Do You Take Bioidentical Hormones? You Need to Watch This!

Interviewer: You are certainly an expert in bioidentical hormones. What should people know or study before they take those, in terms of toxicity? 

Dr. Rosensweet: Well it was a shock to me when I first got introduced to bioidentical hormones and started introducing them to my patients, I was just startled. This was my 20th year in practice that I did that, I'm 42 years in practice now. When I started doing that and the results of administering hormones to menopausal women, for example, and doing it right, it was so dramatic. A little bit just revived and made women so healthy and they were so grateful that I just thought, 'this is great stuff'. It makes sense, when you deplete these major power fuels that affect us in so many ways and you restore them, people feel better. 

About 10 years into that, so my 30th year in practice, I was opening up a jar of the transdermal hormones that we administer and I took a whiff of it and it smelled very strong to me. It smelled something very akin to alcohol.  I went 'gee, I have been asking women to rub that on their skin twice a day'. I'm a holistic doc and I know a lot of people can tolerate a lot of toxicity, but this thing , something in there's strong.  Then I did an investigation of what was in there. What you need to know about adrenal and gonadal hormones is 90% of them are fat-soluble. They're not water- soluble. You put those hormones in water and they sink like a rock to the bottom. They're fat soluble. Not only that, the physics of it, the chemistry of it, they're very poorly fat soluble. In order to put them in a jar and be able to stick a scoop or syringe to administer the exact same dose of them every day, you've got to dissolve them. 

What are people using to dissolve them? I went on to learn that when you're looking a jar or a pump bottle of hormones, they are 99.7% carrier, it's called, the stuff you put the hormones in, they're only .3% of the actual hormones in that bottle or jar. Just a little more, just a little less. Why does that have to be so much carrier? These things are not soluble and they take a lot of solvent to get them in there. The next question came to me, what solvents are they using? I looked up and saw the profile and went 'oh my god'. The compounders even, this is coming from compounding pharmacies. You look up the solvent profile there and the chemistry of it and there's been medical articles written about the toxicity of what's in those carriers. There's a chest surgeon who has an article out there, he has patients had a reaction to azulfidine. I believe that's the name of it, but it's the cream they put on burn patients, but that's a carrier. He discovered that the propylene glycol that's in the cream was poisoning some of his patients to the point of severe toxicity. Now in bioidentical hormone land, this is nowhere near the amount that the silver cream that is being rubbed on burn patients, but it still points out the toxicity and anyone in holistic medicine will know there's canaries in the coal mine that tell us that this small amount of poison can make some people really sick. If it's making them sick, it's making us sick in just a slower way. 

I used to love working on my car when I was a teenager in my twenties. I used to love all the tasks of it, even rebuilding an engine.  It didn't run too long, but I sure enjoyed it. I learned better to have a mechanic rebuild that engine rather than me. The thing I didn't like was emptying my radiator twice a year, which you had to do in Michigan, because the antifreeze was caustic to the hands. My hands would turn white. Well that's propylene glycol.  What is one of the principal solvents in the absorption and absorption enhancers used in a lot of these compound? The pharmaceutical companies have come up with their own version of bioidenticals. They're using estradial in the case of estrogen, they're not using bias? So there's all kinds of problems. 

When you look at the solvents they're using, they've got alcohol, carbapol, propylene glycol, diethylene glycol, I mean, it's a scary list. When we discovered that, we went searching, well is there anything a woman could rub on her skin that wouldn't have toxicity. First, do no harm. I have a massage therapist and I asked my massage therapist 'what are you using'? We eventually put together a combination of organic oils and this is what I'm really suggesting, is to get those carriers to be organic, for one thing, because they're readily available, and you have to put them in oils. The downside is you have to deal with a suspension. When you put those hormones into a small bottle of organic oils, they'll sink to the bottom too. So what a woman has to do is she has to shake the bottle five times before she turns it over and  puts a drop on her hand, and that's the solution that I love.
But there's no toxicity, no solvents in there. I once had a compounding pharmacist tell me well I like you're  little there bottles, we all like the oils that are in there, they're organic. But why don't you let me put it in solution for you?  I said, 'well what are you going to use to do that?' and he said, he gave me the list. Propylene glycol, etcetera. And I said 'no, that's what we're trying to avoid'. Women are very intelligent, they can shake a bottle, no problem. Especially when they know why they are shaking it. So you can understand why the original manufacturers put them up in these solvents. They want to administer the exact same dose every time. Then there's the next phase of our learning that's no toxicity, shake the bottle. We've done studies to see the distribution in the bottom of the bottle has almost an identical concentration that we put on the label so the shaking works well.