Transcript of Hot Flash Free
Aired - 3/11/2008
More info: Women4Balance or www.talkshoe.com/tc/12797
INTRO
DEB WELLS: Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of HOT FLASH FREE. I am your host Deb Wells, coming to you live every Tuesday morning at 10am pacific time. HOT FLASH FREE is brought to you by Balanced Now Productions where it is our mission to help provide women of all ages with information to help us through any phase of menopause safely and sanely. Shana, we’ve got a good call this morning, don’t we?
SHANA: Yes we do. We’ve got Sherrill Sellman who is an educator, clinician and journalist in the field of integrative healthcare. She’s also a Doctor of Naturopathic medicine, with a successful clinical practice, which I wish I could go to.
DEB: Me too.
SHANA: She is a much sought after international lecturer, best selling author, radio host, associate editor and contributing writer to numerous health publications in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Dr. Sellman is a compelling and articulate educator as well as a passionate advocate of holistic solutions for regaining and maintaining health at all stages of one’s life.
DEB: That’s good stuff. She also holds a Doctorate of Naturopathy and a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, in sociology and psychology. Her healing, natural healthcare and professional credentials extend over a 30-year period that include those of doctor of naturopathy, psychotherapist, author and associate health magazine editor, lecturer, corporate and personal development trainer. She shares her sincere compassion and expertise with women using personal consultations to address the root causes of their health problems.
I am so excited to have Dr. Sellman with us this morning. I got to speak with her this morning a little bit. But I’ve gotten to know her through her work on her website and through her book, HORMONE HERESY: WHAT WOMEN MUST KNOW. So, welcome Dr. Sellman.
DR. SELLMAN: Well it’s great to be with you.
DEB: It’s so nice to have you. So we’re just going to jump right in because we don’t want to waste a minute with you on this broadcast. We want to get as much out of you as we can. So Shana and I are just going to begin asking you a couple of questions about how you got started and some of the research that you’ve delved into and your findings, okay?
DR. SELLMAN: Yeah, that sounds great. We do have lots to talk about today.
DEB: Yes we do.
SHANA: Can we start with, can you tell us what made you so passionate about women’s health to start with?
DR. SELLMAN: Well, like so many women my journey began because of my own hormonal challenges. I was in my mid-forties, I was rocking and rolling with a career, I was working 48 weekends out of the year, 60, 70, 80 hours a week. I was keeping those long hours. I wasn’t eating well. There were a lot of things going on in my life at that time that were, when I look back on it now, extremely stressful. And around this time I started to experience a range of symptoms that began as anxiety attacks which occurred like clockwork at 4am in the morning, every morning. And I was a psychotherapist back then and I thought, “Oh gosh, this has to be some sort of psychological issue.” That’s how I understood anxiety back then. It’s changed now. But back then I tried all sorts of therapies, and worked with colleagues. Nothing resolved these anxiety attacks. They would last about two hours and finally I was able to get back to sleep at about 6am or so.
And it was also a time in my life when I was waking up really tired and fatigued. I had some aches and pains in my joints. My libido was really low. I was going through mood swings. There were a range of things that were happening that it was so easy to say, “Oh gosh, it’s this middle-age thing that’s creeping in.” And what changed all of that for me was when I started to experience night sweats. Which, I didn’t begin with night sweats, but after going through these anxiety attacks for about a year, the night sweats arrived. And that was a curse and it was a blessing. The curse part of it was now I am waking up about midnight sweating, dripping wet, having to get up, change the sheets, change the nightclothes, then go to bed and then a few hours later these anxiety attacks would arrive. And if you do not get good quality sleep, and we now know you need to be sleeping deeply 7-8 hours a night, you cannot function. You cannot detoxify. You can’t learn. You can’t lose weight. It all depends on good quality sleep, of which I was getting very little.
The night sweats made me look at hormones for the first time. And that’s when I discovered the work of Dr. John Lee and was able to get some progesterone cream, which totally changed everything. The night sweats disappeared, but so did the anxiety attacks and the fatigue and the weight and the moods. It was like a revelatory moment. And it began my journey and I want to say that when I got on the track of understanding this was a hormonal issue and I needed to investigate how best to get these hormones of mine balanced again, I looked at HRT and I looked at a range of things. I knew nothing. I was just a novice on this. As I began to uncover layers of information I realized that women were being fed tremendous amount of lies, deceit. We were being betrayed. We were being, as I like to say now, medicalized and pathologized for profit. So I became very angry. And when you use that energy of anger to make things happen, it’s a positive force. So I started to write HORMONE HERESY which was a huge bestseller. And it’s about to go into another revised version of it this year. That’s how it all began for me. And it hasn’t stopped.
DEB: Wow. And it all sounds familiar. It really sounds familiar. I had severe debilitating insomnia for years. And the worse I got, the more brain-fogged I got, the more difficult it became for me to sort through the information I was getting, the good information even. It sounds, as you were just sharing, your path sounds so familiar. So tell us, what are some of the myths regarding women’s hormone health? It’s so confusing. Do we, don’t we…
DR. SELLMAN: Well, there’s a long list of myths so I’ll try to consolidate it. I like to start at the very beginning and I quote from Hippocrates, you know father of medicine, Hippocrates great guy, back there 2500 years ago, did some good things but he also had some interesting beliefs. And one of them was around women. He’s quoted as saying rhetorically, “What is woman” and then by saying, “Disease.” So we need to understand that we have a 2500 year old tradition, maybe even longer, of women’s bodies being perceived as innately flawed. And the source of disease, of illness, of suffering, of mental instability, I mean, small brains, a lot of things we’ve been accused of over the years, which I go into in HORMONE HERESY. We need to know historical context because we think, “Oh gosh, 2500 years ago, what do they know? Things are more modern.” But in actual fact we’re really no better off. In perceptions, this patriarchal perception of women, as early as 1966 there was a book written called FEMININE FOREVER. It was written by a gynecologist who said that at menopause a woman becomes a caricature of her former self, she goes into a time of decrepitude and she becomes a eunuch. And basically the only thing that will save her, according to Dr. Robert Wilson, was estrogen. So he started the myth that at menopause the ovaries die and cease to produce estrogen. That is a myth.
