Prepare to have your health questions answered here on Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions
with Dr. Todd Binkley, owner of Binkley Healing Center in downtown Ventura.
Now, here's Dr. Todd.
Good afternoon. I'm Dr. Todd Binkley, board certified doctor of non-force chiropractic
and practitioner of functional medicine.
Functional medicine means I identify conditions that other doctors miss by doing tests that
most doctors just don't do for a number of reasons.
Among them, hormone testing, especially salivary hormone testing, testing hormones in saliva.
So last week I talked about hormones.
I got a lot of response to last week's episode, a lot of questions and a lot of people just
calling and sending a message and saying, thanks, what a great episode, who knew?
It was mostly about a couple of articles that were published recently in the medical press.
Among them, this conversation published between two experts, two medical experts, Dr. Rachel
Rubin, urologist, sexual medicine specialist.
And she was interviewing Stephanie Faubion, director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Women's
Health and medical director for the Menopause Society.
So Dr. Rubin was interviewing Dr. Faubion about the women's health initiative study
that came out 20 years ago and basically put the kibosh on hormone replacement therapy.
They were lamenting the fact that so many physicians to this day don't, not just that
they don't prescribe hormone replacement therapy, because there's good reasons to not give traditional
chemical, toxic, not toxic, but just the standard hormone replacement therapy that was used
for so many years isn't ideal and there's good reasons to not do that for many women.
But they were lamenting the fact that because the women's health initiative, this huge study,
thousands of women, some retrospective studies or they did some follow up studies on 28,000
women showing that standard hormone replacement therapy, estrogen alone can increase ovarian
cancer risk.
And they stopped doing many so they were lamenting the fact that so many doctors stopped doing
hormone replacement therapy at all because of a slightly increased risk of breast cancer
and cardiovascular disease that many family physicians just stopped treating women for
menopause.
They acted like there's nothing you can do for menopause.
If you don't want to risk your increase your risk of heart disease or breast cancer, then
you just need to do some deep breathing exercises or reduce your stress, eat a healthy diet,
etc.
And this was shocking to me.
These are major experts that people look up to, that other doctors from around the country
seek their advice, go to this Stephanie Fabian in charge of this center for menopause, is
basically saying that far too many doctors aren't helping women who have menopause symptoms
and they're not educating themselves about when it is appropriate to use hormones and
what risks can be avoided, how to mitigate some of those risk factors and instead just
putting telling women to take Prozac, do something to manage their mood, relaxation, etc.
So women are coming into doctor's offices with fatigue and anxiety and a laundry list
of symptoms that are often related to menopause or pre-menopause, perimenopause or post-menopause,
whether you're before, during or after menopause.
And there's lots of things that can be done to help these women including certain types
of hormone replacement therapy.
Not necessarily, well so they were talking about even appropriate uses of standard hormone
replacement therapy, which I don't recommend.
And the most important thing is with proper testing, usually the therapies that most people
are tending to use now are transdermal creams that you put on your skin, whether it's estrogen
or progesterone.
And even Dr. Fabian from the Mayo Clinic mentioned this, a lot of these risks can be completely
avoided by using transdermal preparations of estrogen and progesterone, particularly
with lower doses.
And this is something I find in my practice all the time.
The standard, I talked about how it's important to do salivary hormone testing.
So blood is the gold standard for testing many things, most things that you go to a
doctor for, but there are exceptions and one of the main ones is for menopausal women,
it's often better, especially as the first line testing to do to evaluate how are you
doing, do you need some help, what's the best form to resolve your issues, how are we going
to help you the best.
It's better to do salivary, saliva, testing the hormones in the saliva rather than doing
a blood test.
And this is because hormone levels in your blood, in your serum, hormone levels in your
serum are constantly going up and down, up and down, every 10 minutes.
You look at a graph of it, it's all over the place.
So if you do a blood test, measure the amount that's in your serum at any given point during
some single day, you're only getting a snapshot of something that's widely varying.
Whereas when you do a saliva hormone test, you're getting an average of your estrogen
and progesterone and DHEA, the precursor for estrogen and testosterone throughout the day.
And you're also, if you do it comprehensively, the standard comprehensive panel, salivary
hormone panel that I use is done by Doctors Data, one of the premier labs in the country
for this type of testing.
And it's basically four little tubes that you spit in.
And we need four tubes because we're also testing your adrenal function.
So all of your hormones work with one another, your endocrine system, all of your, all of
the glands that produce hormones throughout your body work together.
They function together.
They interact tremendously.
So if one of them is off, there's a very good chance that others are going to be off slightly
as well.
And symptoms of one deficiency or excess of one can be very closely related to symptoms,
to problems with the other.
So for example, cortisol, the adrenal glands and the thyroid work hand in hand together.
The adrenal glands, cortisol wakes you up in the morning.
