Bone Myths 

We were told for years that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) would protect us from heart disease. We were told to put up with the dozens of side effects of HRT, suffer through the weight gain and live with the increased risks of cancers — because we were getting protection from heart disease.­ And we were told wrong. 

Now the latest battle cry is: “get those cholesterol numbers down” and we’re given a $49-a-month life sentence cholesterol-busting drug that works fine for men… but may be quite unnecessary for women. Or we’re put on any number of drugs that damage a woman’s heart. It’s true! If you’re on antibiotics, diuretics, laxatives, synthetic estrogens, contraceptives, or even some heart drugs, your body is being drained of nutrients that actually protect your heart. 

Magnesium is one of the most damaging losses. Here’s my simple prescription for a healthy heart: take magnesium. It’s cheap, easy and astonishingly powerful medicine for the heart, raising HDL (“good”) cholesterol, inhibiting platelet aggregation, improving heart-muscle function, lowering blood pressure, and dilating your blood vessels. Wow! What’s more, most women don’t get enough magnesium in their diet and what they do get is often leached out by their prescriptions. Take up to 500 mg a day. 

You know the symptoms of a heart attack, right? Well, perhaps you know the symptoms of a man’s heart attack. You see, the symptoms for a woman are totally different. A lot of doctors don’t even know this. I recently lost a dear friend who went to her doctor complaining of tiredness. She was sent away with a pill for gastrointestinal distress. But what she was experiencing was the equivalent of a man’s chest pain. If she’d been a man, the doctor would have acted fast, and she’d be alive today. 

For example, for men, cholesterol levels seem to be a determining factor. But a woman can have low cholesterol and be at high risk! 

Yet if that woman has high homocysteine watch out. One study showed high homocysteine levels can TRIPLE your risk of dying of heart disease! So why don’t doctors order tests to measure homocysteine levels for women?  The solution to high homocysteine levels is simple — and, yes, unpatentable. Folic acid costs pennies, and just supplementing with 500 mcg daily will cut your homocysteine levels down by almost 25%. If all women did this, 310,000 lives would be saved in the next 10 years! You see — it’s so easy! 

It makes me sad. Women face an epidemic of pain in America and medical science has all but abandoned the search for a cure. Take fibromyalgia, or muscular rheumatism, which is almost exclusively a woman’s disease [10-to-1]. The cause remains unknown, say doctors, and you just have to live with it, masking the problem with painkillers that further wreck your health.  Or back pain. If you’re unlucky enough to suffer from back pain, your life becomes dominated by your back. Women who seek me out with fibromyalgia or back and neck pain often tell me candidly that they’re at their wits end. I recommend two approaches with great success. First, I put my patients on 50–100 mg of 5-HTP, three times a day. In double-blind studies, symptoms of fibromyalgia were relieved using 5-HTP. Sometimes I give 5-HTP a boost with St. John’s wort and magnesium (precise dosages are given in your FREE book WomanSense).  Click here to learn how to request your copy today! While this works well, I suggest that, whenever you get a “pain attack,” whether it’s a migraine, backache, neck pain, or the pain from fibromyalgia, you sit down and ask yourself a simple question. “What am I angry about?” Patients tell me that, often, the answer is obvious and the pain simply vanishes. When you think about it, this makes sense. Our emotions don’t exist separately from our bodily health. The role of repressed anger in heart attacks is well documented for men. It’s likely that a similar mechanism works in women, too, and causes chronic pain. 

For decades, the standard therapy for menopause has been synthetic hormones derived from the urine of pregnant horses. And it seemed to work, except that it came with a price tag and other risks. At first, these seemed minor discomforts (such as weight gain) but now a body of research has established that the risks far outweigh the rewards of synthetic hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Breast cancer, ovarian, uterine, and endometrial cancers, liver disease and diabetes, thrombosis and hypertension, fibroid tumors, heart disease and stroke. 

Even the value of HRT in preventing osteoporosis is now in doubt. This has put women in a real pickle. If synthetic hormones are too risky, what does work? 

Now comes a stunningly simple solution to the dilemma — in the form of the buttercup. American Indians found the wild white buttercup growing along the shores of
Cape May and they used it for centuries before Columbus to relieve pain. The root is especially potent, and it is this — called black cohosh — that scientists in Germany have studied rigorously for the past 20 years. As a result, German women almost never have to resort to HRT. 

Now word is spreading to American women. Results of research now being completed at Columbia University, the National Institutes of Health, and the University of Illinois will likely confirm that this ancient herbal folk remedy brings women all of the benefits of synthetic HRT — and none of the risks! In my own practice, I have rarely recommended synthetic HRT and you know why? Because I’ve seen black cohosh work. Because black cohosh is simple and safe (nearly 70% of women who are prescribed synthetic HRT abandon it within a year or don’t take the full dosage because the side effects are so unpleasant). And because, instead of flattening your hormone-system, it gently works with it to rebalance and enhance it. 

