Have you had experience with the Wiley Protocol?

When I was researching and deciding whether or not to try the WP, I was put off by the fact that those producing and promoting it (other than Suzanne Somers) do not look like a picture of health nor a good advertisement for the product. I asked my doc if that's just because while hormones are a BIG thing, they're not the ONLY thing, and many other factors are involved in good health. He said that is exactly the case and it was supported by one of the WP seminars/trainings he attended where a participating doctor was engaging the presenter in a discussion of his patient's migraines and they were trying to figure out how to tweak the hormones. My doc was sitting in the back with several other bio-energetic docs shaking their heads and chuckling because there are SO many other factors and hormones should not have been the
that discussion and it wasn't really apropos to the presentation. Suzanne Somers, on the other hand, immerses herself in healthy eating, exercise, toxin removal, appropriate nutritional supps, ETC., looks fabulous and you can tell she feels fabulous, too, that she's a much better advertisement for the protocol.

I'm the original poster of this subject, and I've been on the Wiley Protocol for over a year now. It's changed my life in wonderful ways I never dreamed. I have felt younger, more active, healthier (never sick), more energy, easier sleep and unexpected high libido. I used to be on a 23 day cycle before I went into menopause but now I'm on a 28 day cycle and it feels like I'm finally balanced and normal. I wish I had done this years ago. Also, I thought I was going to have to be on this protocol for the rest of my life because it is keeping me healthy but I just met with my doctor today and she informed me that it is not designed to be used forever in a woman's life, that I will one day be able to go off the protocol and my body should be able to produce the hormones on it's own. If this is true, how AWESOME is that?! Here is a current article by Suzanne Somers about rhythmic dosing: http://www.sexyforever.com/public/newsletter-restart-your-cycle-restart-your-life.aspx?xid=nl_SuzanneSomersSexyForeverNewsletter_20110215

I would like to implore those women who have visited Wiley Protocol physicians who are not prescribing WP according to the program to please let us know at our website. While doctors are free to do what they want as doctors, it no longer is the Wiley Protocol if it is changed as the above poster notes it frequently is. Then we at Wiley Systems are blamed for horrible side-effects and told that the system "does not work". Well, if you took aspirin for a headache, but only 1/4 of the recommended dose, and still had a headache, would you blame the pharma company? I don't think so.

The main reason certain women are not experiencing success on the Protocol is due to physician modification of it that is completely counterproductive to the entire purpose. Alas, many physicians are still scared of estrogen, despite the overwhelming and even alarming evidence to the contrary. They are equally frightened of progesterone, and put them together and you almost have a script for the next summer blockbuster horror movie.

However, and we will say this over and over again for the 10 millionth time: what separates the Wiley Protocol from ALL OTHER BHRT is dose dependency and receptor response. The standard of care model for medicine is "titration", meaning that you give the littlest amount possible to achieve the desired effect. With many traditional pharmaceuticals this approach works well, but not with hormones. Synthetic drugs that are not endogenous to your body are essentially toxins, for lack of a better word. They all have some side effects, as your body is not used to having those things circulate in the blood stream. It's why your liver gets rid of 80-90% of any drug you ingest orally: it's not supposed to be there as far as your excretory system is concerned.

Hormones taken orally are similar. Your body does not expect you to eat your hormones, that too is terribly unnatural. SO it's not just what you take, but how you take it. Your body is no fool.

Back to high-dose, transdermal hormones: hormones work on based receptor response. That means cells have places on their outer facing cell membranes that hormones fit into, which elicit reactions down within the actual cell including DNA transcription, and the creation of various proteins and enzymes. This is how hormones do the things they do in your body. This is in fact how most things get done within in your body.

