An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of Cure
There has been a tremendous push for “The Cure for Breast Cancer” in this country. However, this slogan completely misses a fundamental truth about what women want. No woman wants to develop breast cancer, then submit to disfiguring, painful, or toxic therapies with the hope of being cured. Women want and deserve safe, effective measures to prevent breast cancer and the other maladies that occur during midlife.
The past quarter-century of research has clearly demonstrated that low levels of human progesterone increase the risk of breast cancer. This was the conclusion of the 1981 Johns Hopkins study that found a much higher incidence of breast cancer among women with infertility due to progesterone deficiency compared to women with infertility due to nonhormonal causes.
The WHI, Million Women Study, and other recent studies of conventional HRT, all of which have found that counterfeit hormones increase the risk of breast cancer, provide further evidence for this hypothesis. In both the WHI and the Million Women Study, the highest risk of breast cancer was associated with the use of the combination of synthetic equine estrogen plus progestin. In fact, it is likely that the progestin component was the major factor in this increased risk, because progestins turn off the ovaries’ production of naturally occurring progesterone, reducing levels of this protective hormone. The use of counterfeit HRT also leads to hypothyroidism, which has been demonstrated to significantly increase the risk of cancer. This is because hypothyroidism causes a state of low oxidative metabolism, an environment in which cancer thrives.
There is a huge, multi-billion-dollar cancer industry in America. There is also a multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry and a multi-billion-dollar medical industry in this country. While these highly profitable industries may pay lip service to preventive practices such as healthy eating, exercise, and smoking cessation, they will never embrace prevention as a primary strategy for reducing the death toll from cancer or any other disease. The reason is simple economics. There is no money to be made from preventing disease. Healthy people do not need surgery, drugs, or doctors.
The primary goal of medicine should be the prevention of disease rather than the treatment of disease. The old adage remains true, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Clearly, the first step in prevention is to refrain from using counterfeit hormones, which have been demonstrated to cause cancer rather than to prevent it.
Step two is to use bioidentical hormones. This means first and foremost bioidentical progesterone, both to reduce the risk of breast cancer and to alleviate the symptoms of estrogen dominance that occur in midlife. Progesterone supplementation should begin around the age of thirty-five or younger, whenever the symptoms of progesterone deficiency occur. Premenstrual symptoms such as breast tenderness, headaches, mood swings, depression, fluid retention, weight gain, and irregular or heavy periods are common signs of progesterone deficiency and are highly responsive to treatment with bioidentical progesterone. As women enter menopause, the addition of bioidentical estrogen may be warranted to alleviate menopausal symptoms.
