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SUSAN BRATTON
Welcome to the Sexual Vitality Summit. I’m your host, Susan Bratton, and I have the most venerable, inventive, fact-filled, beautiful doctor for you on this segment. You may have noticed that I usually jump into things and don’t spend time talking about a person’s background, history, or curriculum vitae. Dr. Jonathan Wright, a Harvard University graduate, and MD at the University of Michigan, has a six-page curriculum vitae, written or co-written 15 books, honors and awards, boards, professional achievements, speeches, keynotes, and interviews. I want to give you highlights because I want you to understand who you are watching at this particular moment.
The jewel in the crown of the Sexual Vitality Summit is happening now. Board of directors, University of naturopathic medicine, the fabulous Joe Pizzorno presides ongoing the American Association for health freedom advisor, the life extension foundation board of advisors. He’s written or co-authored 14 books. A couple of highlights are the book Nutritional Therapy. You’ve heard us talking about that on the summit, the guide to healing with nutrition, natural hormone replacement for women over 45, maximize your vitality and potency for men over 40, stay young and sexy with bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, the science explained, and eating clean for dummies.
JONATHAN WRIGHT
I want to call out a couple of honors, the international hall of fame, the literary medical award, the Linus Pauling award for orthomolecular health medicine, and the pioneer award for promoting access to natural remedies and dietary supplements. Those are a smattering of the six pages of awards and accomplishments Dr. Jonathan Wright has attained and is going strong.
In this episode, we talk about bioidentical hormone replacement and not just its association with libido but its support to your cognitive function, musculoskeletal health, and prevention of Alzheimer’s. I also want to talk about aldosterone with Dr. Wright. I’m very interested in hearing loss. The first person I ever heard about that from was Abe Morgenthaler, and I’m sure he found out about that from you. Let’s put a bookmark in that one.
Take us down the road of how you created this concept of bioidentical hormone replacement.
HORMONE THERAPY
Thank you very much for the introduction. You didn’t need to suffer through all that but thank you very much. I want to clarify that even though bioidentical hormones were first prescribed in the United States and the rest of the world in the early 1980s here at Tahoma clinic, they couldn’t have been done without two things. One is a pharmacist in Vancouver, British Columbia, the only pharmacist I could persuade to source the materials needed for bioidentical hormones. His name is Ed Thorpe. This could not have been done without Ed. How did I get the idea? I got it from two places. Not everyone is aware that bioethical hormone therapy originated in China in 1050.
There’s a book by Joseph Needham, who was allowed access to many old records in China by Mao Xitang. Needham happened to be a communist and was from the UK. He found that bioidentical hormone replacement was done in the emperor’s court in 1050 and continued being done in China until the eighteen hundreds. For some reason, it died out. But when they drink pregnant women’s urine, that’s how they came up with Premarin. This is human, so it works better. It’s a bioidentical drink.
WHY HORMONES ARE GOOD FOR YOU
The emperor decreed at the recommendation of the priests that the court thawasa building is built for the young ladies to urinate in. The young ones were between 18 and their mid-20s. Young men went over here. They had these long shallow troughs filled with urine. Once they were all full, they let them evaporate. The youngest priests, like the interns at our modern hospitals, went in there with gums and resins, and they would roll them through the troughs and accumulate the molecules that had dried out of the urine. The ones from the young men’s area would be given to the emperor, and those from the young women’s area would be given to the empress and her buddies. Everybody felt better.
Did you know it was more complete than today’s bioidentical hormones because it contained every hormone in the human body? I am so glad to hear about this because I’ve always been worried that if there’s a nuclear explosion and I am one of the last people left, what will I do to get my bioidentical hormones? I’m going to harvest the urine of the young women and dry it out and sniff it.
NATURAL MEDICINE
I brought it up to say that our ancestors were as bright and dumb as we are equal parts of each. Much of what I do in medicine is not original. It’s going back to our ancestors. That looks like a good idea; let’s see if it works. In the early 1980s, a woman wanted hormone replacement therapy. Remember, I’d only been doing natural medicine for a few years, so I wrote a prescription. She must have been a school teacher because she could read upside down. She said that the medication was for primer. I said yes. She says I wanted natural hormones. I said I know horses are honest. She said do I look like a horse? Guys have learned never to answer that question. I said what’s in the human body isn’t available now except for estradiol. These other hormones are not available.