However, with hormones, it isn't so one-dimensional. Some hormones, like estrogen, actually allow for the creation of receptors of OTHER HORMONES, like progesterone. This is a very important point that traditional HRT completely overlooks, for no reason that Wiley Systems can understand. In order to create progesterone receptors for instance, estrogen must reach a certain concentration in your blood. A little bit just won't do it. You have to get to a point of saturation where the receptors for estrogen actually start to down-regulate themselves. This is what we refer to as dose-dependency. If you don't get to a certain estrogen peak with the Wiley Protocol, you will never have the receptors for the progesterone in the second half of your cycle. This has horrible and deleterious therapeutic consequences, which mirror the complaints of many former WP patients. More importantly, you're constantly in a very high estrogen state if you never get the estrogen high enough, because the receptors aren't shut off as they should be around day 12. There's a lot of very delicate science at play here, and when doctors erroneously lower the estrogen dose, 99% of the time what needed to happen was for the estrogen to increase, not decrease.

I understand how difficult this is for some to grasp given the medical model you're familiar with. But please understand the HUGE difference between toxic, synthetic drug compounds and bio-identical molecules that your body is used to dealing with on a minute by minute, and second by second basis. Receptor response and dose dependency are 2 incredibly important concepts in endocrinology and unfortunately endocrinologists who specialize in reproductive hormones are quite few and far between. Very few doctors of other specialties ever receive proper education on the specifics what we're dealing with as far as BHRT is concerned with.

In closing, I would like to say that of course how a woman decides to pursue quality of life is her choice. However, it is disingenuous to cast the Wiley Protocol in bad light because it is given incorrectly, or taken incorrectly. We are working as hard as we can to educate people about the how and why of the WP, but there is a huge established precedent we are working against to do so. We know it's going to be a rough road, but we a confident we're doing something good. Please, if you're on the WP or have been, and you weren't/aren't receiving full doses as intended, understand that is NOT the Wiley Protocol. It's something else, and we cannot be held responsible for it. It's like not finishing an anti-biotic course, and blaming someone else for the infection coming back. We read every single email we get from people at Wiley Systems, good or bad. It's very hard for us to read everything posted on the internet so please, if you have something to say, tell us.

Jake Raden
Wiley Systems, Inc.

Full Disclosure: I am not a doctor. This is not medical advice, it is intended for your reference. It is a discussion of the underlying biochemical principles that informed the design of the Wiley Protocol for Women.

LOL! I guess you need to define "normal". Normal for your body or what the medical establishment is accustomed to?

Normal bioidentical regimen? That would be rythmic.

Does someone know a way to wean yourself off the Wiley Protocol --and onto a normal bioidentical regimen?

I went to three WP providers before I found one who was actually implementing the Wiley Protocol as described in her book. The others were either prescribing incorrectly or were afraid of estrogen, and were prescribing the Wiley Protocol in name but not in substance. One OBGYN wanted to do blood tests in the first month instead of the third. When I asked why, he said to look at reducing the estrogen dosage. Since this would have completely undermined the estrogen peaking that would create the progesterone receptors that would allow for shedding, I did not go back to him.

I finally found a doctor that was actually implementing the Protocol as it is intended, and who was not afraid of estrogen. I started at age 65. In the first week on it I felt my body was internally vibrating, like a guitar string that had been plucked, this very good humming feeling. I had this persistent image in my mind of many dead sea anenome that were coming back to life, their tendrils reaching upward through the water, vibrating.

Because I had not had a period in 20 years, It took five months for me to come back online. I did not start shedding on the basic level Protocol. I was raised incrementally to Wiley level 4. I finally started monthly shedding after being put on Level 4. Monthly shedding is a critical component of the Wiley Protocol.

I have had no negative side effects of any kind. My skin (I had persistent dry spots that nothing helped) greatly improved in texture, with the dry spots quickly disappearing. I feel amazingly limber. We are female all of our lives. When we lose our hormones we lose a part of ourselves. It is wonderful to feel part of the human race again, to feel fully female again. If I have to choose between what the critics say and what my body is telling me, I trust my body. I will be on the Wiley Protocol the rest of my life. They will have to pry it out of my dead hands.

Read her book first. Then find a doctor who is not afraid of estrogen, and who is implementing the Wiley Protocol correctly.