Dr Louise Newson: Lessons in Hormones, Health and Advocacy

Basically, to keep things very simple, we've got dozens of hormones in our body, and hormones are just chemical messengers that different organs in our body produce.

They go into our bloodstream and they affect every di- different cell in our body.

And many of us feel quite comfortable talking about thyroxine, talking about insulin.

You know, if you've got an underactive thyroid gland, you get it diagnosed by a blood test.

People are quite happy taking thyroxine.

Doctors are quite happy being prescribed, prescribing thyroxine to our patients.

Yet the three hormones that I talk about in my book, progesterone, estradiol, which is a form of estrogen, and testosterone, everybody thinks they're just optional extra hormones.

They're just about, you know, if women have hot flushes, they can go on them, or they think these are just hormones that regulate our periods.

And so what people have misunderstood for many years is that they are the same as other hormones, so they go into our bloodstream, they affect every single cell in our body and our brains.

And they're also not just made in our ovaries, they're made in our brains as well, and other tissues in our body.

So when you understand how important those three hormones, progesterone, estradiol, testosterone are in our bodies and brains, it then enables people to think a bit more about, "Oh gosh, what happens when I don't have them? It's not just about my period stopping, hot flushes and sweats, this is about my body not functioning nearly as well as it was when I was having hormones." It's also about thinking about hormonal changes as well, because a lot of people think, "Well, it's just menopause, it's something that happens when we're older." But then when you have changes in your hormone levels, so everybody does when they have their periods, a lot of women have premenstrual syndrome where they feel a bit rubbish a few days before their periods.

And what upsets me as a clinician is it's been normalized for so long that we just put up with feeling not great for a few days before their pi- our periods.

Whereas actually when you understand that the hormones, especially progesterone, drop on those few days, a lot of women who have natural progesterone, they feel great for their whole cycle because you're just supplementing with some natural progesterone.

But the other misinformation that really worries me as a clinician and as a mother of three daughters is the misinformation of the hormonal contraception because they don't contain hormones.

They contain a chemical that's been made to be like a hormone, but it's not a hormone, and it has risks with it.

And so we need to understand that as well, that they're different.

So all...

Sorry to jump in.

So all contraceptive pills, all the different types are synthetic?

Yeah

YeahGod, that's scary.

I was, I was on that for years

What I think is very interesting, and I've written a lot about the history of contraception in the book, is that actually when they started to think about hormones, initially they were thinking about hormones for menopause, and then they wanted to commercialize.

And to commercialize a product, you have to make something new.

So you couldn't make a new hormone because that we know what our hormones are in our body.