Baby Making

Premenstrual syndrome or PMS is an ordinary illness of women today and its also the major hindrance for women to get pregnant. It is described as a group of physical and emotional symptoms that some women experience in the week or two before their menstrual period.

The most common symptoms include:

• Bloating and water retention
• Abdominal cramping
• Weight gain
• Breast tenderness, swelling or lumpiness
• Irritability and mood swings
• Appetite changes and food cravings
• Headache
• Acne
• Constipation
• Fatigue
• Stress, depression or anxiety

Current estimates indicate that approximately 80% of women of childbearing age have some premenstrual symptoms. Few women suffer from PMS from the moment they start to have menstrual cycles but for some PMS starts around the mid twenties, and can go on becoming chronic as the years go on. In a small percentage of women with PMS, the symptoms are so severe that they are considered disabling.

Conventional medical treatments for PMS fail miserably and in the long run they end up damaging your delicate internal systems. Like all other diseases, the medical industry fails to solve the root cause of the problem and instead focuses on eliminating the symptoms.

So if you visit your doctor complaining about PMS they are likely to prescribe prescription drugs. Besides a steady dose of pain relievers, your doctor is most likely to focus on one of these three treatments:

1. Birth control pills & HRT (hormone replacement therapy)

2. Antidepressants

3. Prescription progesterone

Conventional doctors often suggest temporary use of the birth control pill as a cheap quick fix, but this hardly works because excess estrogen is not the problem.

Currently, popular choices include the lower estrogen pills such as Ortho TriCyclen, Ortho Try Cyclen Lo, Mircette, Yasmin, Yaz and their various generic forms. This may work temporarily because your body notices the additional estrogen and does whatever it takes to rebalance your hormones. After a month or two your symptoms will return and they may be worse than ever. Birth control pills have some scary side effects and you should try to avoid altogether if possible.

If you look at the side effects of birth control pills you'll notice that one of them is PMS. So the treatment of the problem causes the problem. That makes absolutely no sense. Another approach used by medical doctors is to treat PMS as a mental illness.

You may have seen ads for a drug called Sarafem which is promoted as a drug made specifically for PMS. But these pills are not new; they are simple repackaged Prozac, the popular antidepressant. In addition of Sarafem other antidepressants commonly prescribed for PMS are Zoloft, Lexapro, Effexor and Wellbutrin. Once again, instead of treating the cause of your PMS symptoms, doctors just try to cover them up.

One should avoid Prozac and other antidepressants at all costs, these drugs don't cure anything and the side effects are frightening. In fact, withdrawal from Prozac is harder than withdrawing from heroin! The withdrawal symptoms include trembling and tendencies to either suicide or violence to others.

Another typical mistake made by doctors trying to treat PMS with progesterone is thinking the synthetic progesterone is the same as progesterone. Giving progestin's to a women with PMS is like throwing gasoline on a fire - for most women it will only make symptoms dramatically worse.

Oral progesterone (pill form), which is given in high doses of 100 to 300 mg, leads to form metabolites (excretion by products) in the liver that cause undesirable effects or block the effects of the progesterone. Oral progesterone must be prescribed in high doses because the liver immediately dumps up to 90 % of it because it knows it's toxic.

You may hear of many so called "scientific" studies on the news showing the prescription drugs as being effective, what they don't tell you is who funded the study. If you guessed the drug companies, you're catching on quick.