Why We Love It

Get a comprehensive education from the breakthrough book on natural progesterone.

The book, What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause written by Dr. John R. Lee with Virgina Hopkins, is the preeminent work on menopause and natural hormone replacement. Dr. John R. Lee has been a leader in the research, education and treatment of estrogen dominance. His work has brought about new, natural and effective ways to approach the changes brought on by pre-menopause and menopause.

This book is your one-stop source of information on how your hormones work, menopause and the effectiveness of progesterone. With 30 million menopausal women in North America and some 20 million baby boomer women in menopause or on the brink of it, it's no wonder this is a major topic of discussion.

Excerpt from the book: Not so long ago, menopause was a word you did not say out loud in public, and you had to go to a medical library to find a book on the subject. Go into a typical bookstore these days and you'll find literally dozens of titles on menopause.

They range from praising the wonders of estrogen and hormone replacement therapy to personal stories of the ups and downs some women experience during the "change of life," and there are now many other books written on the subject of natural hormones. What was once a taboo subject has become a mainstay of talk shows and women's magazine articles.

Menopausal Politics With 30 million menopausal women in North America and some 20 million baby boomer women in menopause or on the brink of it, it's no wonder this is a major topic of discussion. What is a wonder is how we have managed to make menopause, a perfectly natural part of a woman's life cycle, into a disease. It has only just dawned on us that menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth are not diseases; now we need to realize that menopause is not a disease despite millions in advertising dollars spent by drug companies to convince us otherwise.

The pharmaceutical companies have not failed to notice the huge population of premenopausal women in the pipeline, a financial gold mine in the making. Premarin, a form of hormone replacement therapy made from pregnant mare's urine by the Wyeth-Ayerst company, was one of the top-selling prescription medicines in the United States until the 2002 Women's Health Initiative (WHI) study showed that PremPro (a combination of Premarin and a progestin) increased the risk of breast cancer, strokes, and gallbladder disease.

Although Premarin/Prempro generated more than $2 billion in sales in 2001 and represented 22 percent of Wyeth's pharmaceutical sales, more recently, sales of Premarin/Prempro have declined about 25 percent. In 1995, when I first wrote this book, I stated, "A large percentage of advertising and research dollars are spent trying to convince women that estrogen will cure everything from heart disease to Alzheimer's, but there is scant evidence for any of these claims and reams of evidence that synthetic estrogens are highly toxic and carcinogenic."

Now the WHI has proven me correct on this, and many millions of women are searching for a safe alternative to PremPro. In truth, it's not so much the estrogens per se that are toxic and carcinogenic, it's estrogens used in excess, and with progestins instead of natural progesterone. But you will learn a lot more about this as you read further. The good news is that women have become guarded and skeptical about having new drugs pushed on them. After being told that DES, a hormone that was supposed to guard against miscarriages, was safe, hundreds of thousands of women discovered the hard way that it caused cancer in their children.

Women were told that Valium was a safe and effective remedy for depression and anxiety, only to find out that it was addictive. Then their physicians tried to convince them that once they had reached menopause they should automatically go on hormone replacement therapy featuring synthetic estrogens and progestins, only to find it was increasing their risk of deadly diseases rather than saving them from the aging process. It is telling that only 10 to 15 percent of menopausal women chose to use conventional HRT despite intense pressure from doctors and the media.

The real tragedy is that many thousands of women have undoubtedly died or been permanently harmed because they used HRT, when the natural forms of these hormones, used wisely and in moderation, could have been, and still could be of very real benefit. In the chapters that follow, we will look more closely at how estrogen and progesterone work in a woman's body and the politics of pushing drugs to women.

What is Menopause? Strictly speaking, menopause is the cessation of menses, the end of menstrual cycles. The unpleasant "symptoms" of menopause that some women suffer, such as hot flashes, vaginal dryness, and mood swings, are peculiar to industrialized cultures and, as far as I can tell, they are virtually unknown in agrarian cultures.

In native cultures menopause tends to be a cause for quiet celebration, a time when a woman has completed her childbearing years and is moving into a deeper level of self-discovery and spiritual awareness. She is becoming a wise old woman. In these cultures menopausal women are looked up to and revered. They are sought out for advice and their opinions are heavily weighed in the decision-making process of the community. How strange that sounds to us! We know menopause as a death knell, the end of a woman's sexuality, a descent into a dried-up and painful old age of arthritis and osteoporosis. How did this experience of menopause come to be? I believe it's a combination of poor diet, unhealthy lifestyle, environmental pollutants, cultural attitudes, the incorrect use of synthetic hormones, and advertising. But first, let's look at what happens in a woman's body as menopause approaches.

Supplemental Reading:

About the Author, Dr. John Lee, M.D.: International Authority on Natural Progesterone John R. Lee, M.D. is internationally acknowledged as a pioneer and expert in the study and use of the hormone progesterone, and on the subject of hormone replacement therapy for women. He used transdermal progesterone extensively in his clinical practice for nearly a decade, doing research which showed that it can reverse osteoporosis.

Dr. Lee has had a distinguished medical career, including graduating from Harvard and the University of Minnesota Medical School. He retired from a 30-year family practice in Northern California a few years ago and ever since has been writing and traveling around the world speaking to doctors, scientists and lay people about progesterone. Dr. Lee has taught a very popular course on "Optimal Health," at the College of Marin for 15 years. He is the author of the best-selling book, What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause: The Breakthrough Book on Natural Progesterone (Warner Books, 1996), the new What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Premenopause: Balance Your Hormones and Your Life from Thirty to Fifty (Warner Books, 1999), and editor of the John R. Lee, M.D. Medical Letter.