BIHRT FAQ's

Bio-identical hormones are exactly the same hormones, molecule per molecule that your body produces. They originate from plants. Most often made from wild yams and soybeans. They are then slightly modified in a lab to attain the structure identical to the hormones produced by your own body. Use of this type of therapy is preferred by both men and women in dealing with hormonal changes due to aging, menopause and andropause. Synthetic hormones are also made in a lab, but most importantly are not identical to your body. Bioidentical hormones are superior to types of synthetic hormones commonly prescribed.

At Amaya, we believe that most people should have their hormones checked by the age of 35 or earlier if they have symptoms of hormonal loss. The way to prevent illness and to optimize one’s health is to take an active role in addressing health care risks before they become a problem.

Because bio-identical hormones are just like the ones made in your body, there are relatively few side effects. Side effects occur mainly when the dosage of hormone is too high for the individual. Amaya monitors and evaluates each patient consistently to assure balanced dosage.

While it varies with each person, and depends on which hormone therapy you are using, generally you can expect to see results within three to six months

No. If you decide to stop, your body will simply return to where it was before starting hormone therapy.

No matter what your age, if your female hormones (estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone) are unbalanced, you may suffer ill effects such as hot flashes, night sweats, depression, vaginal dryness, fatigue, and weight gain.

As a man gets older, his testosterone declines. Testosterone is the hormone that maintains a man’s mental focus, his energy, his metabolism his muscles, as well as keeps fat off and maintains strong bones. There is often concern that testosterone therapy may cause prostate cancer. The majority of the medical literature does not support this claim and your physician’s close medical supervision takes these risks into account depending on each individual’s personal health history.

Generally not. Some medicines may actually be reduced or no longer needed.

Amaya would like to caution everyone about the risks of synthetic HRT. We believe it should be a last resort, not a first choice. In general, we recommend that everyone first try a natural approach such as a Personal Program or any other program of your choice which offers natural alternatives. The weaning off from synthetic HRT should be gradual.

HRT = Synthetic Hormone Replacement Therapy

BIHRT= Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement Therapy.

The most common symptoms of perimenopause are hot flashes, insomnia, fatigue, irritability or mood swings, unusual weight gain, irregular periods, anxiety, feelings of depression, fuzzy thinking, bloating or gas, headaches, joint pain or stiffness, vaginal dryness, diminished sexual desire, and leaking of urine.

Amaya can only recommend you a natural approach to hormonal balance. The hormones used in HRT studies were synthetic estrogen and progestin’s not natural Bioidentical estrogen and progesterone. We believe that synthetic hormones commonly used in hormone replacement therapy should be a last resort, not a first choice. However, this is a matter of personal choice.

Yes, the Amaya program will benefit your general health and your hormonal balance, even if you’ve had a hysterectomy, and whether or not you also had your ovaries removed. (Over half the women who keep their ovaries nevertheless suffer loss of ovarian function.) In fact, the Program is especially relevant to women like you, given the heightened risks from long-term use of synthetic HRT (hormone replacement therapy). Note that we generally recommend that women under 40 who have had a hysterectomy consider natural hormone replacement therapy to mimic the body’s natural progression into perimenopause.

No, depending upon what you are taking currently. According to the latest observations unsupervised intake of multivitamins and minerals can do more wrong to your health then its benefits. We recommend you stop all your replacement when you start your Program. We will test you if necessary for the nutritional status and then formulate your personal nutritional plan. It is possible that you might end up using your own products if they are sufficient enough to help you.

The simple answer is no. The Personal Program is all-natural, preventative program with no known drug interactions by far. However, we always strongly recommend sharing your participation in the Program with your primary health care provider, who needs to be aware of any replacement you are taking.

Studies have proved that our true dietary requirements are much higher than the original RDA standards which were set decades ago based on the science of that time. The RDA’s are being reviewed for many years and new standards are expected at some future point.

PMS is a form of hormonal imbalance just like the symptoms of perimenopause. (In fact, women who have suffered from PMS are more likely to have a difficult perimenopause.) The program should be effective in helping to mitigate your symptoms.

