Hildreth: The significance of balance in all things

Hildreth on Health

By Dr. DeWall J. Hildreth

There is no place where this is truer, than in the challenge of maintaining good health. We discussed this last week in looking deeper into our weight challenge and where a balanced or non-balanced blood insulin level may play a big role in supporting a weight reduction program.

Insulin, being one of the body’s hormonal complexes, inter-relates with other regulating hormones of the body and plays a major key in metabolic balance of the body.

Most ladies did not experience a lot of weight challenges until menopause and now, no matter what you do, many of you are struggling with weight, particularly around the waistline as well as hot flashes, all reflecting a hormonal imbalance.

A little discouragement along the way does not help, either.

All of the balancing of hormones throughout the body is influenced directly or indirectly by the pituitary gland in an effort to maintain this balance.

We tend to lose some of this inner balance because of diet, environment, mental and emotional stress, and many other reasons that we may not understand as we get older.

We do know that ladies may experience a full host of symptoms secondary to hormonal imbalance with menopause. To maintain good emotional, physical and appearance health, it is essential to maintain or re-create a stable hormonal balance.

The need to modulate the relative levels of all hormones, not only in the male and female hormones of the body, but the thyroid and insulin which is put out by the pancreas and shown to influence weight reduction through carbohydrate metabolism is also essential in maintaining balance in our maturing years.

All of the endocrine hormones must be balanced by testing. The two most common tests are either blood or saliva. I have been happy with the results of saliva because the hormone levels picked up in the saliva are free and not bound in an inactive way by other proteins as they are in the blood. Blood testing is an excellent way to monitor the insulin before and after eating and thyroid can be monitored through the blood as well.

None of this should be guessed at. An alteration in one hormone level will influence many of the others.

This was and is one of our greatest dangers with the use of synthetic estrogen such as Premarin for the relief of hot flashes.

Estrogen can relieve the symptoms of hot flashes but at the expense of altering the balance of other hormones and thus affecting the metabolic function of other organs of the body.

All of the hormones of the body can be increased or decreased in a safe way but each hormone level must be taken into consideration when altering another artificially.

To maintain good stable metabolic balance within and between different organs of the body, the messengers that regulate metabolic functions must be also balanced; that is the hormones of the body. They are the messengers from the higher brain centers. The human body is a beautiful machine. We must respect it and care for it. Its complaints are always legitimate. The challenge is what it is trying to tell us.

Next week we will go on with the intricacy of hormonal balancing and how it influences other organs and other aspects of the human body.

Contact Dr. DeWall J. Hildreth at 625-1101 or cahcgv@yahoo. com Dr. Hildreth specializes in hormonal balancing and muscular-oskeletal degeneratin.