Balancing Hormones Naturally: An Interview with Christiane Northrup, MD

October 5, 2023

Yes, in the 1970s. So, I’ve been at this for a while and that’s back when the only hormone given was Premarin. Premarin stands for pregnant mare’s urine. So, it’s derived from horse urine basically. And the reason why that was the gold standard was it was just the first to the table. I noticed there were other alternatives to that, but they weren’t as well known. And then in the early 1990s I met the people who were doing work with natural progesterone, bio-identical progesterone. And I found that this was working so much better than medroxyprogesterone acetate, which is a synthetic progestin. All birth control pills, by the way, are not native to the female body, and they have side effects.

As my colleague, Bruce Lipton, PhD, says, “These are not side effects, these are effects.” So, I began to use bioidentical progesterone. Then Joel Hargrove, MD, who ran the menopause center in Nashville, Tennessee, came to our hospital to give a lecture. He was the guy who patented oral micronized bioidentical progesterone. If you take the three-dimensional shape of a hormone that is exactly what is produced in the body, you’re going to get the same effects as what the body would produce.

However, if you make something in a lab and you make it different from something found in nature, it’s going to have totally different effects. Now, to this day, my colleagues do not seem to understand this difference. It’s mind-blowing to me that those in my own profession cannot see the difference.

If we had my book, The Wisdom of Menopause here, we could hold up the graphic that shows all the methyl groups added to native progesterone to make it unlike anything found in nature. You can’t patent naturally occurring substances, which is why the area of herbs and natural substances and vitamins is so underrepresented. The way it has worked for big pharmaceuticals is you can only make money when you create something not found in nature. The only way to patent a hormone is to make it unlike something natural. And so, therefore, there’s no money in giving women the kind of hormones they need. Although we made some progress because of things like the Climera and the Vivelle Patch, which are transdermal patches. They patented the delivery system not the substance. They patented the glue that makes the patch.

Hormone Replacement Therapy

What’s the most important factor when you start on hormone replacement therapy, and the steps you need to take before you start hormone replacement therapy?

I was on the Oprah Winfrey show with Suzanne Somers and the head of OB/GYN at Northwestern. Oprah had me on one of her very last shows. Now you know, she had this show for 25 years and I’m on there as the referee between Suzanne Somers who uses bioidentical hormones, all from formulary pharmacies, and Lauren Streicher, MD, who’s from Northwestern University.

And she and Suzanne Somers were at each other’s throats because Suzanne didn’t see how you could ever get anything in a regular pharmacy that wasn’t dangerous and Lauren didn’t understand that stuff from a formulary pharmacy isn’t regulated the same by the FDA. It was unbelievable, and I’m there in the middle trying to show the audience what’s the truth. I was trying to show that both of them have the truth, but let’s bring it together, shall we? Okay, the bottom line is if you’re going do hormones then get the ones that exactly match those found in the female human body.

That is all the term bioidentical means. You can get those in regular pharmacies now because they have finally figured that out. However, most hormones that are given are not bioidentical. So usually you have to do a little research. However, there are so many alternatives to bioidentical hormones. When I went through the menopausal transition, I remember trying all the bioidentical stuff because I wasn’t afraid of it.

What about other lifestyle factors such as stress?

That’s a crucial point. I would do the bioidentical hormone creams and I’d have them made up at the formulary pharmacy. And I noticed that nothing did anything because my lifestyle was actually the biggest determinant of whether or not I had hot flashes or anything of that nature. So, some women find that when they eat a diet high in sugar or they drink a lot of red wine or they eat certain cheeses, they get hot flashes; also, they do so if they’re under some kind of stress.

So, what is stress? A plane trip between here and LA is stressful. Thanksgiving dinner with relatives you don’t like is stressful. Eating a lot of sugar, eating a lot of donuts, eating a lot of wheat, for some people who are sensitive to gluten, which is a lot of people, that’s all stressful. And all of those things change the way your hormones are metabolized.