For any guy who’s ever been married, she said, I’m sure you can take care of that just like your wife always does. That’s when I called different promises to find out who could provide a basic set of hormones identical to the human body. The reason it is essential is the permanence of horses. It has one thousand times the strength of the endometrium of ladies compared to human estrogen. It’s bad. Other things like Provera had artificial progesterone, ultimately found to be the cause of most problems in the women’s health initiative. Everybody should follow natural medicine and copy nature because if you don’t, it’s like if you own a Chevrolet and you’re trying to fix it with Toyota parts. That won’t work well. You’ve got to set your Chevy with Chevy parts, and we’ve got to fix human bodies if they need fixing.
OUR ANCESTORS
The big deal is to prevent problems. We’ve got to fix human bodies with what’s in human bodies. How come nobody’s taken human urine and found all the delicious things in it again? What are the missing things we’re not getting when we’re just taking estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone? In 2006, a brand new hormone was discovered in the liver. If we wanted to use it, we could, but that only started in 2006. These ancestors in China in 1050 knew that everything in a human body ultimately came out of the human body. They didn’t have to worry about whether they knew what it was. It was all there in younger bodies. When doing healthcare, we want to work with molecules naturally present in the human body.
Secondly, frequencies are commonly found in human bodies. We know that nerves operate on frequencies, but we don’t know that homeopathy is the frequency of the substances. If we work with frequencies and energies found in human bodies that have been there for the last 400,000 years, we won’t make a billion dollars from patenting it. That is the flaw in our system. The people who approve of things only want to back patented molecules. Everyone knows the cost. The Tufts university center for developing drugs published in 2014 online that approval costs 2.6 billion dollars per patent medicine bill. The process of going through the approval process.
CALM DOWN
If every woman has the right to control her body through abortions, why do we have to be approved? Why can’t we use anything we want to for our bodies without having it approved by King George III? We can do that if we mess with our bodies and have an abortion. The Supreme court says, so we don’t have to be approved. Sometimes I have to get that out of my system to calm down.
We’re going for male and female hormones and cognitive function. That is the most crucial thing that hormones do for male folks. It’s testosterone for ladies. It’s estrogen. There’s research that shows the earlier woman has menopause, the greater her risk of cognitive decline. The longer she goes without her ovarian hormones because she had early menopause, the more likely she has that cognitive decline. If you even work with young men who have plenty of testosterone but come up with a way of blocking the activity of their Testosterone. they lose part of their cognitive function. I didn’t say they lost all of it; I didn’t say they have Alzheimer’s. They just don’t have a good memory about certain things as they did, and that’s in younger men blocking the testosterone.
ESTROGEN
Researchers around the turn of the last century found that the things which accumulate in the brain called tau protein beta-amyloid neurofibrillary tangles accumulate at a much slower rate if there’s testosterone present with male neurons.
If estrogen is in female neurons, the rate is 80 percent slower, with testosterone for men and estrogen for women. Why am I fixated on this cognitive function? The ladies keep quiet about it, but when guys see a doctor, they say, “I want to know about my testosterone. My sex life isn’t so good.” It might help if you need this stuff, but sex life shouldn’t be our focus if you don’t focus on cognitive function and can’t remember who or what you did with.
SEXUAL FUNCTION
What’s your sexual function? Let’s do the cognitive; if the sexual function follows that, it will, so much the better. Do not focus on sexual function. Let’s retain our brain function and keep things working up there. That applies to both men and women. It’s testosterone for men and estrogen for ladies. It has much research behind it for maintaining cognitive function. So, that is one of the better reasons for bioidentical impact. It’s the best replay thing for natural hormone replacement.
What is so silly is that people who approve things, that federal agency full of public servants, are mounting two separate attacks on bioidentical hormones and trying to give compounding pharmacies a hard time in being able to compound. They have gradually raised the price by imposing regulations for public safety. They say that public safety doesn’t involve maintaining your cognitive function. I don’t care much about that; we need to stop this attack on natural hormones.
