find another female.
BN: I love that description because it’s such a rational explanation that’s assigned to interpret a sequence of physical events. I always say that man is not a rational animal—he’s a rationalizing animal. I think that’s what people do. That description you give is one that I hear in therapy as well. What you and the holistic anti-aging medical community are beginning to suggest is that you now have the data and a measurable way to say physiology has changed and it can be repaired so that this doesn’t have to be the natural sequence of events and we don’t have to settle for this. We don’t have to come up with rationalizations that help us accept change in reality. We can fight back. And we can fight back by getting bioidentical hormone replacement treatments That have an effective delivery system.
That brings us to what are the delivery systems and why are some effective and some are not or what is the effectiveness of one against the other?
KM: Let’s go back to the tents. The center of the population was in the middle-east and most men would be gone if there was no sex drive or if they were turned down enough. So they leave the tent. The next step is progesterone which makes us have PMS. Not only do we not have a sex drive, we are crabby all the time. Only the hangers-on are going to stick with it and are still there when we hit menopause which is even worse—we just get exhausted and don’t feel like doing anything. So who process shows a progression of how we go through the 40s and 50s, how I rationalize why people get divorced in their 40s, why that mid-life crisis happens. But men are also beginning in their late 40s to loose their testosterone and we get into a whole other stage.
Going back to why I use bioidentical hormones… I practiced OBGYN for over 25 years in private practice. Most hormone replacements that were oral just didn’t work. Even when we didn’t have anything else, most women would take Premarin or whatever we had then—Estrace—but it just didn’t work. They didn’t feel better because they didn’t get testosterone.
BN: So that’s because in the oral delivery mechanism the hormone had to be bound to some base that could deliver it; kind of like most aspirin is sugar.
KM: There’s a first pass effect. Any hormone that’s oral goes through your stomach, goes into your liver before it goes to the rest of your body. When it gets to the liver it’s broken down into things that aren’t just estrogen, but things you don’t want like estrone—which is old lady estrogen that gives us belly-fat, long boobs, not pretty breasts, but old. It also makes our mind kind of foggy. We still get some estradiol which does help our brains, so it offsets one-another. Just by going through the liver and being changed into these other things, we have tons of side-effects, and we get a little bit of benefit, but it doesn’t bring us back to who we were, and we don’t get testosterone.
BN: So the oral delivery causes it not to stay together in it’s optimal form to maximum benefit. It causes it to break down into all its various subsets, some of which are negative. So we get plusses an minuses. So other than oral, what are the delivery mechanisms?
KM: Then we developed vaginal creams, which just helped the vagina, they really didn’t get absorbed into the body. That was the next enhancement. That was more of a lubrication. Then when bioidenticals came on the scene, we were just about getting to normal patches that have estradiol in them but is not truly bioidentical. We were also getting pure estradiol creams that go on your arm, a transdermal patches or creams.
These are better than the oral—they don’t get changed into so many different substances that are negative. They get changed into estrone a lot more readily than the pellets.
BN: That’s a better, more complete absorption without the adverse breakdowns.
KM: But it has some. You also have to use the creams more than once daily—you have to remember to do it.
BN: Is there another option?
KM: The other bioidenticals are sublingual, you can use sublingual tablets that have estrogen or progesterone in them, but testosterone is not absorbed sublingually. My blood tests show that it just doesn’t go through the mucosa of the mouth. Sublingual, you put it under your tongue, and that has to be dosed once or twice a day. It does get changed somewhat. It’s not pure estrogen or pure progesterone when it hits your bloodstream but it’s better than transdermals.
BN: All of the three that you talked about so far are modified as an artifact of absorption into the body. And the forth method, the one you haven’t gotten to…
KM: The forth method are hormone pellets placed under the skin—subdermal placement and that’s what I do because it’s the best way to receive hormones.
BN: They don’t have the absorption process deterioration or modification the other systems have.
KM: It is immediately absorbed into the bloodstream in the fat. The blood picks it up as you need it and it goes directly into the blood and to the target tissues. It crosses the blood-brain barrier very easily, which some of the others don’t, so it helps migraines and makes your sex drive come back if you’re using testosterone. It makes your feminine figure come back without making estrone—the old lady estrogen. It doesn’t have that conversion that other have and it’s also absorbed more purely.
BN: What about an intra-muscular injection of a liquid testosterone?
KM: None of those are pure testosterone. They are bound to other ingredients, going into the muscle they have to put something else with it so it delays the absorption in the muscle. It is not pure testosterone. We get a lot of people coming to us from places where they were given shots; women have full beards. They make a ton of DHT out of it and that’s what makes the beard. Balding comes from DHT and there’s a lot that comes from the IM that we don’t have.
BN: Looking at delivery systems you have found one that you are medical comfortable using because it has minimal side effects, maximum absorption, in a consistent on-demand delivery system that replicates the natural system that has begun to break down through the aging process.
KM: That’s right. We also balance other hormones: thyroid, adrenal, and we attend to pituitary problems. Most of these other things you’d have to see another doctor for if you were seeing someone who was replacing you estrogen, then we do that ourselves.
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Andropause, Bioidentical Hormones, Breast Cancer, Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), Menopause, Pellets, Research, Treatment No Comments
Download the transcription of this podcast.Dr. Kathy Maupin and family therapist Brett Newcomb talk about stories in the news today linking hormone therapy with cancer. In this interview, Dr. Maupin explains how the subdermal hormone pellet treatments that she offers at BioBalance Health are safe.
What are your reactions to the way the press covers the issue of hormone therapy for postmenopausal women?
How do you see the way the press handles these stories? Do you have concerns or reactions as a professional to the way the science of these stories is covered by reporters who are not scientifically trained?
Talk about the WHI study in 2002 that was one of the beginnings of the concern spike regarding hormone replacement as a health care strategy for postmenopausal women?
The use of generic labels such as “hormones” are misleading because they are non specific, and do not make use of distinctions among specific hormone groups that have clinical significance .
Historically in medical research women have been minorities as research groups. Much of what was researched and the conclusions from the research was generalized from research done on men. One of the reasons for this was a concern about doing research on women who might be pregnant. Only in the last decade or so has serious broad spectrum research focusing on women been at the forefront of medical science. Can you speak to the reasons for these distinctions and the changes in the way science is beginning to look at medical research data on women.
There was a period of time when hormone replacement therapy was the gold standard for the treatment of menopausal symptoms and the treatment of aging issues in women. There were 25000 studies documenting the efficacy of estrogen replacement for women.
Then the WHI study came out in 2002. How has this changed thinking with regard to treating women?
There is a story in the press today about hormone therapy increasing the risk of breast cancer. In a logic class this would be an example of what is called an undistributed major term. What does that mean and how does it apply to the article today and to other articles that appear in the mass media?
Some people are afraid to consider hormone replacement therapy because they have heard “things” about it:
- they have heard that it causes cancer
- they do not make distinctions between types of hormones
- they do not know or make distinctions among types of or options for hormone replacements
- there are several types of hormone replacements delivery systems.
What are the different types of hormone replacements or delivery systems that are available?
Why are bioidenticals better?
Why do pellets work better for what you do than other types of applications? What are the pros and cons?
So in the end the takeaway is that you should ask your doctor?
What are the risks to me if I take hormone replacement treatments?
What are the risks to me if I do not take these treatments?
Tags: brett newcomb, cancer, Dr. Kathy Maupin, hormone treatments, news, Pellets, subdermal
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