I think my main take-home message is this: Cortisol and epinephrine, the stress hormones created by the adrenals actually change the way hormones are metabolized in the female human body. So, there’s a strong connection between the adrenal glands where the stress hormones are made—cortisol from the medulla of the adrenals and epinephrine from the cortex of the adrenals—and hormonal metabolism. The adrenals are two little glands that sit on top of the kidneys and they interact with the ovaries in this lovely, lovely dance.

So, your adrenals are involved—and probably many people have heard of chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, adrenal fatigue—and that’s what’s really important in menopause. At age 42, we all go through midlife stage, men as well as women. And that is a wakeup call from your soul, and we call it a midlife crisis, but it really isn’t. It’s the soul saying, “Hey, wait a minute.” So, you went to school, you got your job or degree, you did what you’re supposed to do. You’re working in a job that you’re supposed to work in. And then you hit about age 42 and the timeline of your soul wakes up and says, “Really, really? Is this what you want to be doing the rest of your life? Because I noticed that you were working, doing other people’s work.” And you said, “Wait, I have a vision that’s a little different, so I want to do this on my own.”

That’s what the whole midlife crisis is about, and if you ignore it, then the stress hormones increase because your body is a barometer for your soul. So, if you expect that anything outside of yourself, whether it be bioidentical hormones or herbs or whatever, is going to do it all, it won’t until you get yourself back on the right track. These other things enhance your life when you are in balance. So, there’s no question that estrogen is the gold standard for women who have hot flashes, who then can’t sleep, and therefore get depressed. But in many, many cases, their life itself is requiring a reset button.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who was a pioneer on death and dying a long time ago would say, “You know what? When you’re in pain, morphine works well.” Sometimes you just need to get the thing to get you through, and I’m fine with that, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that at midlife there are other essential issues. The whole reason that chronic degenerative diseases increase at the age of 50, when they tell you to get your first mammogram, or get a colonoscopy is that people have generally been ignoring their bodies for that many years. Finally, the body says, keep it up and I’m going to show you what I can do to get you back on track. There’s no reason why suddenly at age 45, 50, or whatever, the incidence of breast cancer and colon cancer and heart disease should go up. Those numbers are just lifestyle demographics. That’s just how someone has been living.

I’m always interested in the outlier people. Do all women need bioidentical hormones? Absolutely not. Because when the adrenals are healthy, when you have respected your soul trajectory, that is, when you are leading a life that is driven by and guided by your soul, then you just don’t need nearly as many things from the outside to keep you healthy because it’s less likely you’ll live a disharmonious life.

I learned about an herb from Thailand called Pueraria Mirifica. People in Thailand have known about this for 700 years. Pueraria Mirifica means “miracle herb.” In the 1930s the Germans discovered it. Someone discovers what the hill tribes in northern Thailand had been doing for 700 years, and now it’s a big discovery. This particular herb contains a phytohormone, a plant hormone, and it works so well for menopausal symptoms that I started a company to bring that into public consciousness. You don’t need a prescription, and it works very well; it also protects the male prostate. I recommended it using someone else’s brand for a couple of years to get enough clinical feedback to know that it worked.

Balancing Hormones Naturally

The way to balance hormones naturally includes vitamin D and certain nutrients. You start with changing your diet, getting your adrenal glands harmonized, which involves getting your vitamin D levels to optimal.

Regarding vitamin D levels, we’ve been taught to be afraid of the sun, and no one should burn as we know, but we need optimal levels of vitamin D. Vitamin D is both a nutrient and a hormone, and so the level in your blood should be 50 to 80. That’s optimal. When you go and get it drawn, you’re told it’s normal. Normal for what? Preventing rickets. Not enough! You need optimal. Women who have optimal levels of vitamin D have an 80 percent reduced risk of breast cancer and men have the same reduced risk of prostate cancer; current status quo is that one in eight men will get prostate cancer. But if you get your levels where they ought to be, which takes 5,000 IUs per day, generally speaking, then you don’t have these risks. Also there are those people whose bodies just don’t make the vitamin D from the sun exposure.

