Can this woman help make the menopause the best days of your life?
Many high-flying women swear she can. And she’ll be sharing her secrets in the Mail next week
Here is what Dr erika Schwartz did in the couple of days before we met. After ten hours of meetings in London, she flew to Miami — snatching a nap en route — to help organise her twin granddaughters’ first birthday party.
Immediately afterwards she headed to New York for more meetings, arriving untroubled by jet lag, puffy ankles or the tetchiness and exhaustion most of us experience following a long flight.
Didn’t she feel just the tiniest bit weary? ‘No! I felt energised!’ she declares. ‘I’m really passionate about my life. I love what I do. And I believe I have a great opportunity to help other people feel as good as me.’
erika is 65, but could pass for 20 years younger. Her skin is peachy, her hair shiny and her stamina Olympian. No wonder her husband Ken Chandler, 68, calls her the ‘Duracell battery bunny’.
‘She has tremendous energy,’ he says. ‘She just goes on and on. And on.’
erika is living testimony of the efficacy of the therapies she dispenses. She is a tireless advocate of natural, or bio-identical, hormones, so called because their chemical structure is identical to the hormones produced by our bodies.
She’s been taking them for almost 20 years after enduring a debilitating early menopause at the age of 46 (the average age for menopause is 52).
Her husband also has hormone treatment — how could he keep up with her otherwise? Ken, the executive editor of a U.S. news website, who has been married to erika for 13 years, has had twice - weekly testosterone injections for five years.
‘I work with lots of young people and they take you for an old fool, a dinosaur, if you’re sluggish and tired all the time,’ he says.
‘The testosterone has made me livelier. I think I look better than I did at 50 and I have much more energy and focus. I can see no reason why I shouldn’t work for another ten or even 20 years. And it’s certainly improved my sex drive.’
Now erika is promoting natural hormones in Britain and has opened a branch of her evolved Science practice in London’s Belgravia at the exclusive, women- only Grace club, where the Queen’s GP, Dr Tim evans, is medical director.
Her British clientele — high-flying professionals and the wealthy elite — are in the vanguard of the movement towards bio-identical hormones.
As word of their effectiveness spreads, i ncreasing numbers of women are asking their GPs to prescribe bio-identical hormones, which are available on the NHS.
‘If your doctor says ‘All I have is conventional HRT’, it’s simply not true,’ says erika.
She has also written a bestseller, which makes the information accessible to all. The Hormone Solution: Naturally Alleviate Symptoms Of Hormone Imbalance From Adolescence Through Menopause is causing a stir.
Last week, TV star and style guru Trinny Woodall, 51, was spotted in Knightsbridge clutching a copy. The Mail is serialising it next week.
erika is candid enough to admit her vigour, dewy skin and trim figure are not entirely due to the use of natural hormones.
As she explains: ‘When it comes to balancing your hormones, you cannot overlook the significant contribution of diet, exercise, sleep and stress.’
She exercises daily, gets plenty of sleep and has eliminated salt, sugar, caffeine and alcohol from her diet. She also admits she’s had Botox and facial fillers. However, she is convinced anyone can enjoy her verve and energy if they follow her advice.
ERIKA, an exemplar of hard work and enterprise, was raised under the privations of Communism in romania. She lived in a cramped flat in Bucharest and from the age of four would queue for groceries. A single chicken was the only meat her family had for a week.
‘My father was an accountant and my mother a book keeper. It was a hard existence, but my parents were smart, amazing people. They instilled the right priorities,’ she says.
As a child, erika supplemented the family’s income by selling empty drinks bottles.
emigrating to the U.S. with her parents in her teens, she was driven by a ferocious work ethic. She qualified in medicine and at 28 was the youngest doctor — and the only female — running a large hospital’s accident and emergency department.
It was stressful, exhausting work and she also had a child.
She suffered, too, with a gamut of problems associated with hormone imbalance: ‘Depression before my periods, incapacitating cramps, migraines when I was on the Pill, night sweats after the birth of my first daughter and loss of sex drive.’
A couple of years later, she opened a private medical practice. The menopause struck when she was in her mid-40s — a divorced, single mother of two daughters aged 19 and 12.
‘I was pushing myself to the limit seeing patients and raising my children. I’d wake up in the night t hree or f our t i mes, drenched in sweat,’ she says.
‘Sleep became my enemy. I was exhausted when I went to bed and I’d wake up in the morning feeling even more tired.
‘The most disturbing thing was the mood changes. I’d been eventempered, but suddenly I couldn’t stand myself or anyone else. I gained weight, too — a stone — and even regular work- outs at the gym wouldn’t shift it.
