I just read The Natural Superwoman by Dr. Uzzi Reiss. The book is based on finding natural ways to deal with many of the common complaints from women such as depression, weight, energy levels, libido, etc. He offers very good, sensible advice on how to eat, focusing mainly on cutting down on calories while still eating a meal that is satisfying. He also spend much of the book focused on bioidentical hormones, which unlike the Premarin and Provera that has been headlining in the news of late as cancer causing, are actually hormones identical to those which the body naturally produces, which make them not only safer but much more effective.

Reiss walked down the list of symptoms that a woman might experience when she has a lack of estrogen, progesterone or testosterone. Many of the complaints on these lists were quite familiar to me, especially in the estrogen arena. However, I am not sold on this.

Do you want to know why? It is because I have spent years going to doctors and telling them that I’m tired, I’m feeling anxiety and emotionally flat, my periods have gone from normal to near hemorrhaging every month, I have headaches and I’m just plain irritable (especially in the two weeks prior to my period when my estrogen is naturally diminishing) and they have labeled me a number of different things, given me the drugs and admonished me to exercise or not, eat such and such, or not, and told me that I WILL FEEL BETTER. And then I don’t. Or they do the blood test and come back with, “Nope, guess that wasn’t it, how about some more tests that do nothing except display your remarkable ability to bruise.”

In the past year I have been told that I have depression. It looks like a cortisol deficiency. It is all in your head. It’s all in your diet. Must be your thyroid. It’s PMS. I have Fibromyalgia. I believe the fibromyalgia- do you know why? Because it is just a label for a group of crappy symptoms with no real treatment and no discernable cause. The basic advice is “you can try all of this stuff, but it probably won’t work. We can give you painkillers and other drugs to mask the symptoms, but it won’t make them go away. Basically, you should just slow down, get some sleep and resign yourself to functioning way below par. Forever.”

So, forgive me, if when I see a huge list of symptoms that are ever so familiar along side a really easy solution (Reiss’s estrogen cream, applied lightly on estrogen heavy days of my cycle and heavily on days when my estrogen is depleted), I am totally skeptical. Oh, I want to believe. I want Reiss to personally work me up and really fix me. Everything he says sounds good. Very logical, cause and effect, and well thought out, and I will 100% agree with him when he said in the book that he is pretty sure that no one is suffering from a Prozac deficiency. I know I’m not.

After years of tracking my cycle and my overall state of being, what he wrote makes more sense than anything else I’ve read, and so I will make an appointment with my doctor and discuss it. Now, the chances that the military medical people will agree to trying out bioidentical hormones- not good. But still, it is worth a shot.

The one thing the book never mentioned was how all of these hormones applied during pregnancy. Many case studies discussed were of women of childbearing age, so I would have hoped to have seen that discussed a bit.

All in all, it was a thought provoking book, and I recommend it.