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Dr.
John R. Lee M.D
John R. Lee, M.D. was a
family doctor in Northern California when, in the early
1970s, he began seeing a lot of menopausal women with
health complaints who weren't able to use estrogen
because of a high cancer risk, heart disease, or diabetes
for example. About that time he attended a lecture by
Raymond Peat, Ph.D. who claimed that estrogen was the
wrong hormone to be giving menopausal women, and that
what they really needed was progesterone. Dr. Lee took a
list of Dr. Peat's references and checked them out, and
sure enough, it looked like Dr. Peat was right.
FOCUS
ON PROGESTERONE
Dr. Lee began telling his menopausal patients to try
using a progesterone cream and to his amazement they were
delighted with the results. They reported relief from
menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes, night sweats and
insomnia, and they also reported relief from a wide array
of other symptoms as diverse as dry eyes, bloating,
irritability, gall bladder problems, osteoporosis pain,
hair loss, and lumpy or sore breasts, for example. As a
result of this unanimously positive feedback, Dr. Lee
began to collect detailed data on these patients, and
also began to research progesterone more in-depth,
gathering studies from his local medical library, and
communicating with scientists around the world to discuss
their work. He realized that progesterone probably had a
positive effect on bone health and began to get bone
density tests for his patients on progesterone. Within a
few years he realized that these women were gaining
significant bone density - particularly those with the
worst bone density to begin with.
DR. LEE'S
FIRST BOOKS
Dr. Lee was so convinced that his clinical experience
with progesterone could have a major positive impact on
the health of menopausal women, that he retired from his
family practice and devoted all of his time to writing
about natural progesterone and giving talks about it. He
self-published a book for doctors called: Natural
Progesterone: The Multiple Roles of a Remarkable Hormone
and sold it out of his garage, and soon was engaged in a
voluminous correspondence with hundreds of women, doctors
and scientists from around the world. He also self-published
a book called Optimal Health Guidelines, a
general guide to good health written for the class he
taught at College of Marin for 15 years.
WHAT YOUR
DOCTOR MAY NOT TELL YOU ABOUT MENOPAUSE
A few years later a medical writer named Virginia Hopkins
who was suffering herself from early menopausal symptoms
came across Dr. Lee's book and called him to say, "You
need to get this information out to the millions of women
who are suffering from these symptoms, how about if we do
a book together?" Dr. Lee agreed to the plan, and
his second book, What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About
Menopause (Warner Books) was published in 1996. This book
is a "translation" of the medical language in
the first book, and expands significantly on the original
information. Sales of the "Menopause" book were
better than anyone at Warner ever dreamed, and by the
fall of 1998 nearly half a million books had been sold,
almost entirely by word-of-mouth and through progesterone
cream manufacturers who felt it was important to educate
their customers about why they were using the cream, and
how to use it. The "Menopause" book has the
lowest return rate of any book at Warner, and sales
continue to steadily climb.
PROGESTERONE
CREAM TAKES OFF
Meanwhile, a progesterone cream industry was springing
up, and soon there were dozens of companies selling
progesterone cream. It literally became a multi-million
dollar industry within a few years. Why? Because
progesterone cream really works to alleviate the symptoms
of estrogen dominance and menopausal symptoms in general,
and conventional medicine has failed to address these
concerns in a safe, effective manner. Women have
intuitively known for decades that they were being
mistreated by the medical profession when it came to
hormone replacement therapy and have enthusiastically
embraced this intuitively obvious and safe solution.
Again, the bottom line is that for most women, it works
very well and used as directed it is extremely safe.
Occasionally there is a flurry of articles claiming that
progesterone is not safe, but the research that these
claims are based on has always been about the synthetic
progestins, not on natural progesterone. (For a detailed
explanation of the difference between natural
progesterone and synthetic progestins, read What Your
Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause.)
TALKING
TO WOMEN FROM THIRTY TO FIFTY ABOUT HORMONE IMBALANCE
As Dr. Lee traveled around the world giving talks and
attending conferences, he soon discovered that at least
half of his audience and maybe more was pre-menopausal
ˆ women from their mid-thirties to their late
forties. These women were suffering from a long list of
symptoms, including PMS, fibroids, fibrocystic breasts,
weight gain, fatigue, endometriosis, irregular or heavy
periods, infertility, and miscarriage, which they
intuitively knew were due to hormonal imbalance. When
they tried progesterone cream they found that it worked
wonderfully well to alleviate their symptoms, and Dr. Lee
began to collect stacks of mail from women who had
avoided hysterectomy, lost weight, had fibroids shrink,
found relief from PMS, and had finally been able to
conceive after years of trying. This experience led to
writing the book What Your Doctor May Not
Tell You About Premenopause: Balance Your Hormones and
Your Life from Thirty to Fifty (Warner), available in January
1999. For this effort, Dr. Lee and Virginia Hopkins
teamed up with Jesse Hanley, M.D., a Malibu, CA-based
physician with a family practice, who specializes in
helping women balance their hormones naturally. Dr.
Hanley brought a rich new dimension to this book of the
psychological, spiritual and emotional aspects of the
premenopause years, as well as her extensive experience
in using herbs and nutritional supplements to achieve
hormone balance.
THE JOHN R.
LEE, M.D. MEDICAL LETTER
Around the time the "Premenopause" book was
finished, Dr. Lee and Virginia started a newsletter
together, The John R. Lee, M.D. Medical Letter, designed to keep women up-to-date
on hormone research, assess the latest media reports
about hormones, and generally offer down-to-earth,
practical and commonsense approaches to keeping hormones
in balance and achieving optimal health. The newsletter
also features interviews with clinicians and scientists
who specialize in progesterone research and/or treatment,
or who have a unique point of view on some aspect of
health that could be helpful to readers. Another goal of
the newsletter is to give women resources, including
educational material, recommended reading, scientific
references and access to natural progesterone cream.
Back to books by Dr.
John R. Lee M.D.
Publications
by John Lee, M.D.:
Lee,
John, M.D. Natural Progesterone, The Multiple Roles
of a Remarkable Hormone. Sebastopal, CA: BLL
Publishing. 1993.
Lee,
John, M.D. What Your Doctor May Not Tell You about
Menopause. New York, NY: Warner Books. 1996. (Tel: 1-800-759-0190).
John
R. Lee, M.D., Jesse Hanley, M.D. and Virginia Hopkins
What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Premenopause (Balance
Your Hormones and Your Life from Thirty to Fifty).
New York, NY: Warner Books. 1999. (Tel: 1-800-759-0190).
This information
has not been evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration
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