What is Endometriosis?
Stress definitely has a role in endometriosis, as do most chronic diseases, but let’s go back to the basics. Endometriosis, in the simplest possible terms, is tissue from the uterine lining growing where it shouldn’t. During healthy menstruation, women shed their endometrial lining, or the endometrium, each month. The material is expelled from the body as part of the monthly menstruation. While many women would probably like to bypass this inconvenient and sometimes painful monthly routine, it is the key to life itself.However, in the 5.5 million North American women with endometriosis, cells from the uterine lining have migrated from where they’re supposed to be -- inside the uterus -- to other parts of the body, most often within the pelvic area, on the bowel, bladder, ovaries and the outside of the uterus. It’s sometimes called retrograde menstruation. Rogue endometrial tissue has been known to migrate as far as scar tissue on the arms and legs.
This misplaced tissue develops into growths that respond to the menstrual cycle in the same way the lining of the uterus does. Triggered by hormonal signals, the tissue builds up and sheds each month.
While menstrual blood flows out of the body through the cervix and vagina, endometriosis tissue and the cells it sheds have no way of leaving the body. Trapped between layers of tissue, they cause inflammation, scar tissue, adhesions and bowel problems. Endometriosis can lead to intense pain and reproductive difficulties.
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The Essential Estrogen Balance
While modern medicine insists the cause of endometriosis is unknown and there is no cure, it can be relatively simple to treat and control the symptoms. The standard medical treatment involves taking synthetic hormones, such as the birth control pill, that stops menstruation and therefore stops the buildup of blood and endometrial tissue outside the uterus. But there are new ways of approaching endometriosis that are much kinder to the body and address an underlying problem that certainly relates to the condition.Current scientific theory points to estrogen dominance as a major factor in endometriosis. According to many integrative medicine practitioners, bringing progesterone and estrogen into natural balance will frequently result in symptom relief and, in some cases, even shrink rogue endometrial tissue.
Testing Your Estrogen Levels
Along with progesterone cream has come a new method of hormone testing that captures the fat-soluble hormones more accurately than blood tests. Highly accurate saliva testing can give a women and her doctor a much better picture of her estrogen and progesterone levels compared to relatively antiquated and unreliable blood hormone tests.As a general benchmark, a range of 30 to 50 mg. of bioidentical progesterone cream from days 8-26 of the menstrual cycle are usually sufficient. Medical supervision is necessary to individualize treatment. Doctors who use bio-identical hormones do not subscribe to the one-size-fits-all pharmaceutical method of drug prescribing.
I said earlier that stress plays a huge role in endometriosis and de-stressing needs to part of the treatment.
The Effects of Estrogen Overload
Normal estrogen levels may cause some breast swelling or nipple tenderness in the few days before the onset of your period. It’s often the way you know it’s coming. However, when you have an overproduction of estrogen, often called estrogen dominance, those estrogen symptoms are magnified.In addition to stress-triggered estrogen production, we are seeing women with out-of-whack hormones related to environmental estrogens, known as xenoestrogens.
We have seen xenoestrogens wreak havoc in wildlife and fish affecting sexual development and fertility. It’s only in the past decade that we turned the magnifying glass on ourselves and found sperm abnormalities and serious female fertility issues created by xenoestrogens.
