A few days later Neil left a comment apologizing, saying that he suspected one of his "silly kids" must have left those comments. Amused, I responded, "You didn't ask how dared I to put your wife's name on those comments. I guess you knew where they came from as well as I do. What a surprise." He then insisted it was specifically their daughter. (EDIT: His comment and subsequent e-mails originated from the same IP address above.)Wiley's 13-year-old son? Maybe. Or maybe not.
Suzanne Somers and others keep harping about “balancing” your hormones. I have difficulty understanding this concept. Hormones are complicated. There are lots of different estrogens; estrogen levels are higher early in the monthly cycle and progesterone peaks later in the cycle: if you graph them, you see that each follows a curve, and the ratio between estrogens and progesterone is constantly changing from day to day and hour to hour. So what can the bioidentical advocates mean when they say they are “balancing” your hormones?Yeah... it takes only one person in a hundred to create a debate but that one person rarely convinces anyone. My problem isn't with Wiley or her family, cranks have always been a part of humanity and always will be. The real damage is done by those in the media who trumpet her claims. Fuck those shits.
I finally realized that they don’t have any idea what they’re “balancing.” When they do lab tests, they use salivary levels, which they think are more reliable (most endocrinologists disagree). Since they know the test only reflects one instant in time, they feel free to disregard it except as a rough starting point. Instead, they have the patient report any symptoms such as insomnia, dry skin, or lack of energy, interpret those symptoms as signs of unbalanced hormones, and adjust the dosage.
The thing that pinged my what! meter was when jakeelala started talking about a difference between biologically created and industrially created molecules. That is generally a grade-A quack detector.No, he was saying the opposite. That 'the molecule is the molecule' and not "synthetic" even if it was the result of a chemical process to turn plant hormones into human ones. He was pretty explicit about this. He had several comments saying that the bio-identical hormones were "natural" and not "synthetic" specifically because the molecules were exactly the same.
Just piping in to second whoever said upthread that if *anyone* thinking about going to medical school or getting into residency, (or if you're a family member of friend writing in their name) it would really, really help if they covered their internet tracks leading to any hinky photos or statements.Agreed - even more so as it seems likely that Jakeelala's future credibility is being impuned by his own father. Like when he was rumbled for posting abusive anonymous comments on a blog that was critical of the 'Wiley Protocol'. In that situation he blamed his daughter (post#108) for posting the comments when he was confronted with the evidence (the anon's IP happened to match the IP in an email sent to the blog owner by jakeelala sr. not three minutes later) .
I think if you had stated your affiliation up front, or admitted that you had a vested interest, rather then not only claiming to be unbiased, but also having some authority, your comments would have been taken a lot better.Yeah, this. For example, a comment of the form “I registered an account just to respond to this post. I'm related to one of the big proponents of bioidentical HRT, and the reason we think it's better is…” would almost certainly have been well received by mefites. Direct, simultaneously lays out the claim for authority and the admission of bias, hopefully proceeds on to talk facts.
in fact, i was very skeptical of my mothers work (due to a lack of familiarity) for a long time. it wasn't until i started talking to the doctors that i decided she was really on to something. in the last couple of years.Now I'm in love
My mother trains doctors on the molecular biology and endocrinology associated with cyclically dosed bio-identical hormones.and (2) when he was biochemists are like this, but MDs are like this ("biochemists aren't MD's. I wouldn't expect them to know the difference."), which I think intends to induce the reader to believe that the writer or people working with the writer possess MDs, and mislead people about his own credentials (3) when he said, "I actually know far more about this subject than I think you can imagine."
She's also a published researcher in the field of oncology, specifically reproductive cancers. She's also currently overseeing 2 very early stage studies of long term (1-7 years) BHRT replacement therapy with an oncologyst and an OBGYN who are proponents of such treatments. Clinical trials to follow.
Who might I ask, are you?