I want to say that his tact in his book was to tell women that estrogen will keep you youthful and wrinkle free and juicy and sexy. And women just flocked to the message. Flocked to the message. As an aside, that message ended abruptly ten years after his book came out when there was an 800% increase in uterine cancer due to the prescribing of estrogen replacement therapy. He made a fortune and he also was a shill for the drug companies because he was paid by the drug companies up to a million dollars to write the book and promote estrogen as an extended hormone, to a new market, menopausal women. So the myth that he perpetuated back there was that, at menopause the ovaries fail and cease to produce estrogen. That’s a myth. We’ll go into the truths.
There’s another myth. The other myth is that at perimenopause, which is generally 5-10 years, although obviously it’s different in different cases, but generally 5-10 years before we have a complete cessation of menstrual cycles, and that’s the definition of menopause by the way - 12 complete months without a menstrual cycle. If you have not gone 12 complete months without a menstrual cycle you are peri-menopausal. If you have gone 12 months without a menstrual cycle, you are post-menopausal. Menopause is more time of demarcation. So if you are peri-menopausal, and by the way if you’ve gone 10 months and you get your period you have to start all over again and go another 12 months, right? So perimenopause is actually a time when women are experiencing extremely high levels of estrogen associated with fluctuating and erratic ovulation which generally means low levels of progesterone. So contrary to the popular belief that when women get the symptoms, the hot flashes and the night sweats like we’ve had, insomnia, mood swings and weight gain, the migraines, this is not a symptom of menopause meaning low estrogen levels requiring HRT. It’s really a sign of high estrogen levels, accompanied by low progesterone levels and a few other things, which we will talk about in a little bit. And we need to get those hormones properly in balance. So that’s another myth, that perimenopause is a time of low, declining estrogen levels that necessitates the use of the pill or HRT during that stage of a woman’s life.
I always like to say that another myth is that the pill, the myth is that it’s perfectly safe and that it helps to balance women’s hormones. I was a 16-year old put on the pill to regulate my menstrual cycle. And that’s all a myth. The truth about the pill and any of these hormones is that they are known human carcinogens and the pill has higher amounts of these same hormones found in HRT. It chemically castrates a woman, which is a term used for the pill and how it works. And it will never, never, never balance a woman’s hormones or regulate menstruation in young women. It will only add to further imbalance, compromise functioning and ultimately more serious problems including increased risk of breast cancer down the track.
DEB: And infertility. Like you said, it shuts down the hormones.
DR. SELLMAN: Yeah, for some women, they never regain their fertility.
DEB: We have an infertility epidemic in America right now.
DR. SELLMAN: Yes we do have an infertility epidemic and about ¼ of all couples are infertile, 25%, men too.
DEB: That just wasn’t heard of back in my day when I was getting married, in my early twenties and it was rare when a couple couldn’t get pregnant.
DR. SELLMAN: And you know, it’s disastrous because often women will go on fertility drugs. And what are fertility drugs? They’re estrogen. They cause you to super-ovulate. But it clearly states, if you were to read the packet insert and some of the contraindications of estrogen, that it’s never to be used when you’re pregnant because it can create birth deformities. So these women who are already having problems are forced to go on very powerful forms of estrogen. If they’re fortunate enough to conceive, they have lots of estrogen circulating in their bodies when they are conceiving this new being, and it can actually create birth defects. And women who take these drugs are more likely to get thyroid issues, to get major estrogen dominance, mood swings and sometimes diabetes and a range of things. And of course, I’ve met these women so I speak from experience.
DEB: We talk to them on a daily basis and it’s heartbreaking when somebody learns that their years of use of the pill is bringing about these things that they can’t control now.
DR. SELLMAN: What really concerns me is the pill has always been perceived as the next best thing to sliced bread. Just pop the pill, it’s great, it’s convenient, it’s the number one drug given to women for all sorts of hormonal issues from acne to heavy periods to lack of periods to endometriosis, ovarian cysts, polycystic ovarian syndrome, even peri-menopausal symptoms. And it’s now actually being prescribed for the heck of it. It’s being given to women to stop menstruation because menstruation is a little messy and inconvenient. Which to me is one of the greatest travesties done to them.
DEB: Absolutely. And I have a daughter who is a senior in high school and no kidding, nine out of ten of her friends are on the pill. She’s constantly coming home and telling me that one more of her friends is on the pill, to regulate her period. And it’s heartbreaking. It’s just heartbreaking.
DR. SELLMAN: And it shows how ignorant we are because if anyone understood , and I’m putting doctors in that category of being ignorant, because if you can explain to me how using two known human carcinogens that deplete the body of key minerals and vitamins and compromises thyroid function, increases inflammation in the body, creates candida and interferes with digestion, will ever make a woman healthier so she can menstruate, tell me. I’d like to know.
DEB: Before we go on to the questions we have prepared for you, I have a question for you. Is it really all about money? It just sickens me.
DR. SELLMAN: It is all about money.
DEB: Is there anything more sinister going on than that?
DR. SELLMAN: This is why I get all revved up. I truly, why I’ve been writing for the last 10-15 years now, dispelling all these myths. It is all about the money. Doctors have good intentions, I’m not saying they’re evil. I’m saying they have been duped as well. They have been brainwashed by a paradigm that focuses on solutions of using drugs rather than getting a person, in this case a woman, healthy. If a woman has all these problems, you know endometriosis, ovarian cysts, heavy periods, lack of periods, painful periods, whatever, she is not a healthy woman. So why are we putting these women on more toxic, carcinogenic drugs? The government has listed the two hormones in the pill and HRT as known human carcinogens. Which is why the younger a girl is put on the pill, the greater her lifetime risk will be of developing breast cancer. And right now 1 out of every 250 women under the age of 40 are being diagnosed with breast cancer. We have 20 and 30 year old women now being diagnosed with breast cancer. Which, by the way, is why I wrote my latest book called WHAT WOMEN MUST KNOW TO PROTECT THEIR DAUGHTERS FROM BREAST CANCER. It’s revealing these causes, the situation that’s happening and how we can take greater responsibility for our lives and the lives of our children to avert disaster.
