Resistance to Hormone Syndrome and RRT
“It’s my hormones”. I hear this all the time, but fail to see improvements in most patients taking hormones. Obese patients taking thyroid supplements don’t lose weight. People taking adrenal, cortisol or growth hormone supplements still have health problems. Men taking testosterone boosters still have sexual problems. Women take “hormones” but still experience problems or suffer silent side effects. What’s going on?
Hormone replacement therapy or HRT is supposed to improve cellular function. HRT promises help you to relieve symptoms, lose weight, provide more energy, better sex or protect against something. However, most patients on HRT still have those or other hormone related problems. What’s needed is an understanding how hormones declined or are blocked. Instead of HRT, most people have RHS and need RRT.
RHS is Resistance to Hormone Syndrome. Hormones require healthy cellular receptor sites or “docking stations” on individual cells to work. Receptor sites become dysfunctional if the master hormones (insulin, serotonin, norepinephrine, others) are abnormal. Stress, poor lifestyle and other treatable factors cause RHS where hormones are ineffective and your own insulin, hormones or hormones (synthetic or natural) aren’t very effective. Synthetic hormones, with the exception of synthetic thyroid supplements (for some people) often contribute to RHS by screwing up hormone levels, cell functions, organs and receptor sites. A good example is estrogen dominance. Most women have estrogen dominance and giving any hormones only makes it worse, if tested properly. With HRT, they either experience relief of acute symptoms via suppression of the pituitary and/or they experience acute or slow (and silent) excess estrogen symptoms (if monitored correctly), such as increased rates of cancer, heart disease and other subtle problems. Cancer rates dropped substantially in recent years after women stopped estrogen replacement but watch them rise again as women go back to supposedly safe HRT.
The first step is education about RHS, then testing or treating master hormone issues, then lifestyle changes and certain alternative medicines and hormones often rebalance over 3-6 months. If problems are more severe and hormone balance is not restored, we need to progress to Receptor Restoration Therapy or RRT, which takes time to understand and treat. RRT is rehab for the cellular receptors. Restoring receptor site function is too complex for this article, but involves improving cellular oxygen receptor function, insulin receptor functions, restoring kidney, liver and bowel function, complex internal enzyme chemistry and detoxification of xenohormones (drugs, environmental chemical and heavy metals) that block hormone receptors. Just like any other rehab program, it takes some time and team effort to get the cell receptors functioning again.
Having prescribed many synthetic or “natural” hormones, it’s taken a long time to learn they don’t work well and better approaches are available. No matter how hard it is, change your thinking about hormones. Fatigue, feeling poorly, inability to maintain weight and multiple degenerative conditions are better controlled with RHS and RRT than HRT.
David Overton, PA-C works at Natural Medicines & Family Practice integrating conventional and alternative care under the supervision of Richard Faiola, MD, ABFM. 360-357-8054