Your symptoms may well be the result of the hormonal imbalances of perimenopause. Many women experience their first such hormonal changes in their 30's.

We would recommend you to discuss this with your practitioner first. Unfortunately it’s common now to prescribe antidepressants for PMS or perimenopause without considering the possibility of hormone imbalance. In our practice we have seen most of patients lowering down the dose of antidepressants as recommended by their physicians because they start feeling better when hormone imbalances are corrected. Please discuss your progress in the program with your practitioner, and whether you can make adjustments in your medication. In no case is the program a substitute for antidepressants for depression. It may be possible that your depression is hormonally based, and some women have reported good results on the Program. Your results may vary.

It is a quite frustrating situation seen in most Indians. When look into the figures. More than 50% of the population above 35 can be considered overweight and more than 75% of those who have crossed 50 years of the lives suffer from this and have difficulty losing this weight so you are not alone dear friend. As we age there is a parallel decline of essential hormones, our bodies starts getting soft, loses water and fat starts building up resistant to any maneuvers of weight loss. So it becomes very important to understand the basic human physiology particularly the endocrine system. And how simple correctible hormone efficiencies can put on extra weight on your body resistant to any treatment you undergo to remove the extra pounds. Unfortunately these quick fixes are temporary and weight comes back again.

To enumerate some hormones and their function:

Estrogen: A female hormone which declines with age. This decline is responsible for production of more fat in the body as fat is an alternative source of estrogen when ovaries stop making estrogen fat starts making it and body starts accumulating more fat to make even more estrogen. On the other hand more fat is stored more estrogen gets blocked in the fat cells and vicious cycle starts.

Progesterone: On the other hand is the other female hormone which counteracts the effect of extra estrogen and helps in breakdown of the fat cells, But what is most important in such cases is the ratio between the estrogen and progesterone in the body. With advanced age the estrogen levels fall but progesterone levels fall much lower than the estrogen as a result although there is low estrogen but there is estrogen dominance because of even lower levels of progesterone.

Thyroid Hormone: Hypothyroidism is a hidden pandemic and more and more healthy looking persons are being diagnosed as hypothyroid each and every day especially sub clinical hypothyroidism . Thyroid is the main metabolic hormone of our body responsible for utilizing and burning the available energy stores by increasing the basal metabolic rate and keeps the extra pounds away from the body.

Cortisol: Apart from this another very commonly discussed factor responsible for weight gain but never addressed properly is the tremendous amount of stress in our day to day lives. This stress leads to production of cortisol which is good when in moderation and provides energy and support at the time of need and emergency but chronic stress is lethal. In such states our body tries to store as much energy as possible to be used in future when needed and as fat is the easiest form to be stored and provides maximum energy when burnt as compared to other substrates it is the first choice of our body.

Insulin: Another basic link is between insulin metabolism and body fat. Being in a developed nation and because of busy life styles we are forced to eat the conventional low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet, with lots of processed foods like pasta, white bread, snacks, beer and wine. Constant exposure to this diet creates a condition known as insulin resistance. In this condition your body converts every calorie it can into fat - even if you’re dieting. And it won’t let you burn fat when you exercise. When the insulin is not used properly it gets accumulated to the point where the blood sugar levels start dropping to significantly lower levels leading to lethargy and drowsiness for which we are compelled to have snacks and caffeine to make ourselves feel better. But they actually they only make you more insulin resistant leading to further adrenal exhaustion starts another vicious circle while accumulating body fat. Improper dieting and on - off maneuvers, using artificial sweeteners make things worse. When you diet your body considers it as stress and then tries to store and conserve energy, sweeteners are not sugar but stimulate insulin release and make the situation worse, further they lower blood sugar levels which cause sugar cravings and you look for caffeine to compensate. You can only shed off extra pounds off your body when you are healthy from inside with balanced hormones. If you will heal your body from inside and try to balance your life, you will then find you achieve and maintain your ideal weight.