So, it’s not necessarily about getting more sun exposure, although for most that would help.

So, you need to get your vitamin D, and make sure you’re getting enough iodine in your diet. You can get that through kelp, through seaweed; Celtic sea salt doesn’t have it. Himalayan sea salt doesn’t have it, however, these salts are replete with other trace minerals that we all need. So, a good way to get iodine is frankly what I do, I just buy it from Amazon. It’s called Lugol’s solution, which is both molecular iodine and potassium iodide, and you just take three to seven drops per day in water and you’ve got it. It’s necessary for hormone balance. So, vitamin D3 and iodine for hormone balance. Also, we all need more magnesium than we’re getting because the soils are depleted. So, you do all these supplemental nutrients first.

Then if you still need additional help, you do the herbs. That would be either the Pueraria Mirifica or maca. They are women’s herbs that have been used safely for millennia.

You also need enough omega-3 fats. We have too much omega-6 from the oils such as canola and corn oil and all the seed oils, and we need more omega-3s from flaxseed oil and from cold water fish and those things because omega-3s make up most of the cell membrane of your brain. People get depressed when they don’t have enough omega-3s making up the coating of their nerves and the cells of their brains. Once those nutrients are in place, most people don’t need additional hormones.

Also, the adrenals and the ovaries make testosterone in women. During peri-menopause the center of the ovary, the medulla begins to hypertrophy. That’s why healthy women make more testosterone at midlife and less estrogen. And if you have enough testosterone, which is sort of the hormone of desire, the hormone of life force, then your body will take that and make the necessary estrogen and progesterone.

Prudence Hall, MD, is the big hormone doctor in California whom Oprah was going to, and she has had women on the Wiley Protocol. This was Suzanne Somers’ approach also, namely, get your hormones at the level of a 21-year-old. And Suzanne Somers, and the Wiley Protocol aims to cycle your hormones so you have a period every month. Well, who wants a period every month in their eighties?

Most women don’t. And the Wiley Protocol gives you a period every month. What women didn’t know was that Suzanne Somers had a hysterectomy, so she doesn’t get a period every month. So that’s something that women should know. So, here’s the thing—we all want to die young as late as possible.

So, let’s talk about fertility after the age of 37. The reason I wrote Goddesses Never Age, is that what we call early aging in our culture is largely preventable, and a tremendous amount has to do with the way you think within the cultural portals. You know, so age 35 for a woman who hasn’t had a baby yet, that’s a cultural portal where she’s been taught by the culture that her eggs are all going to get old now and that fertility falls off like that. It doesn’t, it doesn’t.

However, I’ve seen women in their forties who are physiologically, biologically older than many women in their sixties. And the data, by the way, from Gina Ogden out of Harvard, who has a PhD in human sexuality, points out that many women in their sixties and seventies are having the best sex of their lives, and nobody hears about this. And so, if you need additional help, there’s additional help available. No woman should suffer from what’s called atrophic vaginitis. What that means is the lining of your vagina, which is very sensitive to estrogen, isn’t getting the estrogen that it needs.

There are creams that you can use to reverse that. I worked for years to create a vaginal gel that has Pueraria Mirifica, and it works really well. It’s nonprescription. However, regular sexual expression with a partner or alone keeps that area in good working order by bringing the blood into it. We’re sexual creatures our entire lives and there’s nothing about turning 40, turning 50, turning 60, turning 70 that changes our sexuality. But we’re taught in our culture that things are supposed to stop working.

Men’s Hormonal Health

What might you say about Men and their overall hormonal health?