DEB: It’s so important. One of the things that, we’ve been on this mission, I’ve been on this mission almost three years now, holding seminars across America and teaching, we have a website Women4Balance if you’d like to go visit and see what we teach. I’m not a physician. I’m not a doctor. I’m self-educated. We have your book on our list of recommended reading, Dr. Sellman. It’s books like yours, is where we get our information and it’s so difficult to be taken seriously without a degree behind my name. You know what I mean?
DR. SELLMAN: Well I want to say, I began without a degree. I only became a naturopath several years ago. I began like you. I was just a woman who felt, I was compelled to share what I was learning. I was a psychotherapist but I didn’t have a medical degree of any sort. I think our voices as concerned women are powerful. You don’t need to have any sort of medical degree, I think it’s our bodies and our experience and our wisdom that helps to guide us. I do want to say that the more you delve into this area and the more you learn you probably want to go on and get a degree in naturopathy or something because you do learn more and it does give you extra added credibility, but I didn’t begin that way either. I said, “Who’s going to listen to me?” When I wrote HORMONE HERESY I was just a woman taking on a mission and I first wrote this book when I lived in Australia and I have to say, I got on every television, radio, newspaper program. I was traveling around the country, I made headlines. It was like, “I can’t believe it! People are listening to me.”
DEB: That is wonderful.
SHANA: That’s encouraging.
DEB: It was well researched and documented and that’s what we try to do.
DR. SELLMAN: I remember the first interview was with an endocrinologist on television who was debating me. It was a sleepless night I have to say, before, but her arrogance betrayed her. In the end people really didn’t trust her and really saw the sincerity from me. It was a huge success, helped with success for the book because this woman, this endocrinologist, was just too arrogant and women don’t like that. It gave her away.
DEB: We’ve just been patted on our heads by our doctors and “It’s all in your head, it’s all in your head. Here go take this.” Well I was on three antidepressants before I finally said, “There’s a list of like 50 symptoms for hormone imbalance and you’ve got a drug for every single one of those symptoms. If I’ll take it, you’ll give it, won’t you?”
DR. SELLMAN: You’re lucky you survived on three antidepressants I have to say.
DEB: You know something, I almost didn’t. I’ve never known depression in my life, until then. And that was over the top for me. I had lost my will to live. A good day for me was shuffling from the bed to the couch and back to bed, before it all ended. It didn’t take long once I decided to wean myself of those, all of it, the HRT, the antidepressants and the Crestor for my then high cholesterol. Everything’s normal now. Once I learned some of the things I need to do to lighten my estrogenic load, lighten my toxic load, nutrify my body with real foods and not fast foods, I made some changes. And my body began to respond, quite quickly actually. That’s the good news. The good news from you is we can hear you cheering us on. That is so encouraging to us, to hear that from someone who is so accomplished and a woman of integrity like yourself.
Let’s go on with some questions here. So Sherrill, what has research revealed about HRT and the pill that we need to know?
DR. SELLMAN: Well, there’s just been some really interesting things coming out lately. But basically, what research has revealed is that HRT is a major medical mistake. When I wrote HORMONE HERESY I looked at the literature and looked at the research. They knew since 1938 that estrogen caused cancer. I couldn’t believe that people were pushing these hormones when it was so evident, when you just get the facts, that this was a disastrous drug for women. In 2002 this huge Women’s Health Initiative study was ended three years early actually because statistics showed that women taking the hormones were getting a 20% increase in breast cancer, strokes and blood clots. That’s still true.
Just the other day there was a study that showed that women on hormones have abnormal mammograms. Well hello, estrogen is known to thicken breast tissue. You can’t get accurate mammograms if you have thickened breast tissue. So then women get more biopsies and more mammograms. By the way, mammograms are known to cause cancer. Every picture they take is one RAD, and usually it’s two on either side, so four RADs every year. For every RAD you have 1% increase risk for breast cancer. So women who get these mammograms throughout their lives are increasing their risk of breast cancer.
There was just a study that I was sent yesterday looking at the pill and they said there are new recommendations going out with the patch because it increases the risk of blood clots and strokes in women. So there’s no safety in taking these drugs. They’re just showing more and more how dangerous they are, how they upset our whole physiology, because our hormones are not just hormones regulating menstrual cycles, they’re regulating every single cell and every single function in our body. And when they are out of balance, and they are made in parts per billion and parts per trillion so teeny, teeny, tiny alterations of these hormones have huge consequences to our health, short-term and long-term.
SHANA: And on the flip side, little teeny, teeny, tiny changes are going to help immensely.
DR. SELLMAN: Absolutely. As I like to say, drugs suppress symptoms but they’ll never get you healthy. What we need to do is get healthy because all hormonal imbalances are due to poor health. That’s what I really emphasize in my lectures and that’s what I’ve learned over the years. If we were healthy, if we were truly detoxifying, nourishing, eating the right foods, addressing all the needs, we would sail through these life changes. To the degree we aren’t, it’s telling us that something needs attention. That was a big revelation for me. Hormonal imbalances don’t just happen and are part of being a woman. They happen because we are compromised in some way. We know this because there are cultures around the world that have no symptoms of menopause, nothing, they just sail through. These are indigenous cultures where they eat well, they don’t have the stress, they don’t have the toxicity that we have right now. That’s our goal. Get balanced so we can sail through, symptom-free, from one stage to another.
SHANA: That sounds wonderful.
DEB: On our website we have a list of foods to avoid. Dr. Sellman, would you just go over, maybe it’s easier to talk about what to avoid than what to eat.
