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See all the Healthcasts at https://www.biobalancehealth.com/healthcast-blog Medications are getting more expensive, and the % of the price of each medication goes up every year as insurance companies hold on to their profits. This one fact should make you listen read this blog, but there are more recent changes in medicine that has caused the average patient to take more total medications, and government with the FDA are making the personal cost of medications higher while they create legislation to prevent the use of cheaper and more medications for each medical condition that you have. So it comes down to the following agencies of “health” make more money at your expense: 1. Insurance companies, 2. Medical practices and doctors who are paid by insurance companies make your appointment times shorter and the number of issues they can take care of at one visit, one, 3. The governmental agency that your tax dollars pay for, the FDA block the basic medications from approval because they are not patentable and the FDA is REALLY just another arm of the pharmaceutical companies. None of these groups want you to be healthy, because they all make more money when you are sick and need more and more medications, that you pay more and more for every year. How do we deal with this and make ourselves healthier and at a lower cost? Efficiency! That means that you will have to do several things to protect yourself. The first and most important thing is to take fewer medications by treating the disease that causes the symptoms you take several drugs for, one for each symptom. I will give you an example that I deal with every day, the symptoms of menopause. Women who go through menopause not only have obvious symptoms of menopause, but they also have many other symptoms that medicine doesn’t connect to the loss of estrogen and testosterone in women. For example, we all know that hot flashes, insomnia from night sweats and painful intercourse from vaginal dryness are all caused by loss of estrogen, however medicine teaches doctors to treat these symptoms separately, instead of replacing estradiol + progesterone if you have a uterus. Treating the cause, replacing estradiol as a patch, pill, vaginal tablet or pellet can treat these obvious symptoms of menopause, but current medical practice tells doctors to give that patient one drug to treat a dry vagina—vaginal estrogen, or vaginal DHEA, or a vaginal SERM, all of which are less effective and much more expensive than giving a woman one prescription of estrogen replacement to treat the whole body and all the symptoms plus many other symptoms that are secondary to low estradiol/testosterone, but are considered unrelated to menopause, so they need many more prescriptions (and more doctors)! Symptoms that are considered unrelated to menopause and hormone deficiency, are treated by other specialties with multiple other drugs. For instance, many types of arthritis begin with loss of testosterone and estradiol before and at menopause, however they are treated by a rheumatologist with multiple very expensive medications that have severe side effects. If menopause is treated with non-oral estradiol and testosterone, then there would be fewer patients with autoimmune arthritis and autoimmune diseases. Most of my patients who have developed these diseases after menopause before they see me are better after I treat them by replacing the hormones they are missing! One Rheumatologist told me he wasn’t going to send me any more patients because after his rheumatology patients saw me they were better and didn’t need his care anymore! They never went back to him. That says it all. My patients who have these diseases not only don’t need the other expensive medications, but they also don’t have pain or destruction of their joints anymore! Another symptom of menopause is insomnia. There are many over the counter drugs that are out of pocket and many drugs for sleep that help your inability to sleep that occurs after age 40. However, when my patients get their testosterone and estradiol replaced, they don’t need sleep medicine anymore! They save much more money on their copays and over the counter drugs than they spend on their hormone pellets and feel more rested after they get their “sex hormones” back, without other drugs! Insomnia is not currently considered secondary to menopause by medicine and the FDA, but it is! My patients are proof! My patients don’t have hot flashes, irritability, or painful intercourse either, so replacing hormones treats 3 symptoms of menopause and more than 2 other medical diseases, that are thought to be independent of hormone replacement. Lastly many women develop migraine headaches at the end of their 30s or the beginning of their40s and they need at least 3 drugs to treat their migraine headaches, and they still are left leaving work to go home and sleep in a dark room the rest of the day. I know how bad this and the other symptoms of testosterone loss and menopause remove quality of life and limit your productivity at your job….I had all of these symptoms after my ovaries were removed and they all went away the week after I had my first estradiol and testosterone pellets inserted. Please consider the efficiency of replacing two hormones, estradiol and testosterone every 4 months for an estimated cost of $170/ month for pellets that are placed under the skin and don’t even need to require daily dosing, AND you can treat ALL of your menopausal symptoms and symptoms of aging, make yourself more productive and a better employee, not to mention getting a great sex life again, and you save money by taking the place of 3-9 other drugs you take over the counter and as over-priced high copay prescriptions! What this takes on your part may be to find a practice that is like mine that not only replaces hormones but helps you prevent all the diseases of aging! Mainstream internal medicine and primary care is no longer designed to make your healthier, just to put you on more and more expensive drugs that not only stresses your wallet but causes side effects and only leads to more expensive medicines but wastes your time by making you come to the doctor’s office multiple times to write you refills and make you pay copays! You don’t get healthier that way. As long as medicine as a business and pharmaceutical companies can make money this way, they won’t change so you will have to figure out how you are going to negotiate the system to get what you need!