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We all have to die someday, but we don’t have to die sick.
I recently received an email message from some listeners to the BioBalance Health Podcast—a couple trying to find a doctor in their city who offers bioidentical hormone pellet therapy. Because their questions are common to my practice, I included their message and my response below:
Dr. Maupin,
My wife and I are in our mid 50’s and are finding it increasingly frustrating with the OBGYN’s that we have gone to recently in our area. Are there any doctors in the Cleveland (OH) area that would deal in the kind of treatments that you do?
The only thing we have found that works at all is a cream called Endau, and all of the doctors here discourage its use. They call it a placebo effect, and stress its lack of FDA approval. They opt for gels and pellets to be inserted in the vagina. None of which will help with inclination.
Are there any doctors in our area that can help us?
Thanks in advance for your assistance.
Sincerely,
D & B
Dear D & B,
I can relate to your frustration. I began BioBalance Health because there was no one in an 8 state area who could help me when I lost my hormones due to removal of my ovaries. Remember, I am an OBGYN with many years of training and lots of connections and still, I could not find anyone in the midwest who was doing bioidentical hormone pellets delivered under the skin!
I finally found help on the west coast from a doctor who had been doing pellets inserted under the skin, not in the vagina, for over 20 years. The unfortunate fact is that the FDA is years behind the research and will probably never approve bioidentical hormones, especially pellets sub-cutaneously, because FDA tend to only approve patentable products that make money from the drug companies. And, Bio-identicals would compete with inferior patented products. The FDA should not be the “gold standard” for drug approval and doctor endorsement in the US, but at this time, it is. The biggest problem is that most doctors are educated by the pharmaceutical companies and do not know the facts on effectively better treatments, (mostly because the managed care industry has stretched them to a point where they are too overwhelmed with surviving their profession to continue to be scientists).
Unfortunately we stand here in the year 2010, in our most productive decades, (our 50s and 60s), in our “delayed adolescent society”, and we need help now! We can’t wait for the FDA to finally realize that bioidentical is more effective and safer. The key is to find a doctor in the Anti-aging society, who uses bioidentical hormones.
I began BioBalance in 2002, and have patients from all over the world come to see me in St. Louis. I have sought the most effective and safest type of hormone replacement for my patients, and taken what I was given in training, fleshing it out to encompass nutritional and preventive replacement of other hormones, like thyroid replacement. My approach is with the basic philosophy that I can replace what is missing in your “aging” system, then I can help you avoid the expensive and destructive diseases of aging, like heart disease, auto-immune diseases, Alzheimer’s and dementia, and many other conditions that steal our lives away from us.
I would love to take care of you and, unlike other centers for anti-aging, we don’t require a large amount of money to hold an appointment, or a yearly fee. Our consults are $250 per patient, and pellet therapy for women runs around $400-500 per insertion, 3 times a year—about the cost of one Starbucks coffee every day!
Men come less often, every 6 months after the initial two insertions. Their therapy runs around $900, because they need a lot more pellets than women do, but they have to replace them less often.
Please come to see me in St. Louis, and if you are happy with the outcome, find a forward thinking OBGYN in your community and ask them to come train with me! There are other specialties who are well suited for this training, but OBGYNs are the true hormone giants of medicine; we treat male and female infertility and hormone problems throughout women’s lives, naturally making OBGYN the best specialty for this practice.
I hope to see you soon! I will be publishing my book and a virtual office visit interactive in the next year to make it easier for patients to get the treatment they need and understand the difference in therapies. We will attend to your question on the next podcast!
Sincerely,
Kathy Cartier Maupin MD FACOG