Men are taught that they need Viagra at the age of 40. And this is a terrible thing to teach men because that does not need to happen at all. Dr Oz had one of my most favorite quotes: “The penis is the dipstick of men’s health.” Cardiovascular system health is reflected in one’s ability to get an erection. When men can get good, strong erections, which they can do their entire lives, it means that your cardiovascular system is in good working order. It’s also interesting that the penis is a barometer of life force. It is a turned-on woman or a turned-on man, whatever your preference is, that turns on the nitric oxide, that increases the blood flow to the penis.

We need to start celebrating this as a barometer of life force that men have, or those who identify as male to be politically correct have. And once you understand about this life force you know it’s available to you for your entire life. So, some people need hormones and some people don’t need hormones.

One in three women will have her ovaries removed by the age of 60 if this trend continues. You sure don’t hear about one in three men having his testicles removed by the age of 60, because even though that’s a cure for prostate cancer, no man is willing to lose the family jewels. Women are willing because we’ve been brainwashed into that and we’re afraid of cancer. So those are all issues that need to be part of the discussion. I don’t think that there’s an either-or answer for the hormones.

Women’s Health Initiative Scare

Will you address here the Women’s Health Initiative scare?

You know, in 1994 the first edition of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom came out. In it I wrote that the Women’s Health Initiative was using the wrong hormones at the wrong dose so they’re not going to find out what they wanted to find out. They believed that they would prove that hormone replacement decreased the risk of heart disease in women and therefore you needed to take these hormones. Then, in 2002, they suddenly stopped the Women’s Health Initiative overnight. It scared millions of women who thought, “Oh my God, I’m on these hormones, I’m going to get cancer, I’m going to get a stroke, I’m going to die.”

Ever since then, it seems the OB/GYN profession has been scrambling to come up with the truth? What is the truth? The truth is you need an individualized approach. So, you start with nutrition and lifestyle. Then consider herbs and supplements such as the iodine, vitamin D, magnesium, and maybe Pueraria Mirifica or maca. Then, and only then, if you need something extra, would I recommend the prescription hormones, but they need to be those that are found in the female human body. Those, by the way, are made from soybeans and wild Mexican yams. They start with that as the template and then in the lab, they do the conversions. But if you go to pharmaceuticals you’ll have something where they do the conversions to make something not found in nature (unless you have patented the glue that puts a natural patch on your skin). So that’s my big hormone spiel.

That was a masterclass on the practical aspects of what you do about menopause and female hormone balance. Why are women having such serious hormonal issues both before and after menopause? There’s a lot of estrogen dominance. There’s a lot of infertility. There’s a lot of early menopause. What’s going on in the modern world that is leading to these issues with female hormone imbalance?

Well, I would say the number one problem is too much insulin from a diet that’s too high in processed sugar. And when I say sugar, I’m also talking about white bread, white flour, junk foods, corn chips, anything that increases insulin. So, we’re seeing adult-onset diabetes in eight-year olds now all around the planet. We’re seeing pubic hair growing on six-year olds. And that is also because of hormone disruptors, the phthalates, which are found in many kinds of industrialized chemicals.

We have kind of this perfect storm now of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs and glyphosate presence. Roundup, which is based in glyphosate, is found in nearly every human being on the planet. That’s a hormone disruptor.

Also, let me be enormously controversial here because we’re not brought to you by any mainstream media and I’m not being paid, and that is to look at the fact that we are now injecting people with all of these neurotoxins starting at a young age.

Now, in the US, 99 percent of newborns get a hepatitis B vaccine, which contains 15 times the amount of aluminum that even the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, consider safe. Ironically, the only way you can get hepatitis B as an infant is to have sex with a prostitute or use a needle from a drug addict, or, obviously, if the mother has it, but that’s the only valid use for a hep-B vaccine at birth. So, what we’re doing now is we’re starting life by giving our babies, our infants what amounts to, and this is the schedule in the US, but in very many countries it’s the same, 72 different injections by the age of 18. All of which contain trace amounts of thimerosal, which is mercury, and this particular aluminum that’s not found in nature. People will say to you, “Oh, aluminum is safe. It’s in the Earth’s crust.” Unfortunately, that’s not the kind of aluminum used as an adjuvant in a vaccine.