COMPRESS HORMONES
I can tell everyone how to do that in ten minutes or less. There is a website that focuses on threats to natural medicine. It’s called the alliance for natural health. You’ll see on the first screen saver by the little hormones. Here, say natural medicine and a short but coherent article tells you what is happening. These folks at the alliance for natural health are very accurate. They give you about a page worth and say if you don’t want this to happen, click here to take action. An e-letter comes up, and if you put in your postal code, it will send it to the senators from your state and one representative from your district. That letter summarizes what the current problem is and what is being done by our public servants to compress the hormones.
It tells the Congress people in short detail what is happening and that you don’t like it and would like to have something done about it. Click here, and off it goes. Do I know that this is successful? I do because, in 2008, our public servants sent all the compounding pharmacies everywhere in the country a letter that says thou shalt not put estriol which is one of the principal estrogens, into compounded private elements for women.
PUBLIC SAFETY
They claim to protect public safety, but they’re destroying it because estriol is the only one of the three principal estrogens that are strictly anticarcinogenic. They want us to leave the carcinogenic ones and remove the anticarcinogenic ones. That’s public safety. They do that because they want to patent an alternative, so we are forced to buy a patented non-bioidentical product because there’s no bioidentical product left in the marketplace. How did you guess that? They said it was based on a citizen complaint, and guess who was complaining? The makers of Premarin. They were responding to a citizen complaint by getting rid of estriol.
Alliance financial health is a free membership organization. They send you a bulletin attacking natural medicine. Out comes a publication to your computer; otherwise, they don’t bother you. At that time, they had 300,000 members. Now they have over 500,000, and those 300,000 members sent over a hundred thousand emails into Congress within the next week and a half, and our public servants backed off. It is accomplishable. I would encourage people to please join the Alliance for Natural Health. They will not bother you unless you say they can send you bulletins. You can read the facts and send the letter, or if you don’t like the letter they wrote, you can make one up yourself and send it in.
BIOIDENTICAL
I wanted you to explain your opinion about supplementing with bioidentical hormones throughout one’s life until the day you die. I hear if a man increases testosterone, he’ll stop making his own and won’t be able to make his own again. He doesn’t want to go on testosterone because he would lose his ability to produce testosterone. I never hear that about women. If a woman takes estrogen replacement, she loses her ability, yet her ability diminishes when she goes through menopause. Those are confusing pieces of information, I hear. We’re focused on 40-70 and beyond. We’re talking about midlife and people in perimenopause or post-menopausal mid-life men.
Let’s talk about your recommendation for good guidance for bioidenticals from that age onward. Thank you for bringing that up. You’re right. It is obvious that once the ovaries quit working, no one has found a way to bring them back to life. Women won’t suppress anything. She will replace something that can’t come back, so it’s an easy decision that I encourage all to consider. After that, everybody has a right to run their health so they can decide whether they want to use them, but at least they should be informed and not be stopped by our public servants in Washington.
TESTOSTERONE
For men, it’s a different story. The ability to make testosterone declines slowly with time which is why Charlie Chaplin’s wife had a baby at age 81. Records about men’s and women’s hormone levels have been kept for years. Back in the 50s, testosterone was significantly higher than today. Why? It’s called herbicides, pesticides, toxic chemicals, and glyphosate circling the planet. Most have a terrible habit of inhibiting younger women’s hormones and their menopause and men’s testosterone over time. Two toxic metals that mess with the guy’s testosterone. They are lead and cadmium.
One of the magazines reported biopsying penguin fat in Antarctica and found blood, cadmium, and pigment fat. Antarctica has no factories, so this is blowing around the planet. Our testosterone capability has been suppressed, which does not mean we need to supply testosterone immediately. It means we must look at testosterone at a younger age, in our 40s. Our grandpas didn’t have to worry until they were 60 to get their testosterone levels measured. If you still can make testosterone, you have a fighting chance to make more.