DR. SELLMAN: It’s really simple. Eat real foods that don’t come in packages. Stay away from, I call them hormone wreckers. I have a list of hormone wreckers. And the hormone wreckers include sugar of all sorts, including anything “diet”. Anything “diet” is made up of toxic, artificial sweeteners that are made up of neurotoxins to the brain or in the case of Splenda are made with chlorine and are carcinogenic and can alter your thymus and your liver and other key organs. So you have to stay away from the toxic sugars. You have to stay away from the toxic fats, anything that’s fried, anything that’s made with hydrogenated oils. All those oils that come off of the supermarket shelves that are in clear containers, they are deodorized, they’re processed, they’re rancid and they will cause major, major damage to your cells and to your hormones. You’ve got to stay away from anything white. And that means white bread, white flour, anything white is a disaster. In fact, I truly believe that a huge percentage of the population are gluten-intolerant and if you are eating wheat, or anything that has the gluten, which is a protein in wheat - wheat, rye, barley, oat, spelt - all of these foods actually cause major allergic reactions and can in fact create hormonal imbalances leading to high estrogen levels and low thyroid, they affect the thyroid. Thyroid affects estrogen levels actually. So that’s one thing.
We need to be sure we are cleansing our vegetables and fruits, using some vegetable cleaners, because these foods are sprayed so regularly. Organic is what we really want to go for. We have to hydrate, drink plenty of water. I recommend people stay away from pasteurized dairy products. Raw dairy products are fine. Raw cheeses are fine. Yogurt can be a problem if you’re lactose-intolerant and keifer is a better option. Those are some basic guidelines. Clean up the diet. Get rid of the processed foods, the junk foods, the sugars, the white things to help balance blood sugar which has a huge role in hormones. Soy, by the way, is not a favorite food of mine, unless it’s fermented. I recommend people do not do a lot of soy, especially soy flour, soy oils, all these things are very toxic and can affect hormones. So how’s that?
DEB: That’s awesome. Around here at my house we call it “eating low to the ground”, eating as low to the ground as we can, as fresh and raw as possible. “Lean and green” is a catch phrase that we use.
SHANA: It seems crazy that we have to teach people to eat real food again, but we do have to teach people to eat real food again.
DEB: I was guilty of it myself. Are you familiar with Raymond Francis?
DR. SELLMAN: Um, hm.
DEB: We had him on a week or two ago and I confessed before I found some of my answers and began learning what I learned, my life was very, very busy and I was burning the candle at both ends and there was a time that I was too embarrassed to put my pizza boxes out on the curb for recycling because there were so many of them. It was pathetic.
(Laughing)
DEB: It was a call 1-800-food and bring it kind of thing. Boy things have changed since then. We’re planting our own garden now. So let’s go on with this interview. You touched on perimenopause a little bit. Tell us, what is it? What is perimenopause?
DR. SELLMAN: Perimenopause is this period when our body is starting to change, to alter. It’s going into this next stage which is our menopausal, or more accurately our postmenopausal, cycle, which is when a woman comes into a full blossoming of her power. What happens in per menopause is our ovulations become more irregular. It could be because we’re stressed, we’re toxic, it’s just the communication between the pituitary, the master gland, and the ovaries isn’t so finely tuned and so if we’re skipping our menstrual cycles and not ovulating and not making progesterone, the pituitary goes, “Oh come on, let’s just do it one more time” and tries to produce the hormones that gets the ovary to keep working. As a result we create some of the highest levels of estrogen ever made in our lives, in these peri- menopausal years. That’s accompanied by irregular menstrual cycles. We may miss a period every now and then. We may even be menstruating but not necessarily ovulating. If you don’t ovulate, you’re not making progesterone.
At menopause what happens, when you finally go into this next cycle of a woman’s life, you reduce the amount of estrogen made by the ovaries by about 40-60%. You never stop making estrogen. You have back-up systems, your fat cells make estrogen, which is why overweight women are at greater risk of breast cancer, because they have more estrogen circulating and are more at risk for inflammation and other chronic illnesses. But progesterone drops precipitously because we’re not ovulating, we’re not making progesterone and the back-up system in that case are the adrenals. The adrenals, by the way, also make some estrogens as well. So we do have a back-up system. Things don’t just shut off. Unlike Dr. Robert Wilson who said the ovaries die and stop making estrogen, that’s not true. Unless, of course, you had a hysterectomy and had your ovaries removed. Which we can talk about. So, menopause is this adjustment. We’re designed not to be rearing children any longer. The reason nature moves us into a stage where we’re relieved of our duties of child-raising and we can go and be the wise women of our communities and not have to worry about spending our time looking after kids. Unless we’re grandparents, and then we can give them back. (Laughing)
So perimenopause is this change that is starting to occur gradually, moving us into menopause. High estrogen, low progesterone. And menopause is when we are shifting gears from our ability to bear children, to conceive and bear children, into our times when we’re really not focused on that job anymore, we’re focused on accessing a greater wisdom and intuition and a greater sense of purpose and direction. Which is what menopause is really all about.
DEB: Absolutely. There seems to be a trend, my generation seems to be going through menopause a decade earlier than our mothers did. Is that a real trend?
DR. SELLMAN: I don’t know if it’s a real trend. I haven’t particularly seen it. But if it is happening, it’s because women are more toxic and more nutritionally-deficient and they’re just unhealthier. The first system to go offline when we’re sick or unhealthy is the reproductive system. Nature will sacrifice that system first. So if we are unhealthy or toxic or stressed or we’re just not giving our body the nourishment it needs, then that would probably show up as a symptom, lack of menstruation.
Often woman are not menstruating, in their 40s, but they’re not necessarily going into menopause. They have more of what used to be called amenorrhea, the lack of menstruation due to deficiencies. Often when I’ve worked with women and we’ve gotten them nourished and the hormones and ovaries working again, they start menstruating. Because they didn’t really have early menopause, they were just deficient and their body couldn’t create enough blood to have a period.
DEB: Wow. I read Suzanne Somers’ book and she’s a big believer in mega-dosing and keeping the period, the menses going and going and going. That, in her opinion, is ultimate health.
