If you have received the Wiley Protocol® dosed in amounts less than recommended in the original hardcover or early paperback (subsequent copies have no Mg. dosing listed) versions of Sex, Lies and Menopause by T. S. Wiley, or currently have seen a prescriber who felt you should “start slow and work up” to the standard, researched dose…it’s a problem.

It’s a problem because hormones are not drugs and should not be dosed as such.

Doctors have been advised and conditioned by their educational experience and by the manufacturers of drugs to “titrate” up your dose of any medication to prevent toxicity. Liver clearance of toxic substances taken orally is hard to predict. In order to limit liability, drug companies and doctors prescribing their drugs – go slow, so as not to kill patients with substances that can have very individualized responses.

Unfortunately, this has been the only model presented to doctors. They have, thanks to Wyeth, other drug companies and many compounding pharmacists, been led to believe that the drug toxicity model also holds for the safe prescribing of natural bio-identical hormones. It doesn’t.

It doesn’t work that way because hormones work through pulsitility and amplitude in feedback loops and threshold provocation to regulate a bio-dynamic you in a bio-dynamic world where nothing stands still and the response templates are evolution’s solution to how you stay alive and roll with the punches. No where in such a system of interactive sub-routines is there a potential for titrating up a smaller static or rhythmic dose.

How does such a system account for individual differences such as genetics or life experience?

The peaks of amplitude or the general curve can be higher in some people as adults, depending on reproductive history; but once adolescence is over, to be a healthy woman with normal (fertile cycles of 4-5 days) a minimum template in serum (blood) levels needs to be reached.

Although most physicians grasp this simple piece of logic, some fail to let go of the pharmaceutical premise of “drug toxicity” and commit to the rest of the truth of endocrinology, which is that providing a menstrual cycle rhythm in lower doses than those used in the premise behind the Wiley Protocol® is perhaps dangerous. 

We say “perhaps” because the natural template has been tested for millennia on all young women. Less than the measured norms in the blood of young women may, in fact be the threshold points for pathology. More than likely, instead of the lower ranges of hormones or other altered rhythms (like the Mesa Protocol) accounting for some human variation, they are a gateway to the disease states that we see in younger and peri-menopausal woman.

If you want the Wiley Protocol®, prescribed in the way that has provided the relief that we’ve observed in over 1000 women over the last 3 years. Find a doctor on our doctors list or have your physician prescribe to one of the Registered Pharmacies™ to make sure you get all you deserve in BHRT.