JOSEPH ROSANO
If you did an excellent job until your oldest grandpa when he needed bioidenticals because his testosterone gave out, and that was in his 70s. How do you do that? Thank you for mentioning this name. You read Dr. Joseph Rosano’s book, and this is a beautiful, wonderfully written book on detoxification. It’s called the Toxin Solution. He did a beautiful job with a slow detoxification strategy.
Have you heard about Cytodetox? It’s something I’ve heard from all 30 doctors at this summit. We need our gut microbiomes back in shape from the antibiotics in our foods and pharmaceuticals that have been given to us. We need detoxification. Get that gut moving and the detoxification flowing. That will help us make more natural hormones. If we take bioidentical hormones, it’s not making us make fewer hormones. It’s adding to what we’re already making ourselves. It’s not a zero-sum game. You can make more of your endogenous hormones while you add exogenous bioidenticals to top yourself off. You must work with someone who knows what they’re doing because you can only pile on so much extra testosterone before you suppress.
DETOXIFY
With women, it’s different. Compile as much as you want. You’re not suppressing anything if the ovaries are shut off. With testosterone, you can detoxify. The second thing after detoxification is putting in the nutrients that stimulate testosterone. There’s a list of those in newsletter articles every month. One can find out what nutrients produce one’s testosterone.
First, you detoxify because otherwise, you’re standing in a sewer trying to lift the maintenance hole cover, but the toxins are on top, preventing you from stealing it. Once you get the toxins off the surface, the nutrients lift you in your testosterone production, and you see where you get with that. If you don’t get as much as you want by measuring your feelings and lab tests, you can add small amounts without suppressing them. If you go too far, it will stop. As a guy, you need to work with a physician more often than the ladies to ensure you don’t suppress over time.
By the time we are 70, unless you’re Charlie Chaplin, you’ll need plain old testosterone replacement from there on, but that doesn’t apply to everybody, just most folks. I know seven-year-old guys who vigorously tried to detoxify and take those nutrients, and they’re still hanging in there. They don’t need supplemental testosterone.
TOP NUTRIENTS
What top nutrients could a man take to support natural testosterone production? Two of the best are zinc and vitamin A. Zinc is known to stimulate the hormones that make testosterone. Vitamin A stimulates the testes directly. Again, the newsletter lists 10, including zinc, vitamin a, and boron.
Boron is a mineral on the periodic table with all the other good minerals like zinc. Hormones come in a bound fraction bound up in a free fraction. The free fraction does all the work and is a loose testosterone and estrogen molecule. The bound fraction has this ample old protein, and other molecules stuck to it like a carrier truck that carries it around the body and doesn’t do anything until it becomes free to contact the receptors. Boron helps to take it off the car and put it into circulation. It doesn’t raise the testosterone itself. It increases the active fraction of testosterone, and that’s very important.
PRESCRIPTIONS
I like zinc and vitamin A the best because they stimulate the growth hormone. When we were younger, we were on zinc and vitamin A and could produce growth hormones. When we’re older, it helps that too. Is the growth hormone something you can supplement without any issues, or is that problematic to replace? It’s only tricky because politicians think they know better than everyone else, namely lawmakers. If you’re in Nevada, you’ve got no problem getting growth home on prescriptions. It’s legal. But in other states, if you try to prescribe growth hormone, they will come after your medical license. That one is variable depending on where you live. It is the legalities that you have to navigate if you want to do this.
What is the best approach for someone who doesn’t know anything about bioidentical hormone replacement but is interested in it but is on a limited budget? Bioidentical hormone replacement therapy and human growth hormone are celebrity things. Rich people can afford them, but poor people’s doctors are like, I’ll do a blood test. You’re in the normal range. You don’t need it. They get pushed off because they can’t afford to go to a naturopath, functional medicine, or integrative doctor. These doctors have found the niche of supplying and filling that gap for the lack of knowledge in the traditional allopathic medical system.
A STRICT BUDGET
What can someone on a strict budget do? They know this would make a big difference in their life from cognitive, libido, musculoskeletal, and protective functions. They’re pretty stuck. Prices are high because certain public servants have imposed restrictions on compounding pharmacies, increasing costs. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be rules and regulations on compounding pharmacies. They should be a lot less than they are and should be regulated as they were supposed to be by each state. Each state has a board of pharmacy. If you have 50 panels of pharmacy, it will cost a whole lot less.