DR. SELLMAN: Suzanne Somers in all honesty has some really good things to say but in that department she is flat wrong.
DEB: Oh, I agree. I completely agree.
DR. SELLMAN: I’ve actually interviewed a gynecologist to challenge and debate what Suzanne Somers is saying. Nature did not mean to have a 60-year-old woman to have the hormones of a 20-year-old woman. And Suzanne Somers, who of all people was on the pill for years and years and years, abused her body for years and years, had breast cancer, she of all people should know better than recommending bioidentical hormones across the board. It’s just irresponsible, actually. Bioidentical hormones are not necessarily safer ways of taking hormones. While bioidentical hormones are made from bioidentical progesterone which is far better than Provera, synthetic progesterone, but they’re all using plant-based estrogens these days. Unless you have a saliva test and unless it’s clear that you are truly estrogen-deficient and remember, if you have any meat on your bones you’re making plenty of estrogen, fat cells make estrogen, then it is extremely dangerous to be on any form of estrogen. That’s where blood tests compound the problem because blood tests do not accurately tell you the tissue levels of your hormones and often lead you to think, the results tend to show you are deficient, when if you’d had a saliva test, which is the testing that I use, would show that you are normal or in excess. So the testing has kind of contributed to the myths that lead to misdiagnosis and mistreatment.
DEB: Again, there’s so much confusion and there’s so much to learn and there’s so much out there to lay our hands on and read. But if you’re learning the right stuff and reading the right information, you’re going to be able to identify the Suzanne Somers approach as being off. You know what I mean? When I read the book I went, “uh, uh.” Because my baseline was Dr. John Lee’s book and THE GREATEST EXPERIMENT EVER PERFORMED ON WOMEN, and your book and Christiane Northrup’s books and Katarina Dalton’s books. So when I got a hold of that book…But that’s not true for everybody. There are some people that just embrace those books and go, “This is the fountain of youth. Mega-dosing is the answer. Keeping my period going for ever and every will keep me young forever.”
DR. SELLMAN: I’ll tell you why you don’t want to keep your period going forever. This is a teaching from Chinese medicine. When we are young we have an abundance of chi, of life force. Every time we menstruate we actually dissipate some of that life force. So when we’re young and have this overabundance we can handle dissipation of that life force when we bleed. But when we get to a certain stage of our life, when you get to your menopausal years, nature’s innate intelligence is to stop the bleeding so we hold that life force within us rather than dissipating. It’s one of the strategies you might it’s the rejuvenation strategy of nature, to hold that life force within us. So every time you are forced to bleed with this induced, this artificial cycle in your 60s and your 70s, you are accelerating your aging.
DEB: Wow, that’s news to me.
DR. SELLMAN: People look at Suzanne Somers and they go, “Isn’t she gorgeous? She looks so youthful.” Well, you know, how many botox injections, how many growth-hormone injections? What else is she doing? And believe me, she is doing it.
DEB: I’ve seen her on TV recently and I don’t think that looks like gracious aging to me. What I’m seeing does not look like gracious aging to me.
DR. SELLMAN: But people do see her as looking good in her 60s and follow her advice and not realizing that there are a lot of flaws to her advice.
DEB: Well let’s move on. Shana, do you have a question?
SHANA: Yeah. Sherrill I read a great article on your site about the pill and breast cancer. Can you share with us what we need to know to help our daughters and the other women that we love avoid this?
DR. SELLMAN: The basic thing about the pill is, as I said earlier, it’s made up of two synthetic hormones. Both of which have been listed, by the United States government and the World Health Organization, as known human carcinogens. Why are women put on the pill? Up until recently when menstruation has become medicalized and pathologized, for profit mind you. There is no reason to put young women for the purpose of eliminating menstrual cycles, other than profit. It makes no sense. We need to understand something. When you’re on the pill and you’re putting carcinogenic drugs in your body, they’re extremely toxic. So you’re going to start affecting the liver and overloading the liver, which is already pretty overwhelmed in our society. The average person has hundreds of synthetic chemicals . Babies these days are born with, one study showed an average of 289 chemicals in their bodies. When they’re born! Born with those chemicals. Many of which are hormone disruptors or carcinogens. And one out of six eight-year-old girls are going into puberty right now because of exposure to these chemicals. The earlier your exposure to estrogen, the greater your lifetime risk will be of developing breast cancer. Which is why early puberty, 50% of ten-year-olds are menstruating, is very terrifying for me. Then these young girls have all these menstrual problems now because they’re so out of balance and toxic and the foods they’re eating are toxic and the stress of our society. So they’re going on the pill.
The pill further creates toxicity of the liver. It’s like taking an antibiotic. It destroys your good gut flora. So women on the pill tend to have candida. Why is that a problem? When you have candida you are interfering with your body’s ability to have a strong immune system because our intestines are the source of 80% of our immune system, from the micro flora in our gut. That gets wiped out by the pill. You’re more susceptible to infections, your immune system is compromised. Candida puts out 79 different toxins so you’re creating a more toxic condition.
Then the pill depletes your B vitamins, including folic acid, B12 and B6, which are known to protect you from cervical cancer. It also depletes magnesium, zinc, selenium, key minerals in your body that are known to also protect you from cancer. In addition to that it suppresses the production of tyrosine, an important amino acid that is helping to create a healthy thyroid. And when a person has hypothyroidism, which one out of five women they say is hypothyroid, a sluggish thyroid is another risk factor for breast cancer.
So all these factors are converging in women who are on the pill. You were saying earlier that you can actually lose your fertility, for some women. I have a quote in my book that came from a billionaire who made fertility drugs who said his best customers are women in their thirties who took the pill as teenagers and twenty-year-olds. So it can permanently shut things off. You combine all these deficiencies with a bad diet, with stress, lifestyle factors that aren’t really healthy in young women, and it’s a perfect storm. It’ s a perfect storm.
