Hanley, MD's Advice for Fibroid Relief
Get Rid of Your Uterine Fibroid
From Hanley, MD
Excerpt from What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Premenopause by John Lee, MD and Jesse Hanley, MD and Virginia Hopkins
"The uterus is one of the first organs to manifest symptoms when a women's hormones are out of balance. Two of the most common uterine symptoms of premenopause syndrome are an enlarged uterus and uterine fibroids. Women with PMS often experience painful periods (dysmenorrhea) which are most often caused when the endometrial lining of the uterus extends into the muscular wall of the uterus (adenomyosis). When shedding of the endometrium occurs (menstruation), the blood is released into the muscular lining, causing severe pain. Conventional medicine treats this pain with nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), such as ibuprofen, but ignores the underlying metabolic hormonal imbalance that caused it. The problem can be simply resolved by restoring proper progesterone levels, which restores normal growth and shedding of the endometrium.
Estrogen dominance causes the uterus to grow, and without the monthly balancing 
effect of progesterone it doesn't have the proper signals to stop growing. In some women this results in an enlarged uterus that presses on other organs, such as the bladder, and often on the digestive system, and generally causes discomfort and heavy menstrual bleeding. In other women estrogen dominance results in fibroids, which are tough noncancerous lumps that grow in the uterus. Some fibroids can grow to the size of grapefruit or cantaloupe, causing constant bleeding and such heavy menstrual periods that the blood loss is akin to hemorrhaging.
Fibroids always shrink at menopause, but the most common course of action a doctor takes when a patient comes in with a fibroid is to remove the uterus. The explanation given is that a fibroid is too difficult to remove without irreversibly damaging the uterus. But in most cases this is no longer true. If you do end up needing to have a fibroid surgically removed, find a doctor who can do it without removing your uterus with it. If you have many small fibroids, it may be more difficult to remove them. On the other hand, their smaller size may make it easier to treat them without surgery.
Case Study - Donna
Dr. Hanley treated a women named Donna who, for financial and emotional reasons, was determined not have a hysterectomy even though she had a huge fibroid that was causing serious bowel and bladder problems. Even after ending up in the emergency room she had refused surgery and had sought out Dr. Hanley, determined to find another way.
Dr. Hanley first talked to Donna about what was going on in her life and discovered that right around time she started to notice symptoms from the fibroid, she had finally extricated herself emotionally and financially from a physically and sexually abusive relationship.
Since she was already in counseling and had a good emotional support system of friends and family, the first thing Dr. Hanley had her do was change 
her diet. Donna had been living on milk, cheese, cottage cheese, and ice cream. Dr. Hanley put her on a high fiber, vegetable-based diet along with some herbs to help detoxify her body and support her liver. Since it was an emergency situation, Dr. Hanley also gave her a shot of a synthetic drug called Lupron, which suppressed her ovary's production of hormones for three months, lowering her whole hormonal milieu, and also asked her to use a very small amount of progesterone cream. Within a few weeks her bowel and bladder problems were gone and Donna reported that she could feel her uterus begin to soften, indicating that the fibroid was shrinking. Just over seven months later, Donna was feeling like herself again, and her fibroid had shrunk to a manageable size.
Donna's story is unusual because most women will see a doctor and end up having a hysterectomy long before a fibroid gets large enough to cause severe pain and bladder problems, and most women do not have Donna's extreme fear of surgery. But Donn is a good example of how a woman can bring her body back into balance when she's willing to accept the challenge of working with herself in a focused way and has the dedication to stick with it.
Some 60 percent of women who reach age sixty-five will have a hysterectomy. For a small percentage of them it will relieve chronic pelvic pain and increase sexual pleasure. But for most women a hysterectomy results in reduced sexual pleasure, and it often does not cure pelvic pain. A hysterectomy in a premenopausal woman will also result in abrupt menopause and atrophy of the ovaries. It will increase her risk of heart disease and osteoporosis and will greatly increase her chances of having bladder problems such as incontinence and chronic urinary tract infections.
Why your Uterus is a Nuisance to your Doctor and the Drug Companies
What doctors aren't telling women is that giving them estrogen before menopause will cause a fibroid to grow - and that giving them estrogen after menpause (when it would naturally shrink) will likely cause it to continue to grow. What most doctors don't know about fibroids is that avoiding estrogen and using some natural progesterone cream will almost always shrink a fibroid enough to minimize or eliminate symptoms long enough to get to menopause, when it will normally shrink significantly enough to cease becoming a problem.
