Christiane Northrup, MD
I first “met” Sara Gottfried, MD, when I was sent a copy of Yoga Woman, a beautiful film documenting the amazing health benefits of yoga. And there she was, on screen in all her beauty and health—a board-certified gynecologist and renowned yoga teacher—embodying the best of both East and West, talking about the incredible power of yoga to heal mind, body, and spirit. Sara Gottfried is a modern-day healer-goddess if ever there was one, and she also happens to be a Harvard Medical School graduate and rigorous physician-scientist. I later learned that my work in women’s health had been a beacon of light and hope during her medical training and obstetrics/gynecology residency years. How delightful to discover that she was following the path I had so painstakingly blazed years before—and now making it wider and easier for others to follow!
Like me, Dr. Gottfried had some early role models that defied the stereotypes of midlife women and aging that we too often see as the “norm” in both medical school and later in our practices. Her great-grandmother Mud, who danced at her wedding, displayed the vitality and health well into her nineties that we associate with much younger women. My own mother and her best friend, Anne, when three years Mud’s senior, completed the Appalachian Trail while in their seventies and climbed the hundred highest peaks in New England shortly thereafter. Then my mother trekked a hundred miles to a Mount Everest base camp at the age of eighty-four—with no oxygen, despite the fact that there is 50 percent less of this precious substance at those altitudes. Her oxygen saturation levels remained normal, a testament to her health and fitness.
Clearly Dr. Gottfried and I are kindred spirits. And if you are reading this book, chances are that you are too! We both started our conventional training already immunized against the “doom and gloom” approach to aging that is part and parcel of medical training. We already knew that the best years of life don’t actually begin until age fifty or so. We already knew that midlife does not have to be the beginning of an inevitable downhill slide into disease and disability that ends in a painful, disease-ridden death. We both hold a vision for all women about what’s possible at midlife and beyond. But the kind of joy, vitality, and pleasure that are our birthrights cannot become reality unless we know exactly what to do to balance our hormones, keep our weight at healthy levels, and quell cellular inflammation before it leads to chronic degenerative disease.
Modern conventional medicine—with its focus on pathology, drugs, and surgery—functions largely by using drugs to mask symptoms. But that still-small voice in each of us knows that depression is not a Prozac deficiency and that a headache is not an aspirin deficiency. Taking symptom-masking drugs can be likened to shooting out the indicator lights on the dashboard of your car to reassure yourself that all is well. A much wiser approach is to look under the hood and see where the problem lies in the first place. Believe it or not, most problems, including hormone imbalance, can be largely relieved through lifestyle changes alone.
Happily, we now have far more sophisticated methods for identifying and testing for hormone and energy imbalances than were available even ten years ago. The science of psychoneuroimmunology and epigenetics has advanced light-years in a short time. And Dr. Gottfried is on the leading edge of all of this. She practices what is known as “functional” or integrative medicine, which works to optimize the minute-to-minute processes and functions of the body before diagnosable diseases develop. Since most symptoms are the end result of cellular inflammation left unchecked for years, we now know it is possible to short-circuit most chronic degenerative disease in its early stages or prevent it altogether.
Be assured that the kind of medicine in The Hormone Cure is the medicine of the future—now. Dr. Gottfried’s approach will require you to be an active participant in your own health care. She doesn’t suggest a quick-fix magic-bullet approach. That is not sustainable. As both a skilled yoga teacher and gynecologist, Dr. Gottfried knows in her own body and mind the incredibly satisfying results you can get from consciously and mindfully working with the wisdom of your body. And she will help you to do just that.
If you want to regain the lost sense of optimism and vitality that you had in your youth—or attain even more optimism and vitality than you ever had—your answers are here. Or if you simply want to continue to stay as vital and youthful as possible for as long as possible, your answers are also here. In The Wisdom of Menopause (Bantam 2012), I referred to the perimenopausal years as the big wake-up call—a time when we reach a crossroads in our lives. Everything that is no longer working has to be addressed and left behind! One road says Die; the other says Grow. In The Hormone Cure, Dr. Gottfried will take you by the hand and show you exactly how to follow the path that says Grow!