We have to remember that estrogen is a very, very powerful hormone disrupting chemical in our body. Seventy percent of all breast cancers are estrogen receptor positive, they’re fueled by too much estrogen. And estrogen in the pill is even higher than what we get in HRT. It’s hundreds of times more potent. So all these things conspire to create unhealthy women who are increasing their risks of breast cancer and when I began to meet the mothers who would tell me of their 20- and 30-year-old daughters who had breast cancer, and then started to meet these women, and in my new book I interviewed five women from around the world who were diagnosed with breast cancer in their 20s and 30s and told their stories, many of these women had been using the pill since they were 14- to 15-years-old. We really need to wake up to this. The pill has been promoted as the safest thing since candy and it’s given out like it was a candy. Yet the truth about the pill is that it is devastating to our health and is a serious risk factor for a range of illness including diabetes and arthritis, because it increases inflammation in the body.
DEB: Oh, my gosh.
SHANA: Dr. Sellman, I have a 15-year-old daughter who has been, for the last year, begging me about going to be put on the pill. And I absolutely refuse. So I’m going to burn a CD of this so she can hear what you just said. But I know she’s going to tune it out so could you emphatically make one statement, like “Just say no”?
DR. SELLMAN: What pleases me the most is when I lecture, there’s a huge chapter in WHAT WOMEN MUST KNOW, I go through all of the risks and side effects and implications of use of the pill, including the blunting of emotions. Probably I am the biggest critic of the pill because a woman’s power comes from menstruation. Menstruation and the flow and rhythms of our hormones throughout the month profoundly connect us with our inner wisdom. When we chemically get castrated from our use of the pill and our own hormonal production is commandeered because of these carcinogens, that are in our body directing the function of just about every system in our body, we are losing touch with our inner sense of self, which is our power as women. That’s the greatest travesty of all, of the pill, is that women get totally disconnected from their own inner wisdom and intuition and their own feelings which guide us into this world. Those are our assets as women. That’s the way the feminine speaks to us. All of that gets aborted and destroyed, from the use of the pill.
Women have to make their own decisions. Young women have to make their own decisions. What brings me great satisfaction and joy is when young women read the chapter or listen to me and go, “You know, I’m never going to take the pill.” Then I know I’m doing my work.
We are a wounded culture and we as women are wounded, we’ve never been given that wisdom. I’ve been fortunate, I’ve had time with aboriginal Australians and Native Americans and Hawaiian elders and those cultures are rich with the wisdom of women. Our society has lost that wisdom. It’s like a ship without a rudder. We need to reconnect with these deep, deep, profound wisdoms. All these cultures have understood that menstruation is vital for a woman’s power. Often menstrual blood is used in many of the rituals because it’s seen as a source of such power. We need to reconnect with our own understanding and we need to get our daughters and granddaughters reconnected with that wisdom so they won’t abuse their bodies and they won’t neglect the source of their own power.
DEB: Amen. I’ve got a question here before we move on to others. Does the pill affect the cervix the same way it does the breast tissue?
DR. SELLMAN: The pill affects the cervix in a different way. First of all, too much estrogen in the body will create an inflammatory state. Estrogen causes inflammation and inflammation is the source of weight gain, of obesity, of cancer, of heart disease, of diabetes, inflammation is the underlying condition that is fueling all chronic illnesses. So we need to understand that too much estrogen, out of balance, is inflammatory in nature. Whenever you have an inflamed body your immune system is going to be compromised. The real problem with the pill is it actually kind of activates the viruses that are associated with cervical cancer, the human papilloma virus, which we’ve been hearing a lot about lately with this vaccine, which I do not recommend.
DEB: We don’t either.
DR. SELLMAN: So it’s been known that women who take the pill are more at risk of developing cervical cancer. Also because the pill depletes the B6, B12 and folic acid which is directly related to increased risk of cervical cancer. So there are a lot of reasons why the pill sets the body up to be more receptive to these viruses and therefore more at risk for cervical cancer.
DEB: Okay, thank you. Shana?
SHANA: Sherrill, in your article BREAST CANCER: WHAT YOUR DOCTOR WON’T TELL YOU, you mentioned zinc deficiency and how it affects development. Can you share a little bit more about that?
DR. SELLMAN: We are an incredibly mineral-deficient society. Our food is deficient in minerals. I’ve been fortunate to attend and speak at conferences on sustainable agriculture. Acres USA is a great organization. I’ve learned a lot from attending conferences there and what I’ve learned is that our soils are just so, so deficient of key minerals, trace minerals, which minerals are required for our vitamins to work. So if we don’t have adequate minerals our vitamins can’t really do their jobs. So number one we’re very mineral deficient. Zinc is one of those minerals we’re very deficient in. Zinc has a huge impact on the immune system. When you’re deficient in zinc you’re prone to all sorts of immune issues. Zinc also has a partner, that partner is copper. Minerals generally have relationships with each other and they have to be in proper relationship for them to work properly. Copper is a mineral associated with estrogen and zinc is a mineral associated with progesterone. Which means when you have higher levels of estrogen you’re going to have higher levels of copper. And when you have lower levels of progesterone you’re going to have lower levels of zinc. That’s why it creates a problem. If you’re estrogen-dominant and you have high copper and low zinc, you’re going to be out of balance. It’s a delicate balance. Your immune system is going to be more compromised. You’re going to tend to be more estrogen-dominant, it furthers it and so the vicious circle continues.
SHANA: We get that vicious circle from lots of places, don’t we?
DR. SELLMAN: We do. All of these minerals are absolutely essential in proper balance and ratios. But once we alter them, and there are a lot of things that can alter them, then we are out of balance and we start experiencing symptoms of imbalance.
DEB: Dr. Lee spoke specifically to the imbalance of zinc and copper in ratio to one another and how that affects emotional health and mental health.
