Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, or PCOS is the most common hormonal condition affecting women of reproductive age.
The rates of PCOS are going up exponentially each year, to the point where we are now experiencing an epidemic.
The cause of this “disease” is unknown. But let’s take a deeper look at this.
First of all, it’s important to understand that mainstream medical doctors are trained to diagnose and treat disease. This means that their main goal is to attach a name to a disease and then learn how to suppress the symptoms of that disease using prescription drugs.
Some common symptoms of PCOS are menstrual irregularities such as a heavy period or absence of menstruation, Also, the ovaries may develop small follicles filled with fluid and fail to regularly release eggs or ovulate. Insulin resistance may develop, which means that your cells become resistant to the action of insulin, causing your blood sugar levels to rise which forces your insulin levels to go up. This excess insulin might increase androgen production, causing difficulty with ovulation, excess facial and body hair, severe acne and male-pattern baldness. In addition, cholesterol may also go up.
So for this syndrome, doctors are prescribing metformin to lower the blood sugar, birth control pills to bring on a regular menstrual cycle, statin drugs if the cholesterol becomes too elevated, hormones to increase fertility and procedures to remove excess hair.
In Ayurveda, a 5,000 year old tradition of natural medicine from India, we take a much different approach. Before any prescription of herbs is given, the underlying cause needs to be addressed. Which ultimately means that the underlying causes are in fact different for each person. This is why we don’t have a specific protocol for any of the diseases we treat.
And the same is true for PCOS. But at least here I can give you an overall way to look at this disease or any disease, for that matter. The trick is you want to keep working your way backwards, always looking to go deeper and deeper into why this happened in the first place.
I see so many women with PCOS each year, with new cases presenting to my office every week. Here is a better way to approach this disease rather than prescribing numerous drugs for each symptom. Not only are there dangerous side effects to these drugs but the bigger issue is that they aren’t addressing the root causes.
For example, Metformin just lowers the blood sugar, but doesn’t fix the underlying reason that the blood sugar is high. The birth control pill just gives you breakthrough bleeding each month when you stop the pill for that week, which makes it look like you now have a regular period — but you don’t, you just have breakthrough bleeding. Cholesterol lowering drugs, called statin drugs, just do that — they lower cholesterol, but they don’t fix the underlying cause of the high cholesterol, which usually comes from problems with the liver and gall bladder. And how safe is it to take fertility drugs — could it be that the patient’s body is so far out of balance and nature is keeping you from getting pregnant for a reason: is it wise to just force our ovaries to ovulate while overlooking the underlying reason that this person isn’t ovulating. I wonder what the offspring will be like if we force the person to get pregnant while their body is giving you signals all over the place that the physiology must be fixed before this person should get pregnant to insure a healthy and happy baby.
So here is how I manage my PCOS patients. First, we want to look at all the multifaceted layers happening all at once. Don’t get confused by the name PCOS — it is actually a bunch of different imbalances that need to be addressed.
First, we want to figure out why the ovaries have cysts — to do that we need to look at the gall bladder function and promote the flow of bile. Many people have sluggish bile flow many many times in a lifetime (see my video on the gall bladder as to why this is so). And if the gall bladder doesn’t squirt out its bile regularly the estrogen will build up, because the estrogen is dumped into the bile each day by the liver to be deposited out of the body and into the bowel movement. But if the bile doesn’t flow and just sits stagnating in the gall bladder, the estrogen will eventually reabsorb back into the bloodstream and create a situation of high estrogen/low progesterone.
So then we must give herbs for thinning out and promoting the bile flow out of the gall bladder, while at the same time trying to see what that particular patient is doing wrong creating the stagnant bile flow in the first place.
Then we must recalibrate the ratio of estrogen to progesterone using very specific herbs.
In my practice we usually see that the thyroid gland is at the root of low bile flow, and ultimately at the root of PCOS. Then we have to see what is that person doing wrong to contribute to low thyroid function: are they taking too many flu shots with mercury, do they have too many mercury amalgams or are they eating too much tuna fish and other fishes which contain high levels of mercury. Mercury is famous for disrupting thyroid function.
Are they eating too much tofu or drinking soy milk? The isoflavones in soy depress the thyroid function. Are they drinking fluoridated water, which is a poison to the thyroid and possibly responsible for some of the epidemic of thyroid problems we are seeing nowadays. Or are they rushing through the day, going to bed late, eating a malnourishing diet or one too low in animal protein, such as a vegan or raw foods diet, which prevents the thyroid gland from working since its hormones are made out of animal protein.
Don’t forget, and this is an important factor when dealing with PCOS: when the thyroid gland is weak the gall bladder doesn’t function properly. The two go out of balance simultaneously for reasons I discussed in my book, “Healing the Thyroid With Ayurveda.” And again, when the gall bladder function becomes sluggish the estrogen will go up as it reabsorbs everyday back into the blood stream, causing numerous cysts to grow on the ovaries. Because that’s what estrogen does: it makes things grow: it made your breasts and hips grow at puberty, it builds up the lining of the uterus, the endometrium, which women shed every month during their menstrual cycle if they are not pregnant.
But we don’t want too much estrogen to hang around. This is why the body is so smart to get rid of it every day: the liver breaks it down and dumps it into the bile, which then squirts it into the intestines and it exits the body in your bowel movement every day. Unless your bile isn’t flowing because your thyroid gland is weak.
We instruct the patients to have a proper diet so they can lose weight which helps their insulin resistance. But we have numerous Ayurvedic herbs to help with the insulin resistance. For example, did you know that cinnamon increases insulin sensitivity by 20%. And we have even better herbs which contain berberine which has been shown to decrease insulin resistance as well.
Nature has given us an abundance of herbs to heal the liver, which is also at the root of PCOS. Many countries eat vegetable oils which turn into a poison when you heat them. Everything you swallow has to be processed by the liver, so when you eat vegetable oils you automatically damage your liver cells and impair its function.
Thankfully we have so many herbs to clean and heal the liver cells. And the liver is at the root of insulin sensitivity. The ironic thing is that metformin, which is used for insulin resistance, actually damages the liver. So the use of metformin in PCOS is very counter-intuitive and not recommended. We have great herbs which target the liver allowing the blood sugar to go down. And the liver and gall bladder are both responsible for clearing cholesterol from the blood, so when the liver is toxic and congested and the gall bladder function is sluggish the cholesterol will go up. So will the blood sugar, as the liver controls that as well.
You may wonder why teenagers have problems with liver function, but you must realize that the amount of both processed foods and overuse of pharmaceuticals has contributed to a very hot, angry and toxic liver over the last 100 years, allowing for epidemics of previously unknown diseases. The liver is at the root of most of these diseases, it’s just that it often goes unnoticed as we are not in the habit of tracing diseases back to their original starting points. We just get caught up in the name of the disease, like PCOS, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Ulcerative colitis, for example and the underlying causes are forgotten and remain untreated.
We also instruct our patients in healthy diet, making sure they avoid the highly estrogenic foods such as fennel seeds and fennel root, tofu and soy milk. And we instruct them in our Ayurvedic cleansing techniques to get rid of the toxins which are upsetting the liver and immune system, thrusting our patients into this autoimmune situation.
So for PCOS, and any disease for that matter, you must always try to find the various root causes of the disease process, which are slightly different in each case.
Once you figure out the underlying causes and fix them, the body is able to heal itself naturally, especially when the diet is healthy, the person goes to bed early and they learn correct Ayurvedic detox, which should be monitored by your Ayurvedic physician.
Hope you enjoyed learning about a better way to treat PCOS.
Thank you.