Another thing was President Ronald Reagan was pressured by the vaccine manufacturers in 1986, because of their fear of financial liability, to make the manufacturers immune to liability. They started a vaccine court where the pharmaceutical industry pays in a little bit of money to give to those whose children have been vaccine injured. Well, the rate of autism in the 70s and 80s was one in 10,000. It’s now one in 40. Also, we know now the HPV vaccine has resulted in infertility and premature menopause in many, many girls. And the standard rhetoric, the standard narrative is that the HPV vaccine will prevent cervical cancer. This has never been proven. This is just another example of the environmental toxins people are exposed to in the US alone.

All put together it becomes a kind of a perfect storm: Insulin that is too high, which causes estrogen dominance and diabetes. Vitamin D that is way too low but it is needed to interact with all the different hormones. Then up to 72 different vaccines, all of which contain neurotoxins, are put in our children. When you read the insert (ingredients) on a vaccine injection you see formaldehyde, fetal cells, monkey cells, aluminum, thimerosal, even just trace amounts, and it’s all part of it. The birth rate is going down around the world. Is there some kind of conspiracy, population control? Well-baby checks these days are just about administering vaccines.

They could be saying, “Hey, let’s get the vitamin D levels optimal. Let’s make sure that hemoglobin A1c levels are optimal. Let’s get the inflammatory profile of omega-3 to omega-6 correct, let’s make sure that’s optimal.” Those would be the places to start. But in modern medicine the way is to wait until the horse is out of the barn and then we go back to fix the fences. “Wow,” we say, “I guess that fence was broken.” But we don’t even look at that beforehand. What we do is we start putting things on horses to get them to stop breaking out of the fence. It’s so backward. It’s nuts, really. There’s so much, you know. Then there’s exercise and meditation; they could be part of everyone’s health, and you know, don’t even get me started on people over-working at 40 to 80 hours a week.

Nutrition and Lifestyle Habits

When you’re talking about children, you could look directly at the nutrition and lifestyle habits that we know are either associated with poor outcomes, disease outcomes, or lifelong health and prevention of disease. If you see somebody living off of soda, donuts, and French fries, you know that you need not wait until something is manifesting in biomarkers or hormone disruption before you start a change.

That’s absolutely the truth. It’s obvious to us, to a lot of people. Remember that nutrition and its benefit is still not really taught in medical schools. Physicians who have had anything to say about nutrition back in the 1980s—well, I had to close my door so that my colleagues would not hear me when I talked to a woman about nutrition. It was considered so heretical then I couldn’t even talk to them. Then I would show up for lunch with my brown rice and my seaweed and all of that and other doctors would just make fun of me. My aunt who was a pediatrician gave me a book called The Nuts Among the Berries when I went to medical school because she was convinced that diet had nothing to do with health. Insane.

I’m glad you brought that up because at one time that model, the idea that nutrition was not playing any role in these diseases, was thought to be really advanced, sort of cutting-edge medical knowledge.

That’s right. However, the good news is all over the planet, there are what we would call subcultures of wellness. They’re not part of this fast food nation. Here in Maine we have an enormous number of farm-to-table restaurants, a lot of organic food, and that’s happening across the country. It’s almost like, as the old is dying, this new is rising at the same time. But you’re not going to see it in the mainstream media. That’s going to be the last place you see it because the mainstream media is brought to you by the same old paradigm. I was watching this show called “Forensic Files” with a friend of mine. He loves this show. I could not believe the drug ads. Every 10 minutes, five minutes, there are ads for these drugs that I, as a physician, have never heard of, and the side effects of them are unbelievable. Talk about a dinosaur that needs to come to an end.