What’s more, when you combine black cohosh with one or two other natural preparations, you can navigate the passage of menopause brilliantly — with tremendous energy and focus. I know because I’ve helped so many women do this. You don’t need a hammer — when a feather will do. All this is spelled out for you in one of the FREE additional reports you’ll receive called What No One Told You About Menopause and HRT. Click here to learn how to request your copy today! 

I don’t have to tell you: It’s the woman of the house who bears the brunt of the family’s crisis. It’s the price she pays for being the person everyone else leans on. 

So what can she lean on? 

Her doctor is likely to give her pep pills and antidepressants, in spite of 20 years of evidence that they create dependence. 

When a woman comes to me with depression, first I look at what’s on her dinner plate! You give a woman who’s under tremendous stress a steak and a martini and it’s like a punch in the gut. The huge amount of hydrochloric acid that gets made just to break down the food and alcohol puts a tremendous stress on your nervous system, leaving you feeling leaden and depressed. 

Now, there are lots of little pills for your stomach and lots of little pills for your head and their side effects are as irritating as the problem they try to cure. Much quicker and better is that little orange box that is sitting in the back of your refrigerator. 

That’s right: bicarbonate of soda. Mix half a teaspoon in a glass of water, drink it and watch what happens. Your intestinal pH goes from acid to alkaline, protein is broken down and… amino acids are produced for your brain to make into neurotransmitters and… suddenly… YOU’RE HAVING A GREAT DAY! I’ve shared this little secret with women who have practically crawled into my office — and watched them bounce out! 

Instead of lots of dangerous drugs, the whole problem was solved quickly, simply, safely, and cheaply. Easy does do it, so often. 

That’s why you’ll never catch me without my little orange box! When I do back-to-back lectures, or have to stay up all night working on a research paper, or have to fly “red-eye” cross-country and be at my best for a morning meeting, half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda is all it takes. Try it for yourself — especially when you feel you’re coming down with a cold. 

If you need to bounce back quickly… be there for others… and be your best… make that orange box your friend! 

Small changes work miracles in the body. Take breast cancer. In an effort to prevent it, we are given a drug that, as it turns out, causes cancer and has scores of other terrible side effects! 

Worse yet, antacids, cholesterol-lowering drugs, sedatives, antibiotics, and drugs for hypertension may increase your chances of getting
breast cancer. 

Yet a tiny amount of the common trace mineral selenium — just a few grains a day — may help shield your breasts from cancer. 

We used to get ample selenium from our food but non-organic grains have almost none today. A recent study of people living in low-selenium areas in
Georgia, the Carolinas, Florida, and Connecticut found that 200 mcg of selenium cut cancer risks in half! The protection granted by selenium was so remarkable, the study was ended two years early so that everyone in the study could benefit. 

We are at the very early stages of understanding the importance of trace minerals to life. The link between deficiencies of selenium and cancer, potassium and hypertension, zinc and infections, chromium and diabetes, and of course calcium and osteoporosis are acknowledged, but mainstream medicine frankly prefers to build “big gun” drugs that can be patented. 

Let them. I’ll take my selenium… and enhance my breast protection.

Laurie here:  On another post (1/25/06;category;Vitamins-Minerals-Dietary Considerations) I gave you an excellent source of selenium and that is by eating just a few brazil nuts.  I personally purchase an excellent quality of brazil nuts (and they are already shelled for me) from the folks over at www.nutsonline.com.

More from drlark.com:

“Dr. Lark, I have high blood pressure, but the drugs are worse than the disease! I need help!” 

The side effects of blood pressure medicines are among the most disturbing I’ve seen. Used on their own, the quality of life of many of my women patients is badly compromised. 

Used in combination with other drugs, though, the side effects becomes so bad that still more drugs have to be added to the daily cocktail…just to make life bearable.This is a torturous path to walk down and I urge you with all my heart not to take it. 

Instead, I want you to dramatically increase your daily intake of potassium. There are now hundreds of studies proving that potassium is as effective as blood pressure medication, and has none of the terrible side effects. In one study, the group taking potassium had fewer strokes than the group not taking potassium. 

The verdict is in: potassium works. 

These days, count your blessings — literally. Write the name of each person you cherish on a beautiful piece of parchment. Wrap it around a glass holder and place a votive candle inside.  According to repeated tests, a simple act of thanks like this can engage and strengthen our immune system and drop white blood cell counts by 30%. It is indeed, as the Chinese proverb goes, better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.