Bottom Line/HEALTH: If you have fibroids, you’re in a tough situation. You suffer from bleeding; you suffer from pain perhaps, or you have to make a tough decision about a potentially invasive and risky procedure. Well, what’s the other option?
I’m Sarah Hiner, President of Bottom Line Publications, and this is our Conversation With the Experts, where we get the answers to your tough questions from our leading experts.
Today I’m talking to Dr. Holly Lucille, a leading naturopathic physician and expert in integrative medicine. Dr. Lucille was listed in Time Magazine’s ALT list as one of the top 100 most influential people and is the author of Creating and Maintaining Balance: A Woman’s Guide to Safe Natural Hormone Health. You can learn more about her at www.drhollylucille.com.
Welcome, Dr. Holly.
Holly Lucille, ND, RN: Thank you.
Bottom Line: Western science when it comes to fibroids seems to take the “cut it out and attack it” point of view. However, it’s risky; it’s dangerous; it doesn’t really solve what’s going on. So what are the other options that somebody can use?
Dr. Lucille: Yeah, I can’t tell you how many cases have come into my office and they had fibroids, they’ve had them surgically removed in one way or another, and guess what? They came back.
Bottom Line: Shocker.
Dr. Lucille: Why? We didn’t identify and treat the cause. As a naturopathic doctor, you’re going to hear me say that over and over again, but it really makes sense.
Let’s think about what a fibroid is. I care little about diagnoses; I care more about the mechanism behind it. You could call it a uterine bump; you could call it a uterine out-pouching, but it really is an out-pouching of the uterine tissue. It’s fueled by something that we know very well: estrogen. This is hormonally sensitive tissue being fueled by estrogen, and here’s why.
Estrogen’s job in the body – all hormones deliver messages, so its message is to tell cells to grow and proliferate, and that’s awesome when it’s working within that first half of the menstrual cycle, getting the uterine lining all plumped up for implantation. Also, estrogen at work when it’s creating breast buds for young women going through puberty – which, by the way, is happening 2 years earlier than it was 20 years ago.
But estrogen that’s out of balance with other hormones, especially progesterone – so this estrogen-dominant situation, whether we’re getting too much or we’re not clearing it from our bodies successfully – it starts to affect hormone-sensitive tissue like our ovaries, like our uterus, like our breasts. And this is where a fibroid situation starts to happen.
Bottom Line: Let me ask you this, though: how come some people get it and some people don’t? We all have estrogen in our bodies.
Dr. Lucille: Yeah, we all have estrogen, of course. Men have estrogen; we have estrogen. We kind of can’t live without it. It’s the excess estrogen. For each individual, what are people’s exposures to environmental estrogens? We have to talk about that, and certainly reduce those as much as possible.
There’s a great website called EWG.org; that’s EnvironmentalWorkingGroup.org. They’ll give you a food list that’s the Clean 15 and the Dirty Dozen as far as having organic in your house when it’s very, very, very important for particular food groups. Also cosmetic database (www.safecosmetics.org). The things that we use every single day that we really don’t think about, health and beauty aids, household cleaning products.
But the problem is, they’re fat soluble. They pass through our skin. They’re called xenoestrogens. They’re known as endocrine disruptors. We hear them in the headlines.
Bottom Line: Let me clarify. All these toxins, the chemicals, that’s what’s passing through our skin and sending these estrogens into our body?
Dr. Lucille: Absolutely. And then they kind of act like our estrogens. They are like a lock and key. The lock is the receptor site, and then the key is the hormone itself. So these dangerous environmental estrogens can really provoke the situation.
Bottom Line: Besides the fact that you need to clean out your intake, so you have to have as clean an environment as you can, are some people more vulnerable to these toxins? Maybe because their digestion isn’t up-to-date, or their immune system is compromised or something?
Dr. Lucille: Yeah, great point. Absolutely. The other thing we do is we treat estrogen in our bodies like a toxin, so it has to be metabolized – that means broken down and excreted through our liver. Also, detoxification happens in your gut as well.
So if you’re lacking good bacteria or if opportunistic bugs have been in there and they’re growing, proliferating, and setting up housekeeping, whether it’s fungal in nature, whether it’s bacterial in nature – that can burden the liver. Excess medications, of course. Antibiotic use, alcohol use, can burden the liver and decrease our ability to effectively metabolize estrogens. So it re-circulates and delivers that message again. It really, really becomes very aggressive and provocative.
Bottom Line: Okay, so rather than somebody going under the knife and taking drastic measures, what can somebody do? They can reduce their external toxins and reduce all those estrogenic things. What else can they do?
Dr. Lucille: Exactly, reduce exposure wherever possible. Take an inventory. If you’re on birth control pill and have been for 25 years, we need to address that. Any other hormone therapies? And then, of course, you’ve got to look around in your household, in your makeup counter, everywhere in your environment to see where you’re getting it, and reduce those. Absolutely. Organic as much as possible.
Other things: clear through your liver. We’ve talked about diindolylmethane before. It sounds like a crazy chemical word, but it’s just a component of cruciferous vegetables – broccoli, cauliflower, kale. Certainly eating more of those things, steaming them, if there’s a thyroid issue for sure.
But you can also get it in a supplement, DIM. It’s called DIM. Those really help our liver process and metabolize estrogens appropriately. We get them out. That’s all about detoxification, is getting things out. Flaxseeds, the lignans in flaxseeds will do the same thing.
Plus, we want to reduce any estrogen dominance by increasing progesterone. How do you do that naturally? There is a botanical; a plant called chaste tree or Vitex. That increases progesterone naturally in your higher brain centers, your hypothalamus and pituitary.
It is so important to actually get hormonal balance, increase proper estrogen metabolism, and decrease exposure.
Bottom Line: All right. Thank you, Dr. Holly Lucille. The bottom line on fibroids? Ladies, before you go under that knife, there are things that you can be doing. The fact is that fibroids are primarily an estrogen imbalance, so you need to bring yourself back into balance. Get the toxins out of your life. All the toxins, all the chemicals, all the plastics. Live a very clean and toxin-free life.
There are things that you can be eating, the cruciferous vegetables, the broccolis, the kales, the cauliflowers. Or you can also supplement with DIM. You can also bring up the balance of the estrogen with progesterone and balance your hormones better with a supplement called Vitex. There are things you can do; watch out for that knife. This is Sarah Hiner with Bottom Line.