LM: The women who have been trying to do the Wiley Protocol, that is also the dosing schedule in the appendix of Sex, Lies and Menopause, have found that during the progesterone phase we have experienced symptoms such as weight gain, edema, constipation, headache, extreme sedation, hip pain, distended abdomen, interrupted sleep, puffy face, acne, whiskers, hair loss, heart palpitations, anxiety, itching, immune suppression, sore breasts, muscle wasting, lethargy, linea negra and more. We suspect that this is a result first-off of progesterone overdose and we are interested in your comments on this.posted by jenkinsEar at 2:36 PM on June 2, 2009 [9 favorites]
DrBF: I wrote that book with TS Wiley, as you know, together with Dr. Taguchi, who is an oncologist in town and actually participated in the work because of her own interest in reproductive hormones and in the field, so for the book I researched and organized all the scientific information which I explained and discussed with TS Wiley so she could write it into a layman’s text. When we came to a treatment protocol, which was somewhat laid out in the book, you know, how do you use these bioidentical hormones in correct doses. So, because there were relatively few scientific studies reported in the literature at that time my opinion was that we could not suggest a protocol with doses before proven correct in a clinical trial. So my concern was that without having performed a clinical trial it would basically be an undocumented protocol I would not take responsibility for. I suggested a small trial which could be run for a period of six months. You line up a group of menopausal women, then you have a control group and then you treat them with the protocol. Do the pharmokenetics - all these basic things to get an knowledge of how it works. Anyway, there was no interest in doing a trial - no interest in doing that by TS Wiley - so I just dropped out.
...
LM: So if we have all these symptoms, well - now that we’re not doing it, we still want to know what happened. It makes us very thirsty, we urinate a lot, we gain weight, we have hair loss, develop whiskers, some women are getting upper respiratory infections, sore breasts…
DrBF: What happens is that, as we talked about before, the reason, one of the major reasons for having the huge production of progesterone during pregnancy is that the pregnancy is basically, if you look at the immunology of pregnancy, like having a transplant. The fetus is a transplant, it is from an immunological point-of-view, non-compatible with the mother, so basically it should be rejected like a skin graft or a kidney or lung that is not compatible. Mother and her fetus are non-compatible. In order to protect the fetus from being rejected the mothers immune system must be suppressed. That’s how progesterone works. Progesterone strongly suppresses the cellular immune system involving B and T lymphocytes. Cellular immunity is the arm of our immune system that fight back mainly viral infections in contrast to bacteria infections that is attacked by macrophages, neutrophiles from the innate arm of the immune system. That means that if you take too much progesterone you become immune suppressed which means if you get any kind of infection your immune T cells are downregulated and cannot fight off foreign viral invades. That’s why you are prone to upper respiratory problems - get more colds and flu like symptoms, because you are immune suppressed. It is a very unhealthy situation.
...
LM: People are under the impression that this protocol would protect them from cancer or that it’s a good thing to do when they’ve got cancer and I would like to address the background where you explored progesterone with cancer.
DrBF: Well, you have to realize that in science, all creative ideas are first tested in the laboratory. We work in the research laboratory for years to test out these different kinds of projects using isolated cells in simple experimental culture systems. The next thing you do is transfer the experience from the cellular experiments to simple animal models. You may transplant tumor tissue into these animals and then treat the animals with progesterone. I got into that. I discovered that progesterone at the single cell level destroy breast tumor cells. But we have yet no clinical evidence to suggest that progesterone prevents or cures breast cancer, albeit we have some anecdotal evidence. It’s all studies waiting to be done. I think they are exciting, they should be done, but it’s still a long way to go before we can say anything about the efficacy of using progesterone in the treatment of ovarian or breast cancer patients.
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posted by netbros at 3:17 PM on June 2, 2009 [2 favorites] [sung]Lily the Pink is a third-grade memory. Loved to sing it and One Tin Soldier.
Here's the story - a little bit gory,
A little bit happy, a little bit sad -
Of Lily the Pink and her medicinal compound
And how it drove her to the bad.
So we'll drink a drink a drink
To Lily the pink the pink the pink
The savior of the human race.
She invented medicinal compound
Most efficacious in every case.
Sorry to seem like I was covering up for some huckster, we've just got sort of a bright line about not writing "$MeFite is actually $IRL_person" on the Blue.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:05 PM on June 1, 2009 [1 favorite]