At this time, the regulation of compounding pharmacies has been delegated to a specific federal agency, and they get to regulate everybody. It’s a uniform opinion from one place. Someone pointed out that between the early 1990s and 2016, pharmaceutical companies paid billions directly to that public agency. What do you think that public agency is going to be towards? They regulate the compounding pharmacies. Why doesn’t the state board of pharmacy do that anymore? If we want to bring costs down, we need to get back the regulation of our state boards by our compounding pharmacies in each state. That would bring the price down nicely. Other than that, we’re stuck.
HEALTHCARE
Given the present circumstances, people can get a telemedicine doctor in a state with more liberal, less costly regulations and have their tests done through that telemedicine doctor and have the prescriptions filled in Vegas and mailed to them. That is one of the quote-unquote loopholes if you can’t get bioidenticals prescribed by your healthcare provider.
Everybody says that if their libido is low, their hormones are common, and if they took hormone replacement therapy, they’d get their libido back. We understand there’s a body-mind-spirit connection. Your sexual desire is part of your connection to your partner, how you feel about yourself, the context of lovemaking, blood sugar levels, general health, and how your guts flow. There are all these extraneous circumstances. The thing that nobody’s ever explained to me about hormones is that it supports our desire and libido. What’s the mechanism that makes hormones affect libido?
CREATE LIBIDO
In all my reading, I’ve not found anyone who told us exactly where the hormones work to create libido. There’s a misconception that hormones are not the only thing that stimulates libido. To give you an extreme example, there’s a drug for Parkinson’s disease. It is an artificial molecule. When people take this, one in thousands will become a nymphomaniac if she’s female, and we will chase all the ladies if he’s male. This drug artificially works on the dopamine pathway in the brain.
Do we need a synthetic drug for that? No, we don’t. Did we have ancestors who wanted to have libidos? Yes, we did. There happens to be a botanical from India from Ayurvedic medicine. A few centuries ago, somebody had decided to name all the botanicals with Latin names. The Latin name is mucuna, but the second name is spelled p-r-u-r-i-e-n-s. Anybody who follows that spelling knows the word prurient and period interest. We can be charged with a crime of too much prayer and interest. In other words, we’re too much interested in sex. It was named centuries ago because it was known by the Latin neighbor that it helped boost most people’s sex drive. If you look online, in your local compounding pharmacy, health food store, or even our small dispensary, everybody’s got mucuna on the shelf now.
KNOWLEDGE
The problem is if the salesperson in that store were to tell you what this stuff does, they could be arrested by our public servants because they’re not allowed to tell the truth about the science behind supplements. Politics keeps getting into things. They can’t put on the label that the macuna-purians have been found through the centuries to help increase the sex drive. They can arrest you if they tell you and if you’re an undercover agent. You have to find this out on your own; it is available and compatible with everybody.
Check with your physician knowledgeable in natural medicine and talk about this stuff because it’s as potent as bringing on the libido as the hormones are. It works again in the brain. There is a lot of ancestral wisdom, and there have been botanicals from every continent for thousands of years that humans have found to stimulate their desire.
A BIGGER PENIS
Nobody ever turned down a bigger penis and more desire. These are what we always want. We want to feel more lust, passion, and attraction. That feeds into your frustrations. Yohimbine was an African botanical before Viagra was invented. Doctors prescribed yohimbine. There was even a pharmaceutical derivative of yohimbine dispensed by doctors through the pharmaceutical system. When Viagra came out to the public, some laws said products with Yohimbe were illegal to sell in the US. They wanted to put the botanicals out of business. You cannot collect a more significant approval fee unless you have it exclusive. It’s not worth the investor’s money to put the 2.3 billion dollars into a botanical product. The other issue is all the marketing information is regulated with macuna-purians, yohimbine, or fenugreek, an Indian ayurvedic, Tribulus Terrestris, or Tongkat Ali, a Malaysian botanical.