They are involved in your sense of energy throughout the day, as is the thyroid gland.
You can think of the thyroid gland as kind of like the furnace of your immune system.
Thyroid makes everything burn hotter, faster if it's too slow.
So when it's deficient, you feel sluggish.
And so those two work hand in hand.
But all of your sex hormones, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, there is a normal amount of
testosterone in women and there is a normal amount of estrogen and progesterone in men.
And all of these things are constantly interacting with one another.
So comprehensive test, saliva test, includes four cortisol tests, four tests for your adrenal
function.
I said it, I misspoke last week.
The first one is a half hour after you wake up in the morning at lunchtime again, dinner
and bedtime.
So half hour after you wake up, lunchtime, dinner time and bedtime.
Those four times a day you test, spit in the tube.
We're going to measure the cortisol levels.
And then the lab takes those four samples and takes a little bit from each one and makes
a fifth tube to measure the sex hormones, the estrogens, progesterone, DHEA and testosterone.
And that way you're getting this average throughout the day.
So why is this so important?
Well, saliva hormone testing measures active bioavailable hormones.
That's the best way to monitor topical and sublingual hormones that bind, most of which
bind to red surface of red blood cells.
So they don't spend a lot of time hanging out in the plasma that is tested on most blood
tests, but they do show up in saliva.
And when a lot of clinicians only measure serum levels of hormones, because they tend
to look low, they tend to look lower than they are actually functionally in the body.
And so people get overdose, people are taking in addition to the fact that they're taking
synthetic oftentimes synthetic hormone replacement therapy instead of plant-based hormone replacement.
They're often taking way too much.
So many times I see they come back.
Oh, my doctor said it was normal when they did my blood test.
We do the salivary test and the levels are just off the charts.
And sometimes just taking them off of that.
Just I tell them to go back, talk to the person that they prescribed that and say, Hey, can
we do a trial, lower my dose to see what happens.
But the bottom line is far too many people are taking weight.
Women are taking way too much estrogen or sometimes progesterone, but it's much more
common that they're taking too much estrogen.
And men, men that were taking testosterone are often taking too much testosterone.
Men love to think that how it's impossible to take too much testosterone.
Well, if you take too much of anything, then number one, your body will stop making it
and your cells that those things bind to can become sensitive to them so that you reach
a point of diminishing returns.
And the more you take, the less effect it has.
This is huge.
And that's way too complicated to talk about right now.
I promised I was going to talk about another case study.
So this is a 76 year old female.
I talked about how it's actually possible to do hormone replacement therapy without
increasing your risk of breast cancer.
But what about breast cancer survivors?
When you have breast cancer, they test you to see if your cancer is what's called ERPR
positive, estrogen receptor and progesterone receptor positive.
Basically does your cancer have receptors on it that bind estrogen and progesterone
that will therefore make your cancer grow faster if you have high levels of estrogen
and progesterone?
And they make part of the treatment is to take medications that block estrogen or block
progesterone or both.
So the thing that they don't always explain very clearly is that if you test and find
out that your estrogen levels are low, lower than normal, and you take tiny doses of estrogen,
then it's not going to increase your risk of breast cancer, especially if it's a plant
based form and not the horse urine, estrogen or synthetic progestins, which are carcinogenic.
So this 76 year old woman came in, she's a breast cancer survivor.
She had afternoon fatigue.
Everything was fine.
She's in remission.
She's been in remission for a few years.
But all of that, everything that happened with her remission as far as her follow up
tests for her tumor markers are all fine.
But she has tremendous afternoon fatigue.
She's just exhausted all afternoon.
She has low mental sharpness.
She's got some allergies, some night sweats, muscle loss.
She was thin, but she'd always been thin, but she was really starting to lose even more
muscle mass.
And she had low libido.
She's 76 years old.
Why shouldn't a 76 year old woman have a normal libido as well?
So a lot of people are even afraid to admit that.
It's on my form.
I ask everybody about it.
It's on my form.
We don't have to talk about it if they don't want to, but no one should have to suffer
any of these things if they don't want to and they don't have to.
So we did the salivary hormone test and her cortisol was really, really low in the morning.
Started to come up in the afternoon, went a little high.
Basically it's the type of pattern.
It's kind of hard to describe it because I'm looking at a graph that you can't see.
But it's classical early stage adrenal fatigue or late stage, actually late stage adrenal
fatigue where there's just, it's not making enough.
If it's not making enough to wake you up in the morning, that's a definite problem.
And your body's trying to compensate, crank out a little bit more in the afternoon and
even more in the evening when she doesn't even need it.
And so the cortisol levels, the adrenal function was a mess.
And the DHEA, which is a precursor for estrogen and testosterone, was low.
So at her estrogen levels were low normal.
