Progesterone for Men and Women: Why the Uterus Was Never the Point

When we talk about progesterone, especially in light of women, from a conventional standpoint, almost always what you'll hear is that progesterone is for endometrial protection.

And that is true.

That is absolutely true.

Progesterone is involved in the protection and the health and preservation of the endometrial tissue within the uterus.

Unfortunately, what you'll find in the conventional setting, in general, you'll hear this in the OB-GYN crowd, is that that is all progesterone essentially is for.

It's for the health and wellness of the endometrium.

Obviously, it's for pregnancy.

We need a healthy, hefty amount of progesterone during that time.

But practically speaking, once you are menopausal and beyond, and you're not having kids anymore because you're incapable of doing so, and you don't even need your uterus at that point, so they say, well, then progesterone just becomes this, I don't know, trash hormone.

It's not necessary, and just forget about it.

That's just generally how it seems to be talked about.

So if you are prescribing progesterone for endometrial protection, that's awesome.

But you're only working with like a quarter of the picture, a quarter of what progesterone is really intended for and used for.

And if you're not prescribing it to male patients at all, then I think you're working with even less than that.

Because I think that's super freaking important too.

And I've talked about that before, but I'm going to talk about it again because it's so important that I repeat these things because we need to break down a lot of these stigmas and a lot of these odd narratives that we've created in our own communities as providers as to what some of these things are.

Progesterone is arguably one of the most, I think, underrated and mischaracterized hormones in all of our clinical practice.

It's been filed under women's health, very much so.

So meaning that it has nothing to do with guys and under women's health, specifically uterine health, that filing that reduction that categorization has extremely limited ability for us to then think outside the box and how to actually utilize progesterone for what it ought to be used for.

So today, again, we're going to talk about some of that physiology.

And I hope by the end of this episode, you just have a fundamentally different picture of what progesterone does, what it does for women and men, and why also, by the way, the synthetic versions like progestins aren't the same thing.

So let's get into this whole uterine only narrative because I think that is probably one of the most damning things when it comes to progesterone.

I think a lot of ways... that's probably where we've found ourselves kind of floundering in the conventional way of prescribing progesterone.

So again, the uterine protection thing is not wrong.

Unopposed estrogen does carry endometrial risk in women with an intact uterus.