Dr. Peat was telling us that this natural progesterone existed, it was available in a skin cream, it was well absorbed through the skin, it did all these wonderful things, and you could give it to people who could otherwise not take the estrogen. So in my practice, I asked women who had osteoporosis to take the natural progesterone cream, and I followed their bone mineral density tests just to see what would happen.
It turned out that in three years time the women typically gained 15 percent more bone. It wasn't just merely a delay of the osteoporosis, the bones actually became better. But the most important thing was the patients told me all the other things that got better. They reported to me that fibrocystic breasts turned back to normal. Those that had acne or hair loss, like male pattern baldness, showed me that their hair was coming back. Things I had never heard of. Fact I thought I had probably slept through a class in medical school, there were so many things I was learning from my patients. But then I discovered all my colleagues had slept through the same class. They didn't know anything either. ...We didn't know that progesterone was good to help the thyroid hormone work, we didn't know it was good for the peripheral nerves the Schwann cell to make the myelin sheath to keep the nerves healthy. We didn't know that it was a hormone that allowed you to burn fat for energy, we didn't know it was good for bone cells, in fact there are receptor sites for it on the osteoblast so we could make more new bone, we didn't know that brain cells needed it ..., we didn't know that back in the 40's it was recommended as a treatment for epilepsy. We didn't know any of these things. We didn't know that rheumatology journals showed that it could be injected into the joints of people with rheumatoid arthritis and is just as good as cortisone or gold and no side effects. That's something to have the people have to tell you that their fibrocysts went away, their acme went away, their myofibrositis went away, the facytis decreased, and in all of these. Let me get it clear right from the beginning I'm not saying that the progesterone is the super and only ingredient in the treatment plan, it is a major factor but it is not a panacea in itself. You all know that there are multiple factors , most of them being nutritional. You have to have the right nutrients there, but then you have to have the right hormone which is kind of like the architect or the manager to direct affairs. If the hormone isn't there having the right nutrients isn't going to work by itself.
... So I was learning that from my patients, and it was not in my books. But it was in the literature. All of these are in the biochemical literature. It has all been there. You don't have to be an astrophysicist and start from scratch here and learn the universe all over. It's in there but it's not in what I was taught, it's not in the curriculum at medical schools, it's not in the text books it's not in the standard books that doctors read.
These were things that at first I found unbelievable, and yet when I researched them in our hospital library, to find references to see if anyone had studied them, I found that, yes, they had been studied and yes, they were known effects of progesterone.