DR. SELLMAN: Yeah, too much copper can create rage. Sometimes you want to increase the zinc in your diet. But sometimes you need to address underlying issues and not just think that adding zinc is the answer. I’m a firm believer that we need to address root-cause issues. If your adrenals are exhausted, for instance, and by the way adrenal exhaustion is really the cause of night sweats and insomnia, amongst other things. If your adrenals are exhausted, they regulate mineral balance in the body, so if they are really exhausted you’re not going to be able to properly utilize your minerals, no matter how many you throw in. So it’s really important to address adrenals, which by the way are kind of the foundation of hormones as well. If our adrenals are out of balance, if you’re too stressed, if they are producing too much of the stress hormone like cortisol, it’s going to be a primary cause of hormonal imbalance and put those hormones out of balance, leading you to high estrogen, low progesterone. A lot of people don’t understand that progesterone deficiency is really caused by adrenal exhaustion. Which is what I had, when I was going through those symptoms, I came to realize down the track, that I had major adrenal exhaustion, for a number of reasons. When you have adrenals that are dysfunctional, that actually results in low progesterone, high estrogen, for a lot of reasons. Cortisol blocks progesterone receptors and increases estrogen and does a lot of things that are quite debilitating to the body and to the hormones.
DEB: Everything seems to be so delicate. Some basic advice would be what? To start with eating correctly?
DR. SELLMAN: I think the basic advice would be to eliminate those hormone wreckers we talked about. If you really want to get healthy, which hormones will get balanced the healthier you get, you’ve got to love yourself enough to take away the toxins and poisons that are damaging to the body. You have to eliminate those toxic foods and you have to eliminate toxic behaviors. You need to really rest. It’s more important women understand the need to rest, to meditate, to relax, to create that balance in rhythm because if you are living a stressful life physically or emotionally, you will never get your hormones in balance. Stress actually increases estrogen levels, cortisol levels and depletes thyroid and progesterone and all the hormones go awry. So you really need to honor yourself and bring in something every day, every day some relaxation. I like to use biofeedback programs. There’s a great program called Healing Rhythms. It’s a computer program and you put little sensors on your fingers and it takes you on wonderful journeys as you go into deeper states, it trains you. That to me has become really crucial to use with my patients.
You need to make sure you’re getting basic nutrients, some basic multi-vitamins, multi-minerals. You need digestive enzymes, probiotics and you probably need, definitely, some good essential fatty acids. Those are kind of basics. You kind of build on that. And the need for sleep.
And I have to say one more thing, while we’re on the subject, that probably you haven’t given much thought to, and that’s the effect of electro-pollution. So cell phones, cordless phones, wireless routers, act as more powerful endocrine disruptors than endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
SHANA: Really? Are you kidding me?
DR. SELLMAN: I am not kidding. No one should be using a cell phone, or a cordless phone or a wireless router, all these devices are turning out to be disastrous. I’ve been writing about this. I lecture on this subject. The connection between hormone disruption, estrogen dominance, breast cancer and cell phones and emfs. There are products that I’ve found that actually have a science behind it that I use on all my computers, wireless routers, phones. I would not use these technologies without them. They actually protect. Cordless phones are three times more powerful than cell phones. And cordless phones, like having little cell phone towers in your home, they suppress melatonin levels, which is known to suppress estrogen levels. They suppress thyroid function. They increase cortisol levels. They will interfere with serotonin and dopamine, which are neurotransmitters in the brain that address depression and dopamine has to do with sense of pleasure and pain management. All these things are altered from exposure, as well as miscarriages and infertility and sterility in men. From cell phones, from wireless technology.
I have articles on my website that anyone can go read and also where you can get this protection. You’ve got to get protected from it. And our kids, there’s a study that just came this week from the UK’s The International Herald that actually is questioning once again how safe are cell phones for our children. I have to say, they are a disaster waiting for our children. Two minutes on a cell phone can alter the electro-activity of a child’s brain for hours. And half of tweeners, half of the 20 million tweeners, about 10 million are now using cell phones because the industry is marketing to children since the adult population has been saturated.
DEB: We were at the hospital the other day because my husband’s father was having some heart work done and we went to visit him in the hospital, and I saw two children, they both owned cell phones, had cell phones of their own, and they could not have been more than eight or nine-years old. Both of them. And they were texting each other back and forth trying to stay quiet in the hospital room. I couldn’t believe it.
SHANA: Now is it coincidental that we’re seeing this increase in attention deficit disorder and an increase with children using cell phones?
DR. SELLMAN: Definitely. And crappy food.
DEB: Yeah. Right now I’m going to hang up and go to GoodWill and get myself a corded phone.
DR. SELLMAN: Yeah, go back and get the corded phone.
DEB: I’m ready to go backwards. I’ve got three cell phones in my home. I had no idea. Not cell phones, cordless phones.
DR. SELLMAN: And take them away from your bedroom because if you have cordless, if you have cell phones, if you have digital clocks, any electrical appliances at your head, near your head when you sleep, it’s been shown to suppress the production of melatonin, which not only helps you sleep but it also regulates estrogen production, it’s a tumor suppressor, it’s a powerful antioxidant, it’s an aromatase inhibitor, all of that gets altered when you have these devices. Studies have shown that melatonin levels aren’t produced.
SHANE: Electric blankets?
DR. SELLMAN: You should never have them. You can warm up the bed, but never go to bed with them on.
DEB: Wow. Okay, we’re at the top of the hour. Is it okay if I give the opportunity for any listener questions, Dr. Sellman?
DR. SELLMAN: Yeah, sure.
DEB: Okay, good. Thank you. For those of you that are on the call right now and have questions for Dr. Sellman, now would be a great time to ask them.
NITA: I do.
DEB: That’s Nita from Washington. Go ahead Nita.
NITA: I’d like to know what her take is, she said something about sugars, white things, what are her ideas on replacing sweeteners with natural--
DR. SELLMAN: Well here are the sweeteners that I approve of. Stevia, Xylitol and there’s a sweetener called Lo Han, it’s a Chinese fruit. That’s it.
DEB: Have you ever heard of agave nectar?