It's ironic that our conventional medical culture has evolved in such a way that a woman who has an enlarged uterus or a fibroid is considered to be a liability, all because it has become a virtual requirement that your doctor prescribe Primarin and Provera to you when you reach menopause. If your doctor didn't feel so powerfully obliged to prescribe those drugs, your uterus would naturally shrink. Because he or she feels obliged to prescribe those drugs, your uterus becomes dangerous. Thus, do drug company profits dictate medical education and practice.
Having a uterus also means that your doctor can't just prescribe estrogen
alone; he or she also is required to prescribe Provera (synthetic progesterone) to offset the cancer-causing therapy (HRT) in the 1960s used only estrogen, and this human experiment cost the lives of thousands of women who died of uterine (endometrial) cancer in the 1960s and 1970s before it dawned on the medical profession that unopposed estrogen was the cause. It took another decade of intense public relations and marketing campaigns to convince women that is was safe once again to take HRT because they would now be protected from cancer by the addition of a synthetic progestin to the mix, most commonly Provera.
But as Gail Sheehy so aptly described in her pioneering book "The Silent Passage", there aren't too many drugs in the world that will make women feel worse than Provera. Many women outright refuse to continue taking Provera when they experience its side effects (something akin to severe permanent PMS) and will even risk cancer and take unopposed estrogen to avoid it. This gives your doctor yet another reason to suggest that removing your uterus will solve a lot of problems. The promise is that you can take only estrogen without the Provera. The promise is that estrogen will save you from heart disease, osteoporosis and Alzheimer's disease, so the trade-off of losing your uterus is well worth it. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. Unfortunately, these promises aren't true. If you remove your uterus and take estrogen, your troubles have only begun.
What a convoluted, tricky house of cards has been built around the belief that conventional HRT will save you from the ills of old age. All these lines of reasoning, assumptions, and beliefs systems are built on decades of clever but inherently dishonest advertising and marketing for estrogen. Premarin, the top-selling drug in America, has made your uterus a liability. The truth is that your uterus is not a liability for you; it is a liability to drug company profits.
Let's also briefly delve into the economies of a hysterectomy. Removal of your uterus is a very costly major surgery, with a long recovery time. After surgery, your will be visiting your doctor every six months or at least once a year to renew you hormone replacement prescription. This scenario gives both your doctor and drug company a lifetime repeat customer, which is the dream of every one in the business, from the small entrepreneur to the corporate CEO. In other words, removing a women's uterus is very, very good for business.
Furthermore, the unopposed estrogen that your doctor believes it is safe to prescribe not that you don't have a uterus will eventually lead to a long, expensive (but profitable to your doctor) sequence of pathologic conditions such as fibrocystic breasts, weight gain, water retention, hypertension (elevated blood pressure), blood clots, gallbladder disease, and breast or other hormone-dependent cancers. You have, in effect, become a cash cow for your doctor. Each and every disease you get from unopposed estrogen brings financial reward to your doctor. Behavior rewarded is behavior repeated.
Now let's look at the other choices. Removing a fibroid from a uterus takes a level of surgical skill, patience, and expertise that most ob-gyns don't have. It also takes longer and costs more, so insurance companies would rather not pay for it. Until fairly recently, very few ob-gyns were qualified to do the surgery, nor would the insurance companies cover it. If the ob-gyns can't do it themselves, they have to pass on your business to another surgeon. Or they can remove your uterus, which is a fairly simple and straightforward procedure (for the surgeon not for you).
If you just have surgery to remove a fibroid , and you leave your uterus intact, after the surgery your doctor may not see you again except every few years for a pap smear.
Now let's say your doctor recommends using some progesterone cream. Well, you can buy that yourself, over the counter, and it's fairly easy to learn how
to use it. That may be the last time you see that doctor, except to return for the ultrasound a year later, which will show that your fibroid has gone from the size of an orange to the size of a walnut.
The economics of these choices are extremely different for you and your doctor. We aren't suggesting that you shouldn't ever have your uterus removed, because in rare cases that is necessary. But we are strongly recommending that your take into account the hidden agendas that exist in this type of a situation before making a decision , and that you make your decision based on what's best for you."
Healing the Uterus/Fibroids
What to do
What to Avoid