‘My joints hurt, my hair was thinning and I felt worn out.’ erika went on conventional hormone replacement therapy — the most common synthetic HRT is made f rom pregnant mares’ urine — but her symptoms worsened.
‘ My breasts were swollen balloons and my periods returned with a vengeance not once a month, but twice or three times. I was haemorrhaging for weeks at a time,’ she says.
‘My mood swings worsened. One moment, I was on top of the world, the next I was crying. It was as if there was an alien in my head. I was irritable and judgmental. I’d turned into a witch. And my sex drive was non-existent.
‘I started to look old and lose focus. As a doctor, I believe you should look and feel good for yourself and your patients. Why would they want to see me if I looked old, fat and miserable?
‘I knew I had to make a change for the better or I was doomed.’
She tried combining conventional HRT with alternative remedies. Nothing worked.
On the verge of desperation, she recalled a patient who had reported favourable results from natural HRT. erika began experimenting herself.
With the help of a chemist, she fine-tuned natural hormones using oestrogen and progesterone made from concentrated and purified yams and soy.
‘The first batch of hormones that came through the post from the chemist were so complicated you needed a biochemistry degree to work out what to do with them all,’ she says.
‘So I went to a local pharmacist with a prescription I’d written. He prepared natural progesterone and estradiol (a form of oestrogen).’
erika started taking them and the results were startling and swift. The bloating, weariness, hot sweats and haemorrhaging evaporated. In their place came a surge of energy and joie de vivre.
‘I thought: “This seems unreal, but if it works so well for me, why on earth aren’t I prescribing it for all my patients?” ’
She started prescribing hormone treatment not only to combat the menopause, but also to help younger women with premenstrual tension, post natal depression, mood s wings, migraines and fertility problems.
SHE has treated her daughters — Lisa, now 37, and Katie, 30 — from adolescence. ‘Of course I did! They brought all their school friends to me, too!’ she says. erika’s middle - aged male patients benefited from natural testosterone supplements: their muscles became more defined, their mood improved and their dwindling sex drives returned.
However, the much- debated question remains: are natural hormones safe?
When doubts were raised over the safety of conventional HRT in 2002 — studies linked extended
use to a risk of breast cancer and heart disease — interest in bioidentical hormones grew. But detractors contend there have not been sufficient significant studies to evaluate the safety of the soy and yam-based hormones.
There are fears, too, that the use of hormones compounded by specialist chemists is risky because there can be inconsistencies in terms of dosage.
However, getting a standardised dose is not an issue because big drug companies also manufacture natural hormone products.
A 2009 Californian study claimed the use of natural hormones is associated with a lower risk of breast cancer and cardiovascular disease, and that they are more effective than synthetic and animalderived versions.
But it conceded that scientific trials were needed to investigate these differences.
That said, a trial in Denmark in 2012 demonstrated that healthy women taking bio-identical HRT for a decade immediately after the menopause had a reduced risk of dying from heart disease.
For Erika, the positive anecdotal evidence of hundreds of her satisfied patients is persuasive.
Her one proviso is that the treatment she advocates should be medically supervised.
She allows, too, that when used in conjunction with bio- i dentical hormones, certain alternative therapies have a use. This week, the North American Menopause Society (NAMS) endorsed hypnotherapy as a treatment. ‘There is a time and place for alternative practices with long track records,’ says Erika.
‘But I’m surprised NAMS has waxed lyrical about hypnotherapy while it is shy about the proper use of hormones, specifically human identical ones, which have been scientifically proven for decades to improve outcomes.’
Without doubt, the debate will continue. There are those who contend our bodies are designed to function with less oestrogen after the menopause, so why interfere with nature? To this, Erika retorts: ‘There are many people who feel that’s the way it should be, so let them get old!
‘But for those of us who choose not to, there are other options. What we shouldn’t do is be scared.
‘Why don’t we just focus on having the best quality of life and stop living in fear? We could be run over by a bus tomorrow.
‘When we reach our mid-50s, it’s often the first time in our lives we can take care of ourselves. Before that, we’ve been raising children and pursuing careers. I believe we should enjoy to the full the time we’ve got left. Do we want to be married “for companionship”? Women have female friends for that.
‘There’s no reason why sex should become an ordeal. If it’s painful, then taking hormones can fix it. Why suffer? Why accept that you Full of energy and vitality: Erika Schwartz should shuffle around feeling bloated, miserable and invisible when you could be having the time of your life?’
THE Hormone Solution by Erika Schwartz (Warner Books). drerika.com