I do what I can to keep people safe, healthy, young, energetic, and full of sexual vitality. I was glad to have this conversation with you about bioidenticals because there’s been so much vilification of hormone replacement therapy. How can you vilify something that belongs in your body? That has been there for the last 60 years without hurting you, and you’re calling it dangerous?
You’ve been prescribing bioidenticals for people for a long time, and you’re an old guy doing great. How old are you? My mother says I was born in 1945 but was unconscious then, so I don’t remember. How old does that make you? 74. You’ve been supplementing with testosterone for how many years and doing detoxification? The buildup stopped working in my late 60s.
LIVE HEALTHIER
That picture of myself and my wife at the state fair last year. I was 73. Could you guess how old my wife was? I have her permission. I’d say she looks about 42. I imagine she’s in her 60s because you were in your 70s when this picture was taken.
She was 78. She’s a little older than you are. You always want to marry an older man because women live longer than men, so we don’t want the same age. We’ll die sooner. She looks incredible, beautiful, and lovely.
That’s what bioidentical hormones can do for both genders, but more for women because guys know that women invariably look better than us. She was at that time 78, and nobody would believe it until she got her driver’s license. She’s been going strong on bioidenticals for 30 years. Menopause is at 50.
It’s been 29 years this year. Do you find that people do better? How do you decide between intravaginal estrogen or estrogen cream patches? What are your current state-of-the-art delivery systems?
PERIANAL MUCOSA
Are there particular ways you like to provide a bioidentical replacement for men and women? I have a lot of experience with it. Ed Thorpe helped put this program together in the US for the first time since the 1800s. I learned early on about mucous membranes in the lips and surfaces of the labia and the vaginal area. Guys have a mucous membrane in the pelvic area called the perianal mucosa.
The mucous membranes absorb better than the skin. We never want to swallow that stuff because research says that consuming estrogen leads to blood clots in some people, and rubbing it on never does. Ingesting testosterone has equally harmful effects because estrogen is made in ovaries, and testicles make the testosterone. The hormones go to the heart from those two places, distributing them to every cell. The liver gets a bit when we swallow; we bombard the liver with that stuff. The liver doesn’t know what to do because it never deals with this in life, so it causes problems.
A woman kept track of herself every few months with tests over time. She would rub the hormone in over two years. Her test kept going down even though she rubbed the same amount on the skin.
MUCUS MEMBRANE
I told her why don’t you try putting it on the mucous membrane of the vaginal area or the inner labia and run the test. We didn’t change quantities. Her next test was right back up to where it started. That’s where I learned that as long as she rubbed it into those areas, it stayed at the same excellent level, but skin over time doesn’t want to absorb even if you put it in different areas. I happen to name that dermal fatigue. The skin gets tired of drinking the hormones. The best place is to rub the stuff into mucus membranes because it keeps absorbing.
For men, the mucous membrane is in the rectum. You can’t necessarily rub it on the anus or the perineal area, or even the scrotal tissue. The scrotum is not a mucus membrane. If you feel like it, lift it and look. It’s still skin, but if you happen to be four years old with a mirror and you look t your rear end and pull apart, you’ll see right around the anal opening is a ring about half an inch that looks like lip tissue. It hasn’t got the fat under it. That mucus membrane can be absorbed very well if you want to put it on. You don’t have to stick it inside. It won’t soak well if you get on the skin around it.
DMSO
I’m not affiliated with this product, but it gets around skin problems for some people. That’s a combination of DMSO and Aloe Vera gel. It’s sold in all the stores as DMSO Aloe. It’s always 70 DMSO and 30 alloys to maintain the absorptive capability, unlike liquid DMSO, which can run off your skin. It smells and gives you sulfur breath. When you combine it with the aloe, you get a bit of sulfur but not bad.
Remember, DMSO will take anything through your skin, so you must ensure your skin is clean. I don’t have to put it on my rear end. Guys, I can put it in my hand. Make sure it’s clean first because the dirt will go in. Rub in your hormone, get DMSO and aloe, and rub it vigorously until the whole thing disappears. It doesn’t work for everybody, but it works better than 50. Whoever the genius inventors of this DMSO were, congratulations.