So estradiol is the estrogen that most people hear about, but there's also estrone and estriol.
So they all have similar functions, but estradiol can aggravate some cancers.
Estriol is cancer protective.
It actually reduces your risk of cancer.
So this is all measured on the test.
And the simplest way to explain it is she had severe issues with her adrenals that needed
some support.
She had low DHEA, which is a precursor for estrogen, and her estrogen was low normal.
So if I give her something that's going to very, very slightly increase her estradiol,
but has very little chance also, and her testosterone was really, really low, unmeasurable, which
is not unusual than a 76-year-old woman.
So DHEA is a precursor for estrogen and testosterone.
If I give her some DHEA, which is what I did, I gave her some support for her adrenal glands
and some DHEA.
You may have heard, a lot of people have heard of DHEA.
It's not a good idea to take it if you haven't been tested, because some problems can happen.
You can buy it over the counter, but I don't recommend taking it unless you've been tested.
Bottom line is her DHEA was low, her estrogen was low normal, and her testosterone was off
the charts low.
So what's going to happen if you give her something that is a precursor for estrogen
and testosterone, and her testosterone is really, really low, then most of it is going
to be converted into testosterone, and small amounts of it are going to be converted into
estrogen, enough to give her some symptom relief, but not enough to increase her risk
of breast cancer at all.
So that was what I explained to her.
That's what we did.
Four months later, her DHEA did exactly what I told her it would, it raised her testosterone
from basically undetectable up into the normal range for women, and it had no effect on her
estrogen levels.
Her estrogen levels were basically unchanged, were completely unchanged.
Her estradiol was one picograms per milliliter on the first test, and four months later it
was exactly the same.
It was unchanged.
And guess what, all of her symptoms were much better.
Everything that she came in with, the fatigue, the mental sharpness, the allergies, night
sweats, she was exercising more because she had a little more energy now.
She was building some muscle mass back up, and her libido improved.
So she was very happy, and that would never have happened if she had just gone the traditional
route with which most doctors do, and only tested serum levels of her hormones.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions to Almost Any Health Challenge.
So who should get a saliva hormone test?
Well, anyone who's taking conventional hormone replacement therapy and doesn't feel the way
they should feel, or bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, or basically some, I
have people who come to me who are going to other progressive, functionally oriented practitioners
who've done some of the same things that I do and just weren't getting the results.
And oftentimes in the case of those, it's because they're being overdosed, they're
being given too much.
I've had some amazing cases where all I did was suggest that they go back to the practitioner
that prescribed the hormones they're taking now and say, hey, can I do a trial?
I'm doing some different testing here.
This other doctor said I should just stop taking some of this stuff for a while.
Is that okay?
I'm not going to tell somebody to stop doing something some other doctor told them to do.
I make sure that they go back and discuss it with that prescribing physician.
But the bottom line is, many people are given too much estrogen.
They just stop taking that, take a much lower dose, and especially a plant-based form, and
they feel a lot better.
So anyone who's unsatisfied with their current hormone treatment, if they're taking it, or
is worried about side effects and are not taking it, or people with fatigue, depression,
chronic inflammation, which drives so many, almost every condition in your body, hormones
affect every part of your body, but also especially heart health, memory loss.
Osteoporosis is, there's a lot of times, osteoporosis, when I have patients with osteoporosis, we
can resolve it just with nutrients like bioavailable calcium, adequate amounts of vitamin D, vitamin
K2, just those three, actually, often will make a huge difference in pre and post testing
on DEXA scans, bone density testing.
Sometimes collagen is also important, and sometimes insufficient estrogen is the missing
link, is the reason that whatever else they were, they might have been doing is not keeping
their bones strong.
And anything else with osteoporosis also helps in rare instances where people have fractures
that never heal.
So anybody that has an issue with bone density or bones that are not healing properly, and
then anyone who has low testosterone.
So most people know the common symptoms, the most common symptoms of low estrogen, hot
flashes, mood swings, anxiety, irritability, insomnia, vaginal dryness, night sweats, and
depression.
Most people have heard of these things, the classic symptoms of menopause, but there's
many, many other symptoms of low estrogen, varicose veins, urinary tract infections,
palpitations, panic attacks, strange dreams, memory lapse, hair growth on the face, weight
gain, and if you get tested properly, and it's usually very low doses that are recommended.
Once we do this type of testing, you don't need massive doses, and I'm certainly never
going to recommend horse urine, estrogen, premarin, and synthetic progestin, which was
what was in Prem Pro, the classical combo hormone replacement therapy that so many millions
of women took for decades.
Instead, we do the plant-based forms.
And what does that do?
It does the benefits of taking just a little testing and making it to see if you need it,
taking just low, very low doses of plant-based natural estrogen, increased metabolism, better
body regulation, regulation of body temperature, improved sleep.
