Are Your Hormone Creams Hurting You?

by Glen Depke

So, are your hormone creams hurting or helping you? 

You may be surprised by my answer.

Far too often I see clients in my office that have been put on hormone creams only to find themselves toxic in those very hormones or at times, creating other more problematic hormone imbalances.

Today I will share the more common challenges as seen at Depke Wellness.

The two most significant challenge recognized with testing with my clients is women toxic in progesterone and men toxic in estrogen hormones. Now in fairness I will share the many or most of these women had been tested in the past by another practitioner and recognized a progesterone deficiency. I commend these practitioners for searching for the hormonal challenges but the recommendations often provided provide many more challenges than offering positive support. 

Let's discuss the women first.

When a women is recognized as progesterone deficient, the most obvious response is to put this woman on a progesterone cream. Right?

While this is often the recommendation, this most often leads to a toxic build up of progesterone over time. Understand that the hormone creams tend to build up in the fat tissue, especially with those that are over weight. With this build up, the liver is put under extreme stress and a chronically overburdened liver causes it to become congested. This in itself is yet another stress to your body and further hormonal imbalance. As a side note, if the liver is sluggish and cannot process hormones properly, they are released into the blood stream in an even more toxic form than when they actually entered the liver.

I have often seen the results of women that have been on progesterone creams showing significantly high or toxic levels of progesterone. As an example, a woman that may be looking for a healthy level of progesterone between 50 and 400 will show up in the 2500 or more far too often.

On the male side, I see men with high estrogen levels on a regular basis and you will be surprised as to why. Men will have their hormones tested and often find low testosterone levels. The typical recommendation with this is to put this man on a testosterone cream. Not only are we looking at the same potential challenge as listed above but there is one more scary challenge occurring that is most often overlooked. Many men are low in testosterone because they are overproducing an enzyme that is converting testosterone into estrogen. Due to this, when you look at testosterone it will be low. The challenge here though is that by giving this man more testosterone, he will still be converting this to even more estrogen type hormones. 

Yikes!

I had a gentleman in my office recently that I have had a long term comfortable client/practitioner relationship with and we joked that he is becoming a woman. 

But it really was no joke.

He was actually gaining weight in areas that are not normal for a man (breast tissue) and he even shared that is has become much more emotional than ever before.

So you may have guessed this already but we do not recommend hormone creams at Depke Wellness.

To be up front, we do not even focus on "end result" hormones such as estrogen hormones, progesterone, and/or testosterone. We focus on the core of the hormonal challenges as the are represented in your adrenal function. The focus is on the proper lifestyle recommendations, proper B vitamin support (vitamin B5/pantothenic acid) and sublingual baseline hormones only long enough to assist you body in finding its balance. Once your body finds its balance you are off the protocol and often able to enjoy proper hormone balance based on your own normal bodily function.

At Depke Wellness we recommend assessing your hormones with a comprehensive adrenal test kit to understand the full array of hormones that may be challenged for you. This looks at the full array of adrenal hormones along with progesterone, estrogen hormones, testosterone, progesterone and even melatonin. This is not used to diagnose but simply as  way to assess your current function, so we can make the necessary recommendations to allow your body to balance itself.

You can also use this simple yet accurate complimentary assessment to understand your likelihood of living with an adrenal hormone challenge. If this shows a challenge for you, testing is definitely recommended.

If you have any comments or questions in regard to this article, please post this below and I will address this personally.