Menopause is defined as a single day — 12 months after your last period. Your physician's suggestion that you wait until you have passed this milestone reflects an antiquated view of a woman's transition from the premenopause to menopause. The majority of women experience their severest symptoms in the months to years leading up to this milestone. To wait for this single day would be to subject women to a year or more of unnecessary hot flushes, night sweats, mental fogginess, and bone loss. Our approach is to start addressing these symptoms as soon as they appear. They often begin a year or two before the final menstrual period, a time called the perimenopause. By so doing, we can avoid all the havoc that fluctuating hormone levels can wreak on a woman. Our approach is to smooth the transition from normal cycling through the menopause rather than to wait for a somewhat arbitrarily defined date.

As you mentioned in you question that you are doing everything what is right for you and your body including diet, exercise but you are still not able to gain what you are looking for - perfect health. In this perspective I would like to mention that the male body is no different from the female body when we look into the hormonal interaction. But the major difference is low testosterone levels in other words a condition equivalent to menopause in females also known as "Andropause" in males. It comes with deficiencies’ of other endocrine hormones too but we still focus on the hypogonadism as the classical picture is what you had described in the stem of the question.

Low testosterone levels lead to decreased lean muscle mass and bone density. in addition it makes you prone for increased body at especially around the waist both outside and inside the body including your body organs intestine ,liver etc. unfortunately this further leads to decline in the testosterone levels. And the vicious cycle starts. As there is abundance of aromatase enzyme which converts available testosterone to estrogen you start accumulating more estrogen which further stays in the fat cells and keep making more and more estrogen responsible for pot belly and gynacomastia.

Not only this more collection of fat and increased body mass index decreases your capacity to do exercise and also reduces the activity with increased load on your cardiovascular system, as they have to supply more blood to oversize organs and thus you start losing stamina and feel weak. This further leads to changes in the metabolic arrangement in the body and increase insulin resistance with further accumulation of fat.

Testosterone is not just about sex it has functions above the shoulder also, especially in the brain and it helps to maintain the cognitive functions, emotions, mood and memory. Testosterone is also important to maintain adequate red blood cell count and so low testosterone individual are having low RBC count and thus less oxygen is carried to vital organs leading to fatigue and low stamina.

Testosterone is also important to maintain the health of the vascular endothelium in the circulatory system, to maintain the blood flow and the compliance and no wonder why decreased sexual function cannot be correlated to low testosterone levels as to maintain an erection vasodilatation and complete vascular integrity of the blood vessels in corpora cavernosa (the penile spongy musculature) is required.

Apart from the testosterone there are other hormones which play role in maintaining the overall health as mentioned above in one question that include Thyroid hormone, Growth hormone, Insulin, DHEA, Melatonin and Cortisol. It is a complex interplay of these hormones, which affect your overall health, and it is not advisable to just focus on one hormone. Ideally complete hormonal evaluation is necessary and identification of deficiencies and addressing them with bio-identical hormone replacement is what we recommend for complete health. But for best effect it has to be in conjunction with proper nutrition, exercise and stress reduction.

First of all I would like to say that there is no fault of your gynecologist in prescribing the synthetic hormones as that is what have been in the medical curriculum and been taught to the medical student for years and it will take lots of efforts to understand and accept the change.

Few years ago the synthetic hormones were with full flow in the market and were considered very safe and advised with a full flow all over the world and a study was initiated to see the good effects of these medications but the results of the studies backfired and came out increased incidence of uterine and breast cancers in the women who were using them in the study so the study was halted. This raised the alarm in the society so search for better options began.

The reasons for these side effects were explored by various researchers and are still undergoing but we understand what common sense will be. These synthetic hormones were introduced in human bodies to fulfill the deficiencies in the natural hormones existing in the body and the only possible explanation for the side effects is that they are not the same as they were intended to be they were synthetic and were hormone like substances but not true hormones. This basic difference is enough for the body to treat the synthetic hormones as foreign substance and reject it or make changes in the body cells itself to accept them and this lead to the adverse effects.