So, nutrition and lifestyle changes are really the foundation for women’s hormonal health.

Absolutely.

And whether we’re talking about estrogen dominance or how to avoid early menopause or whether we’re talking about infertility, hormonal balance, or post menopause, the foundation is nutrition and lifestyle.

Always, always. There’s no way around it. And I would say the biggest issue is excess sugar. What I mean is added sugar, not whole food sugar. For example, Anthony William, the medical medium, talks about fear of fruit. Many people think that fruit has got too many carbohydrates and sugar. For most people that is not true. Fruit is so loaded with hydrating nutrients, stage-four gel water, and it’s absorbed very, very quickly. So, fruit is not under question. The issue is to avoid foods that spike your blood sugar, and that includes all the fake foods that nobody should be eating.

Would you speak to the interconnections between meditation, nutrition, taking certain supplements or decreasing the stress load in your life, exercise, sleep, circadian rhythm changes and vitamin D, and how they are intimately connected with estrogen and progesterone and testosterone and all these other hormones?

Yes, gladly. The biggest wake-up call for me was the work of Rollin McCraty, PhD, at the Institute of Heart Math. What Rollin demonstrated was that when you get into cardiac resonance—that’s where the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system balance. Sympathetic is fight or flight, parasympathetic is rest and restore. When those two are balanced, then the beat to beat variability of the heart, which is called cardiac coherence is accomplished.

That is measurable, and there’s software available where you can put a little finger sensor on, and you can determine when you’re in cardiac coherence. Well, guess what, you’re in cardiac coherence with the breath. So, breathing through your nose and breathing out through your nose will put you into cardiac coherence. So, if we were to just take a moment, and let’s do this experiment. Let’s have everybody breathe in through their mouth. Mouth breathing is a stress response. So, breathe, take a deep breath through your mouth and then let it out. Okay. Now let’s rest a minute and let’s take a deep breath in through our nose. Here we go, in and out through your nose. Now when you did do that a couple times, what difference did you notice in the breath through your mouth versus the breath through your nose?

It was definitely more relaxing when I breathed deeply through the nose.

Yes, and it’s also deeper because there are these turbinates in the nose that go right down to the diaphragm. And so, you literally shoot the air down to the lower lobes of the lungs, not only where the blood is, but where the vagus nerve, which is the principal nerve of the parasympathetic system, goes through the diaphragm. So, you engage the rest and restore parasympathetic nervous system just through breathing through your nose and maybe holding it a moment at the top. Now, when you go through life breathing that way through your nose and even exercising that way, proven by the work of John Douillard, DC, then you’re going to maintain cardiac coherence. And when you’re in cardiac coherence hormones harmonize. The level of DHEA, the mother hormone, which is produced by the adrenals, increases and that will go through the pathways and create the balance of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone that your body needs. Cardiac coherence increases DHEA. Therefore, you now have the raw material for the hormones you need, the sex steroids that you need, progesterone, estrogen, testosterone.

Many people worry that, “Oh no, I have a hormonal imbalance,” but then as I just demonstrated to you breathing through your nose will begin to change that hormonal imbalance because it also does something else. Breathing through the nose begins to digest the excess stress hormones, cortisol and epinephrine, and therefore, the metabolic pathways are instantly shifted. See, in the face of stress hormones, cortisol and epinephrine, your DHEA or your estrogen will actually be metabolized into another stress hormone called catechol estrogen. This was taught by Joel Hargrove, MD. So, in the face of stress hormones, the body is going to take the sex steroid hormones, and make additional stress hormones. But when you are calmed, you’re going to take that same DHEA or estrogenic raw material and it’ll go down a pathway of normality.

Even just something as simple as breathing is going to affect very important hormones in profound ways. So, people might find from testing that their cortisol level is high and think they need to be on cortisone therapy, or need a supplement to fix their adrenals, but they really only need to fix the lifestyle factors that are impacting the amount of secretion of that stress hormone.