It can prevent muscle damage.
Estrogen can increase blood flow and decrease arterial plaque, maintain collagen in the skin.
Estrogen can decrease blood pressure and bad cholesterol.
It can improve your mood.
It can reduce your risk of heart disease, obviously, with those other two.
It decreases wrinkles, enhances energy, enhances increases concentration, increases your good
cholesterol, helps maintain bone density and sexual interest, decreases colon cancer, and
helps maintain memory.
So these are good reasons.
People you know that are having these issues recommend that they get a saliva hormone test.
So the focus is the saliva test for hormones.
But blood tests are important, too.
One of the questions I got from last week was, when do you need blood tests for hormones?
Well, the most obvious is thyroid.
You can't test thyroid.
And the thyroid panel is included on the blood tests that I order on every patient.
Unfortunately, when you go to most doctors, they're going to test your TSH levels alone,
if that.
If you have complaints that are consistent with low thyroid, they're probably just going
to test your TSH.
And you really need to test.
TSH isn't even a thyroid test.
It's a pituitary test.
Thyroid stimulating hormone is made by your pituitary gland to tell your thyroid to make
more thyroid hormone if it's low.
But it's important to make sure that your body is able to produce adequate amounts of
thyroid directly by testing thyroid levels, T4, and also by testing free T3 levels, the
only functional active form of thyroid.
You need to know if your body is actually converting that into the active form as well.
So those are always blood tests.
I do those on almost every patient as a matter of routine.
And then the other big one is anything to do with pregnancy and the menstrual cycle.
So if you're people that are wanting to know if they're ready to get pregnant, if everything's
working normally, just want to screen, or if they're having difficulty with infertility,
you're going to measure FSH, follicular stimulating hormone, and LH, luteinizing hormone.
These are things that can only be sexual binding, globulin, these are things that can only be
measured in the blood.
So if it's a pregnancy related issue, then that is obviously a hormone that you do have
to measure in the blood.
I personally see far more people with menopausal symptoms than with difficulty getting pregnant,
but I do see some women that have helped women who are having difficulty getting pregnant
as well.
So if the FSH and the LH, the hormones of pregnancy or ovulation are off, they're not
able to get pregnant, or for whatever reason they can't get that testing to normalize,
then there's lots of things that can often be done by testing for other things.
First, there's their basic blood panel, their basic levels of health.
Do they have vitamin B deficiency?
Are they fighting off a chronic infection that's stressing their system?
Do they have adequate levels of protein?
A lot of times people have toxicities, chemical toxicities, mold toxins, heavy metal toxicities,
these things are super important and can stress a woman's body and make it difficult to get
pregnant.
So there will always be a place of importance for blood testing for thyroid issues and pregnancy
related issues.
But if you know someone who's having menopausal symptoms and only being tested with blood
tests for their hormones, then tell them about what may be possible with a salivary hormone
test.
So I've been talking mostly about estrogen.
Progesterone is also super important to test.
In fact, one of the most common problems when we test people for hormones is an imbalance
between estrogen and progesterone.
Your body stops making progesterone after menopause, the ovaries stop making it, but
it is still made in small amounts in the adrenal glands from pregnenolone and it performs many
functions in the body.
I'll probably talk about this next week.
We're going to run out of time here pretty soon, but briefly progesterone aids as a diuretic.
It's anti-inflammatory.
You know, apart from the effects on pregnancy, progesterone to pro-generate it obviously
is the most important function is for pregnancy.
But it also has effects on GABA, one of the most important neurotransmitters in the brain.
It enhances the action of thyroid hormones.
It has a positive effect on sleep.
It helps build bone.
Progesterone helps maintain bladder function.
The list of functions of progesterone is a long one.
So I'm going to come back to that next week.
So send me your questions, email me, text me if you have questions about hormones.
I'd love to answer them on the air for you no matter what you've been told or whatever
your experience has been thus far.
If you or someone you love is struggling with conditions, symptoms that you suspect are
related to hormones, then there are always options.
If you haven't done a salivary hormone test, for example, or haven't seen a functional
practitioner that's going to look for how to restore normal function versus just treat
disease with drugs, then I'd really love an opportunity to help them.
Thank you for listening.
Tune in next Friday.
I look forward to speaking with you then.
Send me your questions.
Have a wonderful weekend.
Do something to be healthier this weekend than you were last week.
See you next Friday.
You've been listening to Safe, Effective Natural Solutions with Dr. Todd Binkley.
If you have a health question you want discussed on the show, email your health questions to
drbinkley at binkleyhealingcenter.com.
Take advantage of this opportunity to ask questions for yourself and for your loved
ones because our health matters.
Join him next Friday at 4 p.m. for Safe, Effective Natural Solutions right here on
98.3 The Word, KDAR.