Proponents of synthetic hormones say that they are hormone like and they are very similar to the natural hormones there is a very minute change in the molecular structure just a molecule here or there. I would like to ask you that there ate two liquids in glass bottle bith looking alike one is H2O the other one is H2O2 the difference is just of one oxygen atom but can you drink both of them? I am sure that you won’t. Reason – H2O is water and H2O2 is hydrogen peroxide used for cleaning purposes the difference is just one oxygen atom. Answer is very self explanatory so now you would like to have progesterone to replace your body not medroxy-progesterone which is synthetic and not even progesterone but a progestin.

Similarly you would like to go for estrogen not ethynyl–estradiol or any other synthetic product. I would also like to clear here the confusion between natural, synthetic and Bioidentical hormones. Natural hormones are those which are found naturally in nature.

Armor thyroid is natural but belongs to the pigs and is Bioidentical for pigs not for humans. Choice is yours. Similarly Premarin is natural in one aspect as it is collected from a pregnant mare’s urine. So it’s bio-identical for horse and mare but not for humans. Choice is yours. Similarly synthetic estrogens are conjugated equine (horse) estrogens. Now you would think from where we get the natural hormones which are bio-identical too. Believe me or not, Mother Nature is very compassionate and takes care of us and that is why they gifted us the plants like Mexican yam from which a molecule named "Diosgenin" is extracted as a precursor molecule and modified in the labs to make bio-identical hormones exactly similar to the hormones with which we were born. This should clear the fact that eating Mexican yams or similar products do not provide you the Bioidentical hormones you need as they do not contain any hormonal property.

This question is just like when should I start thinking about my own health? If you are concerned about your health and want a good quality of life there is no specific time or the age when you should start thinking about BIHRT. Hormonal deficiencies can be present since birth and that is one reason why test for hypothyroidism is mandatory in all newborn babies because thyroid hormone is essential for normal physical and mental development of a baby. But that area is covered by pediatrician and I would not discuss more about it. But as far as overall wellness is concerned hormones play a very important role in therapeutic as well as wellness purpose. On one hand BIHRT can be used to deal the issues related with the teenage like acne , mood swings, in 20’s for post partum depression, night sweats, infertility, in30’s bloating, PMS, Migraines, Breast tenderness, Fibroids, ovarian cyst, endometriosis, decreased attention span, weight gain, in 40’s and beyond sleep disorders, migraine, hair loss hot flashes, depression, bone loss, bloating weight gain, low libido, etc but above all BIHRT can be used under supervision at any age (excluding pediatrics ) provided there are signs and symptoms of hormone deficiency evaluated and documented with lab investigations.

When a woman stops ovulating and has not had a period for a year, she is considered menopausal. In men, hormonal decline is much more gradual. For both men and women, however, the effects of this decline do not occur in a single instant. Women and men as young as 30, may be affected by symptoms of hormonal decline. Some of these effects include low energy, low libido, slow cognitive function, decreased well-being, depression, weight gain, muscle loss, and even osteoporosis (the loss of bone mass). In addition, women may suffer from hot flashes, night sweats, vaginal dryness, and painful intercourse.

It is not necessary to start BIHRT if your physician does not recommend it or is not justified on lab and clinical evaluation. Unsupervised BIHRT or any kind of hormone replacement can be dangerous as it is all about balance.

This is a very critical and most important question. Earlier it was the thought that our hormones decline because we age but now it is confirmed that we gar because our hormones decline.

