|
Page 3 of 8 Jonathan Wright is the next luminary to come along in the history of BHRT. Dr. Wright was also practicing in a small clinic in Tacoma, Washington on the West Coast in the 1980’s along with Dr. Lee in California. Jonathan’s contribution to the BHRT story was the recognition that women needed estrogen replacement from their Forties on, as well as progesterone supplementation. Dr. Wright’s approach was a static, chronic, very low dose regimen of estrogens, plural in a formulaic ratio for the whole month and 10 to 14 days of static, low dose progesterone to create a “faux luteal phase”.Dr. Wright invented the ratio - what he called Triple Estrogen or “Tri-Est”, which eventually became Double Estrogen or “Bi-Est”. Triple Estrogen mimicked all three metabolites of estrogen - estrone (E1), estradiol (E2) and estriol (E3). Bi-est had only E2 and E3. The Tri-Est became Bi-Est when it was found that estrone (E1) is the most ubiquitous faction of estrogen found in frozen breast cancer slides. Both formulations of bio-identical hormone powders (available in creams or capsules) were designed to recreate the ratio of spent metabolites found in pregnant women in the third trimester of pregnancy. Dr. Wright concluded from the work of Dr. Henry Lemon that it was a “safe” ratio because the third trimester of pregnancy is usually a healthy time for women. While it is a healthy time for women, the amount of E3 made in the third trimester is expanded by the production of the fetus (reference 1). Therefore, at no time in a woman’s life is it “normal” to have that specific ratio of estrogens, since the baby’s adrenals put out the copious amounts of sex steroids that convert to metabolites in mom (reference 2).
Since Dr. Wright’s model is pregnancy, he, too, feels that a period is optional. Although Dr. Wright did attempt to address the faltering estrogen production of peri-menopausal and menopausal women, his model was not completely “natural” or bio-identical either. However, recently, Dr. Wright was quoted as saying in Smart Publications, Frontiers of Natural Medicine: An Interview with Jonathan Wright, MD, “We need to as closely as we can mimic the patterns of a young healthy woman with young healthy hormones.” So maybe he will agree with The Wiley Protocol® someday.
|
