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.