Real Life Wellness: So what are you going to do about PMS?

By Bill Hemmer
There are many options of PMS treatments available. The first and most basic treatment to help you is to eat right and exercise. Hundreds of studies link proper body composition and good nutrition to decreases in PMS symptoms. If you work out and eat right for your body many of your symptoms will disappear.

A second more popular way of dealing with PMS is through prescription drugs. Hormone Replacement Therapy has been done for decades. The standard protocol for Hormone Replacement Therapy is oral hormones given in different doses until the symptoms subside. Synthetic hormones are given. These hormones have been created in the lab from animal urine.

Another popular way of dealing with PMS symptoms is adding anti-depressants or anti-anxiety drugs to the mix if hormone replacement therapy hasn’t taken care of the symptoms to the patient’s satisfaction. These mood-altering drugs affect your nervous system to turn down the volume of what you feel. People describe these drugs as putting a wet blanket over everything and so you basically feel nothing…good or bad.

Finally, an alternative to classic drug therapy is beginning to become more popular. Nutritional supplements such as black cohosh, and many others have shown promise in relieving PMS symptoms. These supplements work naturally to bring your body back into balance. But sometimes these supplements aren’t enough to take care of severe cases.

Another alternative to classic drug therapy is called Natural Hormone Replacement therapy. This therapy differs from standard hormone replacement therapy by using natural hormones from a plant source and not a synthetically produced hormone from a laboratory. You might be asking yourself, “What’s the difference?” Well the difference is very important.

This difference has been argued and debated for years. Basically, any compound produced in a lab doesn’t have the same natural energy found in the same compound from an un-altered source. This energy is called bioavailability. The more bioavailability a compound is, the more energy that compound has to produce a positive change in your body. Doesn’t it just make sense that natural compounds will always work better than man-made compounds.

To make this difference a little more real life, visualize the difference between a prime cut of Filet Mignon and a hot dog.  

They’re the same thing…right? They are both made from cows so they must be the exact same.

This argument has been used by the food and drug manufacturing companies for the last 70 years. The same basic molecules are being used, with the same chemical structure, therefore the healing value of the synthetic molecules made in the laboratory must be the same.

But anyone who has eaten a filet mignon will tell you it tastes better than a hot dog. Why is that? The filet is butchered directly from the cow’s most tender and lean part of its body. There is nothing else done to it. There is only 1 step from the cow to the table. And man is it tasty!

Now let’s look at a hot dog. Scraps from many different cuts of meat are put together with fillers, chemicals, preservatives and red dye #2 to be shoved into an artificial casing. Only God knows how many steps it takes to create the finished hot dog. Does it taste as good as a filet? Does it have the same nutritional value as the filet? Of course not.

Are you beginning to see the difference between naturally occurring vitamins and hormones and synthetic vitamins and hormones? The argument has always been synthetic vitamins and hormones are the exact same molecules so they must act the same way in the body that natural hormones and vitamins do. Let’s take this argument to the dinner table. If you took all of the different chemicals and compounds from a laboratory and put it together to make a filet would it taste as good as coming from ol’ Besse?

So why have the food and drug companies argued this fact for so long? Profit. These companies are in business to make a profit. It is much less expensive to distill vitamins and create drugs from synthetic sources than it is to extract them from natural sources. So, it makes sense to get these compounds inexpensively so they can sell it at a reasonable price and still turn a profit. That’s just good business.

This good business has been based on information that is faulty. Your body can’t utilize synthetic vitamins and drugs nearly as well as it can an organic or natural vitamin or herb. There are energies and natural vibration patterns in nature’s vitamins and herbs that cannot be duplicated in the laboratory. There are also literally hundreds of cofactors, phytonutrients, enzymes and mineral activators found in natural vitamins and hormones that cannot be reproduced in the laboratory setting. All of these ingredients have profound effects on the actions of these compounds in your body. These subtle energies are very important in creating the proper downstream effects of vitamins and hormones within your body.

Downstream effects are events that occur once a specific vitamin or hormone has been activated in your body. These downstream effects create wellness. Synthetic hormones and vitamins don’t create the same downstream effects; therefore, they won’t create wellness.