The Truth About Estrogen…Why Avoiding It Could Harm Your Health

You've probably heard that hormones, especially estrogen, are dangerous. But what if I told you that avoiding estrogen could actually be putting your health at risk? There's a lot of fear around hormone replacement therapy, but today we're breaking down the truth, both from a medical and a biblical perspective. By the way, I'm Dr. Tabitha, your Christian physician. I am your hormone expert when it comes to everything midlife. And we are going to debunk these myths about hormones. Let's get into it. Women fear estrogen replacement therapy because it's been ingrained in us that estrogen causes cancer. Unfortunately, there was a really bad study that was stopped early in 2002. What this study was saying was that estrogen causes breast cancer. It took us over 20 years of fear and lies to finally have the truth come out that estrogen does not cause breast cancer. Estrogen actually makes us who we are as women. It is an essential hormone to stay healthy and thrive all through life. Now that we have seen the truth about this, you can rest assured that estrogen replacement therapy is safe. All right, let's talk about estrogen and why we need it. If you're a woman, you know what happens when estrogen goes down in your body. This happens right before your period. Every month, your mood starts to change. Some of us have severe PMS symptoms. Your energy level declines. You get tired, you want to take naps. All of these changes are happening because your estrogen drops right before your period. That's a natural event. It happens every month. And hopefully your estrogen goes back up and you start another cycle. But when you transition into menopause, that estrogen no longer comes back up. It stays low. And those symptoms that you used to struggle with, they start to multiply and they start to compound because that loss of estrogen is being felt through your entire body. I have women every single day in my medical practice tell me, I just don't feel. Feel like myself. I don't know who I am anymore. I don't even want to engage. I don't want to talk to my husband. I don't want to go out. So it's really important for you to realize that estrogen impacts everything about you. And when that level shifts and goes down in menopause, those changes are permanent unless you get on estrogen replacement therapy. So now that the greater medical system has got on board with the fact that estrogen doesn't cause cancer, they are still being shy about it. They're still a little nervous. So what they're doing is they're saying you can have estrogen right after you go into menopause for a few years in the lowest dose possible, but that's it. We just want to suppress your hot flashes and night sweats and mood swings enough for you to get by. And here's the problem with that. Even though it's getting rid of those basic symptoms that you're feeling, it's not giving you the levels that you need for your body to feel function well. There's two reasons to go on hormone replacement therapy for symptom control and disease prevention. I personally am on hormone replacement therapy because I want to keep my bones strong, my brain functioning well, my heart healthy, all the good things that estrogen does. I'm not just trying to get rid of my hot flashes and night sweats. There have been countless studies done on estrogen. We have been studying estrogen in women, and what we have found is there are different ways to give estrogen estrogen replacement that are safer and less safe. For a long time, we used something called conjugated equine estrogen. This was Premarin. This was estrogen that we got from horse urine. Premarin is the main hormone that was studied in the Women's Healthy Initiative, the study that scared everybody in 2002 and said that it was dangerous. What that study did show us was that conjugated equine estrogen has an increased risk of blood clot and stroke. It's an oral estrogen that we take, and our body converts some of that estradiol into estrone even before it's absorbed into our bloodstream. So what does that mean? Well, our body has three main types of estrogen. We have estradiol, that is our main reproductive hormone. That's in good levels when you're trying to have a baby. There's estrone, which is more of an intermediate. It's also made in fat cells that can go on to be turned into four hydroxy estrone, and that can start to increase your risk of uterine and breast cancer. And there is estriol. Estriol is a weaker estrogen. It is elevated in pregnancy and menopause. So when we were taking Premarin as an oral pill back in the day, it would go through our liver and be metabolized, and that would cause us to make too many clotting factors, and so it increased our risk of blood clot and strok. So the biggest thing we learned from the WHI study is that the safer way to get estrogen is through our skin. My favorite form of estradiol replacement is an estradiol patch. I like it because you put it on, it gives you a steady dose of estrogen all throughout the day. Most of my patients love their estrogen patches. So when you are looking for someone to help you with your hormone replacement, you want to find an expert who understands the nuances of estrogen replacement therapy, how to give it in different forms, how those different forms react in your body and what those risks are. But if estrogen is so beneficial, what does the Bible say about it? I often have women say to me, isn't menopause a natural thing? Why are we taking hormone replacement therapy or estrogen when God made us to go into menopause? Well, here's the deal. We as women in this modern society are living in a different way than our great grandmothers or any women before us have in history. We are just getting into our prime when we are going through this midlife transition. Whereas our great grandmothers, their lives were slowing down. They were done having their children and done taking care of their families and working in the fields and doing all of the things running the household, people were taking care of them. Unfortunately, in this day and age, we're just getting started. We're not having babies until 35 or 40 years old. We're having families at an older age. And now we work and have full time careers and we are building businesses and building empires. And so we are just doing things differently. And our physiology unfortunately hasn't caught up with our advanced society. So even though we have cell phones and Internet and emails and we can do all of these things, our physiology still functions like a cave woman or a woman back in Jesus's time who's sitting on the porch knitting, being taken care of by her children and her grandchildren. In my mind, God tells me, we have given you the ability to create and produce and have all of these medical advancements. That is not the problem. The problem is veering away from how I created you to function. So I like to reconcile this fact with, let's work on our stress management. Let's remember that we were created for rest and to hand things over to God. But also, if we are doing these things and we want to stay young and healthy and vibrant because we want to take care of our children and run our businesses and enjoy our life. Let's treat our body like the temple that God asked us to treat it like and use our medical advancements to our advantage so that we can show up and fulfill our purpose that God has for us. He has called us for a mission on this earth and. And sometimes we need some estrogen or hormone replacement therapy to be able to do that. I personally can attest to that. Now that you know the truth about estrogen, let's talk about another factor in your hormone health, stress and cortisol. Click here to watch my next video on how to balance your hormones naturally.