The neuro-endocrine system is a complex network of chemicals between the nervous system and the endocrine system that governs the release of our hormones and other vital bodily elements. When we are young, our hormones work together to regulate many bodily functions, including our responses to heat and cold, our life experiences and our sexual activity. Different organs release various hormones all under the governance of the hypothalamus, a walnut-sized gland located within the brain. The hypothalamus sets off various chain reactions whereby an organ releases a hormone which in turn stimulates the release of another hormone, which in turn stimulates yet another bodily response. The hypothalamus responds to the body's hormone levels as its guide to regulating hormonal activity. When we're young hormone levels tend to be high, accounting for among other things, menstruation in women and high libido in both sexes. With advanced age lower levels of hormones can have disastrous effects on our functioning. The growth hormone, testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, DHEA, melatonin and thyroid all have specific functions and activities alone and in conjunction with other hormones. The shortage of these hormones accelerate the aging process .Hormones are vital for repairing and regulating our bodily functions, and when aging causes a drop in hormone production, it causes a decline in our body's ability to repair and regulate itself as well. Moreover hormone production is highly interactive. The drop in production of any one hormone is likely to have a feedback effect on the whole mechanism, signaling other organs to release lower levels of other hormones which will cause other body parts to release lower levels of yet other hormones. Thus hormone replacement therapy, a frequent component of any anti-aging treatment, helps to reset the body's hormonal clock and so can reverse or delay the effects of aging. If our hormones are being produced at youthful levels in a very real sense the cells of our bodies are stimulated to be metabolically active and thus we stay young.

As with any medication, the pros and cons of using BIHRT must be carefully weighed. Studies show, however, that BIHRT in physiological doses (equivalent to what your body used to make) produce significantly fewer negative side effects than synthetic hormones. Many patients have reported no negative side effects while using BIHRT. By Transdermal application of the Bioidentical hormones the absorption is directly into the bloodstream and the patient can effectively eliminate the first-pass effect where the hormone is metabolized in liver to produce harmful metabolites. This alternative route of administration provides a more consistent and natural way to introduce medications into the body with minimal side effects if any. Although Bioidentical hormones are natural and safe but they are still hormones and need judicious monitoring which makes the involvement of the physician in the treatment necessary. Unsupervised and inaccurate dosing can cause usual side effects as with any medicine.

Contact a representative at one of our clinics.

At AMAYA, we offer a unique, personalized, preventative medicine program. Your evaluation begins with a comprehensive medical history with the help of Confidential Hormone Evaluation Questionnaire for men and women. This is followed by laboratory testing with which we check your blood’s cell counts, chemistry and hormone levels including the sex hormones, thyroid hormones and the ability of your body to manufacture these hormones with some very specific analysis. Because the laboratory testing is so broad, the final reports will be available in 5-10 days. When we receive the final reports, we will call you and make an appointment for you to come in and have your initial consultation.

We will review lab findings with you, one on one and evaluate your medical conditions and formulate an individual treatment plan that includes stress mgt, diet, exercise, and also Bio-Identical Hormone replacement Therapy.

We will call you in 2 weeks to see how you are feeling and then you will return to the clinic for a 4-week follow up.

Although we are happy to communicate with your current physician, we encourage you to continue your usual visits with him or her.

Yes. Bring along any lab work, bone density, mammograms, PAP smears or other diagnostic tests done in the past year. We do not need the actual x-rays or ultrasounds, only the report. This will help us in deciding what further tests you need to start on your way to better health and hormonal balance.

This depends on your health insurance. At Amaya, although we do not bill directly to insurance, we supply you with an invoice to submit your claim for reimbursement to your insurance company. A number of lab tests or medications may be covered by your health insurance. However, patients cannot submit these bills to Medicare or Medicaid.

The cost varies depending on each patient and their individual needs.

Currently we are offering complimentary bio-identical hormone consultation. As every one is unique and have specific requirements, some really need bio-identical hormone replacement while others do not. We do not believe in one size fit all policy so we believe that not every person requires hormone replacement. We will let you know if you really need bio-identical hormone replacement or not.

Charges are decided on the basis of the extent of lab work required, depending on the clinical evaluation and medical history. After we discuss with you in person we design a personalized plan for you.

For more details on the cost of program please feel free to contact us. We can confidently say that we offer you the most affordable Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement Program with intensive yet necessary blood work. Apart from that, we are the only clinics in Houston & Katy who provide you with necessary paper work which helps you in getting reimbursement from your insurance company.

If you have any question(s) which we have not answered, please feel free to contact us.