Lara Briden - The Period Revolutionary
Leading the change to better periods and hormones
Women’s libido is negatively affected by hormonal contraception.
The pill was an important step in our struggle to legalize contraception. I celebrate that, of course. Hormonal birth control can also be medicine for debilitating conditions such as severe endometriosis and very heavy periods. I celebrate that.
What I don’t celebrate is the distorted message that hormonal birth control is the only birth control. And I don’t celebrate its widespread prescription as “hormone balance” for any hormonal symptom that might arise in women and teenage girls.
We must not fear estrogen—our own queen of hormones. With all the current talk of estrogen dominance, plus the 2002 HRT scare, estrogen has acquired a bad reputation it does not deserve.
Natural progesterone fared well in the new KEEPS study. It proved to be effective for menopausal symptoms, but without the risks of conventional HRT.
When I first started practicing in the 1990s, many of my patients needed a way off the nasty HRT duo of Premarin (horse estrone) and Provera (medroxyprogesterone). As the WHI study was to prove in 2002, those pseudo-hormones cause breast cancer and significant cardiovascular risk. My job as a natural doctor was to help women transition onto natural progesterone.