ORGANIC
I have been having my bioidenticals compounded in organic coconut oil because I discovered that you’re going to a compounding pharmacy and having bioidenticals made and rubbing them onto your vaginal mucosa. I asked what was in the carrier cream. It is garbage what they put in the carrier cream. I have them formulate mine in organic coconut oil, but for a new carrier cream for compounding pharmacies that are supposed to be all organic, they don’t list the ingredients on their website. I don’t trust it. I’ve looked at new pharmaceutical companies launching with venture capital money to help women through menopause.
They have pharmaceutical products supposed to be vaginal creams and all-natural. They’re full of long words. I don’t know what they are. There’s no place you can even google to figure out how a chemical is made—for example, silicone. I’m moving into sexual lubricants because that’s another area of frustration around natural health. People are using horrible sexual oils full of terrible chemicals and putting them on their vaginal mucosa, which is awful.
OILS
I’ve been a proponent of organic coconut and avocado oil, but a woman wrote to me recently and said it’s suitable for people who don’t use condoms, but I want to use a condom. I said to use polypropylene and polyisoprene. She said yeah, but they’re all lubricated, and the condom manufacturers don’t have to write what they use in the lubricants on the product. They’re petrochemicals and disgusting, so that’s not regulated. We can’t say that mucuna-proteins will help you with libido. It’s a natural botanical. We live in this same world of frustration about people’s health and natural medicines that we’re stymied every step of the way the deeper you go into it and realize chemicals have infiltrated every part of our world.
I was happy to hear you talking about detoxification. First, you must build up as many hormones as possible and supplement them.
I’m interested in aldosterone because it helps with hearing loss. In my family, they had hearing loss, and it’s incredibly frustrating. It isolates you. What can we do in middle age to protect ourselves from hearing loss? Is aldosterone a key, and what other bioidentical hormones should we be aware of to keep supplementing our youth?
RESEARCH
Insofar as the hearing loss part, I often rely on the work of researchers and just implement it in clinical practice. A professor at the University of Oregon, Dennis True Ph.D., found that rats were going deaf. He found that some had low aldosterone. They had low aldosterone. He discovered that aldosterone, an adrenal hormone, could restore hearing in these mice. Did I find that out? No. One of the groups I admire, among others, is engineers. This engineer, who was deaf in one ear and starting to go deaf in the other, found an article about Dr. Trune’s research. He brought it in to see me and asked if this could apply to people. I said I don’t know. Not because this hormone is made in both animals and people.
Let’s check your levels first. There’s no point in supplementing if you don’t need it. His aldosterone level was low. They gave him artificial steroids to bring it back, but those had ceased working on one side. They’re always going to stop working. Their molecules don’t belong in the body. He only had one ear’s worth of hearing left, but he took that aldosterone. He got the majority of his hearing back. That was in 2004. He is still using that aldosterone and has a hearing in one ear.
He took aldosterone and measured his levels; his grades went too high when he took even more aldosterone. I had to tell him I know you’re an engineer. You think that looks better, but that doesn’t belong in human bodies at that level. It’s the quantity, the molecule, that belongs in there that’s important too.
IS IT DIFFERENT?
He backed down but wanted to prove he was an engineer. It was working, so he quit. His hearing went away. He went back to it. His hearing came back, and this was in one ear. The other ears are permanently deaf. He tries to go off for the third time. His wife told him you go off the third time, and I’m going to divorce you because it’s bad enough you can’t hear in one ear. I won’t be married to a man who can’t attend in both ears. Stay on that aldosterone. He’s done it ever since.
I like working with engineers. They’re the people who like the quantified self. They want data, and I do too. These are the quantified biohackers.
What is a good range for aldosterone? Is it different for men and women?
It’s the same because the adrenal function is the same. We’ve sent people with this problem to our clinic doctors, who are good at collecting statistics. She finds it works slightly over 50 of the time and doesn’t work 100 of the time. For those 50, it’s beneficial. Your question about the normal range is on the test page.
What are other hormones we should be looking at for anti-aging and longevity? What are you using or giving your patients that look interesting?