DR. SELLMAN: Yes, but I’m not sure that agave nectar doesn’t raise insulin levels. I’m looking at the five carbon sugars that don’t raise insulin levels and don’t feed bacteria. You can eat them all you want and they won’t stimulate inflammation and they won’t cause bacteria, gum disease and hormonal imbalance. Xylitol, if you do a search on that and my name, I wrote a long article about it, is fabulous. It’s been studied for 40 years and it prevents cavities and they give it to kids in Scandinavia after each meal. It helps with bones. It alkalines the body and it tastes and looks just like sugar.
DEB: I’ve used it. It’s good stuff. And I’ve read where it just eats calculus and tartar off the teeth.
DR. SELLMAN: Well it doesn’t really eat it off it just doesn’t let the bacteria grow that creates it.
DEB: Right. Any other questions? (Pause) No questions for Dr. Sellman?
DR. SELLMAN: I’ve made everything perfectly clear?
DEB: You must have.
SHANA: We’re all stunned. We’re thinking about the cordless phones we’re holding.
DR. SELLMAN: Just when you think you’ve got it all together there’s always something else that comes along that makes you think, “Oh my god, here’s another piece of the puzzle I didn’t even think about.” When it comes to this cell phone thing, there is huge deception by the wireless industry to lie about how dangerous this technology is. In European countries no woman who is pregnant is advised to be on a cell phone because it could be so harmful to the developing fetus. Other countries are strongly recommending that no child under the age of 16 use a phone. Do you know how many hours, by the way, kids use phones now? I was at a seminar, I was getting some feedback. Up to 10,000 minutes a month. And a study showed that 500 - 1,000 minutes a month can increase the risk of brain cancer by up to 300%. So what’s really terrifying is these kids and this new generation that their lives are texting and everything is done on the phone these days and no one understands just how dangerous it is. Especially to the kids who will be the first generation using it for their entire lives.
DEB: So instead of providing the unlimited text and unlimited minutes, it’s be better to go back to a plan that limited your minutes and you can --
DR. SELLMAN: No, no. We’re at the point of no return. The only way to be protected are to use the products that are made by a company called, that I’ve researched and personally use, is called BioPro. Because 20 seconds on a phone will damage your cell membranes, will shut them down. Reducing the use of the phone is no longer an option. Even if you do we all live within half a mile from a cell phone tower and a German researcher said that if you live within a mile and a quarter you’re exposed to the radiation. There’s no escape. You have to be protected. You have to use good antioxidants. You have to use technologies that are able to allow us to use these technologies without harming ourselves. But you can’t avoid them anymore. There are 78,000 hot spots around the United States. We have wireless in almost every school now. They are removing wireless in schools in the UK because studies have shown that the exposure to these radio frequencies from a wireless router is three times greater than what you get from a cell phone tower. These are kids in school, sitting in front of there computers, exposed to this frequency every day, day in, day out.
So this is a huge problem, aside from being a hormone disruptor it’s weakening the immune system, leading to brain tumors, and other tumors and sterility and infertility and miscarriage and interferes with brain functioning. The list is long. So I advise everyone to go to www.whatwomenmustknow.com and read my article about electro-pollution. And especially there’s an article about hormones, emfs and cell phones.
DEB: I saw that one on there, I just hadn’t downloaded that one yet. So that’s next this afternoon for sure. Dr. Sellman mentioned her website, What Women Must Know, you will find her there as well as some of the articles that Shana and I mentioned and questioned Dr. Sellman about. You will also find her book. And if you click on her store links you’ll find all the products she recommends.
DR. SELLMAN: I also want to say that I have kind of a virtual practice. I work with women all over the country through phone consultations and offering saliva tests and other things. So if you don’t have someone locally that really understands what’s going on, then I’m certainly available as a resource.
DEB: This is good news and you will be hearing from me. Because I was just wishing that you lived here in Oregon, that you were nearby.
DR. SELLMAN: I don’t have to be.
NITA: Deb, I believe you told me that the other day on the phone.
DEB: What?
NITA: That you wished she had lived next door.
DR. SELLMAN: Well we can be next door. Skype takes us next door to each other now. There’s lots of ways. You really don’t have to sit in front of a doctor . It’d be nice, but it isn’t required to get the results.
NITA: Oh, this is exciting.
DEB: It is very, very exciting.
NITA: That means I don’t have to live next door to anybody either.
DEB: And you live out in the sticks, don’t you? That’s awesome. Well, okay Sherrill, is there anything else you’d like to tell us about your website? Anything new that we need to be paying attention to that we may have missed while visiting?
DR. SELLMAN: No, I think the only thing I want to say, I don’t know if it’s on my website but I have a three-CD set called “Getting Your Hormones Back on Track” and it discusses so much of what we were talking about, but it’s three hours long. So that’s just full of great information and people can just contact me directly. They can email me which is golight@earthlink.net and they can order it from me. The more educated we become the more empowered we become. That’s why I continue to write and lecture and do wonderful, wonderful interviews like this. Thank you so much because we need to get the truth or else we really can be manipulated and we need to stand up in our power.
DEB: I just want to thank you for your time and you know that cell phone thing, I think that could be subject enough for another call. What do you think?
DR. SELLMAN: Yes, you bet. I’m in.
DEB: You’ll come back then, great. You’ll be hearing from me again on that level too. Thank you so much Dr. Sellman. You will be hearing from us again and I’m sure you’ll be hearing from many of our callers today. This is not only being recorded but it will be passed on and there will be women listening to the recording, the archived recording, later. Thank you so very much.
DR. SELLMAN: It’s been such a pleasure, thank you so much for having me.
DEB: It’s been awesome and you’ll be hearing from me again. Okay, Shana, what about next week? Who’s going to be with us next week?
SHANA: Next week we’re going to infertility and natural progesterone with our very own Cynthia Tarantino, who is now pregnant with her own progesterone baby. Unfortunately this call won’t be live, but it’s going to be pre-recorded due to Cynthia’s work schedule. But watch for announcements about its availability.
DEB: Right on. Okay everyone, thank you so much, especially Dr. Sellman and until next week, we’ll talk to you then. Bye, bye now.
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