Right. Also, people are very hung up on hormone testing. Well, here’s the problem. The hormones change minute-to-minute, so if you’re going to get a hormone profile, I would do what’s called the DUTCH test, which stands for Dried Urine Test for Comprehensive Hormones.

When you buy it, they’ll send you something like five strips and you pee on those through the day, so you’ve got about four to five points on a graph, and it’ll give you an idea. However, I have found over the years that hormone testing, other than for thyroid markers, is generally not very helpful because it’s just measuring one point in time, and testosterone levels, for instance, peak in the morning.

I have seen so many times people do hormone panels and literally, you can split-test it from one day to the next and you can get wildly different results in the same individual on the same hormonal panels from one day to the next. Or you do different types of hormonal testing, like saliva versus blood testing versus urine testing and you get totally contradictory results.

And then what happens is people think you can take their incomplete results to the bank. I’ve been in this for 30 years, and if the testing were useful, I would know it by now!

So, in 2002, there was the Women’s Health Initiative study, and this sort of bombshell about the study saying hormonal replacement is dangerous. A lot of doctors became confused as to whether they should be recommending it or not. Then there was a reanalysis of that same data and they basically concluded that when you look at women who started the hormonal replacement very soon after menopause, it actually showed net benefits. And so, Seibel is essentially saying, “Hey, for women in menopause, hormonal replacement is a very good thing.” My take on it is in addition to that you should also be working on your nutrition and lifestyle habits. However, it seems what you’re saying is that nutrition and lifestyle is the foundation or core of what’s really going to promote hormonal balance, along with helpful herbs and supplements, and then if you still need further help, that’s when you should be looking into hormonal replacement.

That’s my approach. Absolutely. And I know all the data he’s talking about. JoAnn Manson, that whole group, the Women’s Health Initiative, they have massaged the data about this huge cohort study. When I began practice in the early ’80s, we suddenly were terrified of hormone replacement because all of these women were getting uterine cancer from Premarin. So, then they brought in Provera, medroxyprogesterone acetate, which they saw as a vacuum cleaner for the uterus, so you wouldn’t get a waxy buildup that would result in endometrial cancer. Yes, suddenly hormone replacement went out of favor. I’ve been in it long enough to see the pendulum swing. And thank God women have access to this kind of information now, but there’s no one right answer for everybody. That’s what I think we finally have to get across. And we can’t allow mainstream doctors to tell us what the best thing is because if you look at the downside history of medicine, with thalidomide and the Dalkon Shield IUD, and I swear, as I live and breathe, the HPV vaccine, you don’t have a good track record about these things. You know, people believed doctors saying, “If that were dangerous they would have told us.” Well, let’s take another example: Vioxx. How many people died unnecessarily because of that? So, you’ve got to have a balance between your intellect, your medical care, and your own intuition to find the right answer for you.

Yes. You talk about people being a partner with their physicians in the decision-making process, and because there are so many options out there, you need to be armed with facts. So, I guess my final question to you would be, do you have any recommended resource such as your book on this subject, as being the best for women who want to be armed with as many of the facts as possible about how to approach hormonal balance post menopause?

I think that my book, The Wisdom of Menopause lays out the big picture of what’s going on, and I’ve never seen anything that’s like it. On the other hand, there are many, many books on menopause and on bioidentical hormones. There’s Suzanne Somers’, The Sexy Years, and she does a lot with supplements and nutrition. So, I think she’s made a great contribution. But I would say if you just read the first five chapters of The Wisdom of Menopause you’re going to find the information there.

Excellent. Thank you so much. I’ve really, really enjoyed this conversation. It’s been such a pleasure. So, thank you for your time, and I will talk to you again very soon.

Very good. I look forward to that!

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Balancing Hormones Naturally: An Interview with Christiane Northrup, MD

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