Since we can’t get young people’s urine, everything in it, we need to use individual things. We measure other hormones; we don’t just measure estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, or DHEA. Those are the ones we know about.
LAB TESTS
We measure oxytocin and melatonin. Melatonin helps the pancreatic eyelet cells and is not just for sleeping. It helps keep them healthy. Oxytocin, even though it’s supposed to be the hormone of love, it’s the hormone of keeping your bones and muscles. About seven years ago, research showed meticulous step-by-step hormone research that oxytocin stimulates the stem cells in power to make new muscle.
Ladies need a dab of testosterone to support their muscles because muscle is not endorsed by estrogen in either gender. If they are nervous about going past the dab because they might get a mustache, they’ll say how about oxytocin because that stimulates new muscles too. Besides that, it helps you to sleep better.
There’s aldosterone, but we always measure the adrenal hormones—the list of cortisol, cortisone, and all their derivatives. If our adrenals weaken, we have severe stress, such as in our 80s. How many people die in their 80s of pneumonia compared to people in their 40s? What’s the difference?
WEAKER
The adrenals sometimes will grow weaker over time. There’s andropause for men. Androgens go down. There’s menopause. It goes down for women. Even though it’s called menopause, it’s still women-pause. Have you ever heard of mammoth gastro-pause? The Mayo Clinic reported this in 1932. Doctor Francis van Zandt and her team did this type of stomach testing in the 1930s; they pumped the stomach out and measured the acid. They counted 3700 people, adults, every decade of life from 20 to 80. They found that in their 20s, women had a slight chance of losing their stomach acid production. Men had no chance at all, but it increased with every decade.
According to Dr. Van Zandt and her team from the Mayo Clinic, from research on 3700 people, by the time we are 50, 48% of men and 52% of women had lower than necessary acid in their tummies to digest everything properly. If we can’t digest properly, we can eat the best organic diet and take our vitamins and minerals, and we won’t get as much benefit. Here’s what is very interesting about all the scientists’ statements.
NUMBERS
At age 60, it was 48% of men and 52% of women, but it was less when people got to 70, it was less. She politely said that people who had low stomach acid for that long died, so they’re no longer in the percentages. You can only go so long with your stomach acid getting lower. So people would remember it; I call that gastro-pause because it’s another pause naturally in all of us. So far, nobody knows how to bring it back, just like we don’t know how to bring ovaries and testicles back when we’re 80.
We have all the health food stores and compounding pharmacies. Don’t take betaine hydrochloride without talking to a skilled and knowledgeable doctor in natural medicine. A book I co-wrote with Dr. Lane Leonard is called Why Stomach Acid Is Good For You. It was published in 2001, and it’s still in print. Why haven’t you heard about it? I’m going to digress. It would ruin the whole industry called the acid blocker industry because it pointed out there is research from the UK by Dr. Giles who showed that the acid contents of our stomach regulate the valve between the esophagus and the stomach. The more acid our stomachs make, the more that valve closes. Things can’t reflux.
A MYTH
This myth that acid reflux means you have too much stomach acid and should use an acid blocker is a myth. Our book tells people that if you’re refluxing acid, you’re not closing your valve, so you need to take your acid with meals so the valve will close and you won’t have reflux. You won’t sell acid-blocking medications anymore, which is essential for staying healthy. What are the symptoms of low stomach acid? Acid reflux is one of the symptoms of low acid, not high. You are bloating, and the food is sitting in your stomach longer than it used to. That’s a pause, even though it has nothing to do with sexuality unless we’re dead and can’t have sex. It has a lot to do with staying healthy over time. The older we get, the more we need to pay attention.
Dr. Wright, thank you very much for the wisdom you’ve brought to this conversation. Interestingly much of our discussion was about our natural health being regulated by Big Pharma. I appreciate you carrying the torch of frustration and spreading the word about how we are being manipulated. I’ve enjoyed getting to know you and having the experience of this conversation. Thank you so much for giving us your time and participating in the Sexual Vitality Summit. I’m your host, Susan Bratton, and this was a fantastic episode.
