Lara Briden - The Period Revolutionary
Leading the change to better periods and hormones
Progesterone is the hormone women make after ovulation and is important not just for fertility but also to help to prevent osteoporosis, stroke, dementia, heart disease, and breast cancer. Regular ovulatory cycles are beneficial for general health. Progesterone can also be taken in the form of micronized progesterone to relieve heavy periods and the symptoms of perimenopause.
With the 2019 news that women don’t need pill bleeds came the assurance that “women don’t need periods.” But is that accurate?
It’s true that women don’t need monthly pill withdrawal bleeds because they’re not periods, but women do need (or at least benefit from) monthly natural menstrual cycles because that’s how we make the hormones estradiol and progesterone.
Progesterone is important for women’s health. Yet for decades, it has been ignored or wrongly blamed for side effects it doesn’t cause. How did that happen?
Progesterone was discovered shortly after estrogen, missing the chance to be included in the simplified narrative of “testosterone for men and estrogen for women.” To complicate things further, progesterone couldn’t initially be made into an oral medication, so it was sidelined in favor of synthetic progestins.
According to a 2017 study, pain is the most frequently reported symptom of PCOS, even though pain is not a symptom of PCOS.
The solution to this paradox is that both PCOS and period pain are common, so it’s easy to have both a PCOS diagnosis and pelvic pain. But, importantly, the PCOS diagnosis can only explain irregular periods or symptoms of androgen excess (e.g., facial hair). It can’t explain the pain!
Also, PCOS cannot be diagnosed by ultrasound.
Iodine has beneficial anti-estrogenic effects that can relieve breast pain, ovulation pain, and premenstrual mood symptoms. It may also help prevent ovarian cysts by promoting healthy estrogen metabolism, down-regulating estrogen receptors, and stabilizing estrogen-sensitive tissue.
That makes iodine one of the best treatments for estrogen excess or so-called “estrogen dominance”—although I don’t use that term.