Medical Spa News: Women Are Turning to Hormones to Look Younger (Treatments are not FDA Approved)

Sometime after her 43rd birthday, Dawn Foley noticed she was beginning to look her age. And she didn’t like it one bit. A former beauty queen turned sales professional in Los Angeles, the blue-eyed brunette is used to turning heads. “I just did not want to look older,” she says. “You end up with wrinkles. Your skin starts to sag. And no matter how much you exercise, you just don’t have the body you had when you were 30.” She tried everything to stop the clock: diet pills that claim to stave off weight gain; photo facials and Fraxel laser treatment to rejuvenate skin and erase wrinkles. She even had her breasts lifted. “I’m happy with those,” she says. “But I wanted to look younger without any more surgery.”

Then Foley saw a news report about practitioners who claim they can reverse the aging process using a souped-up hormone regime. Getting old and fat is no longer inevitable, they said. It’s only a glandular disorder caused in part by dwindling hormones. And the way to fight that disorder is to replenish our levels to what they were in our 20s or 30s — whereupon we will once again feel as if we were that young. A little more digging brought Foley to Suzanne Somers’ best-selling books extolling the virtues of hormones. Somers, 62, takes daily shots of human growth hormone (hGH). Using a plastic applicator, she shoots a so-called bioidentical hormone called estriol directly into her vagina. She rubs bioidentical estrogen cream on her left arm every day, and two weeks out of the month adds progesterone on her right arm. “A lot of women, as they get older, their breasts start to droop,” Somers has said. “But when you put the hormones back in the right template, everything perks up again!”

Foley bought the pitch. “I thought, This is it! This is the magic potion!” she says.

Leading endocrinologists would call it something else: dangerous. “Use of these products for anti-aging is based on hype, not science,” says Steven Petak, M.D., of Houston, president of the American College of Endocrinology. Despite what bloviating celebrities like Somers claim, there is no evidence that hormones have anti-aging powers — and plenty of reasons to think they might cause harm, including diabetes and possibly cancer. Somers herself developed breast cancer while on her hormone-heavy routine and had a hysterectomy due to precancerous changes in her uterus. The FDA has not approved any of the substances for anti-aging. In the case of hGH, it’s a flat-out felony to prescribe it for reasons other than short stature in children, AIDS wasting syndrome or a condition called growth hormone deficiency syndrome, which is so rare it affects fewer than 5 out of every 10,000 adults.

When Foley approached her ob/gyn seeking hormones, the doctor told her that her levels fell within the normal range of a woman her age and that she didn’t need any more. So Foley instead turned to the world of “age management,” whose practitioners have learned to skirt the law by expanding the definition of growth hormone deficiency syndrome to include almost anyone over the age of 30. “That’s one of the first things I learned,” Foley says. “If a regular doctor tests your levels, he’ll say you’re within range even if you’re all the way down at the low end. But [an anti-aging] specialist is going to tell you, ‘You’re within the normal range, but if we bring those levels up, you’ll feel a whole lot better.’”

An M.D. in Beverly Hills, California, prescribed Foley bioidentical estrogen and testosterone creams, which she uses each morning; progesterone pills that she pops before bed; and hGH, which she injects nightly into her abdomen or thigh. Foley says she plans to use hGH every day for the rest of her life, or at least as long as she can afford the nearly $500-a-month cost. If she lives another 40 years, she could spend nearly a quarter of a million dollars on the stuff. “I don’t think there’s anything illegal about the way it’s being prescribed to me. I’m taking it because of a hormone imbalance,” she says. “I’m absolutely going to stay on it forever.”

Welcome to the newest cult in America’s worship of youth, in which thousands of women are following elaborate, unproven regimens for anti-aging and weight loss — and increasingly, like Foley, finding doctors who will help them do it. Without any additional training, an entrepreneurial physician can declare herself an anti-aging specialist, hang out a shingle and begin prescribing hormones, including estrogen, hGH and human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), a pregnancy hormone injected during fertility treatments that doctors are touting as a miracle weight loss cure. Needless to say, the shots, which insurance generally doesn’t cover, are making these “anti-aging” doctors plenty of money.

Some of these physicians operate out of clinics with names like the Center for Clinical Age Management. Others dole out hormone therapy at medical spas, where it has been added to the list of quasi-medical anti-aging procedures that now include Botox injections, laser hair removal, skin resurfacing, oxygen facials and the occasional vaginal rejuvenation surgery. Spas have a huge incentive to diagnose their patients with hormone deficiencies, says Lorne Caplan, a consultant to the medical spa field in New York City. “The med spa industry has expanded so much in the past three years that most of them are getting hammered by the competition,” he says. “You can’t make money on laser hair removal anymore. You can’t make money on cosmetic injectables. You can’t even make money by anti-aging consultations or weight management. But they can charge whatever they want for hCG and hGH. That’s why they’re pushing them so hard. And in a lot of [states], there’s no regulation. It’s the Wild West.”

Amir Friedman, M.D., an anesthesiologist who now specializes in preventive medicine and anti-aging, runs the California Wellness Center in Encino. Dr. Friedman says about 10 percent of his patients use human growth hormone. He claims the shots can cure depression, sharpen your memory and improve your sex drive — enough that he’s seen crumbling marriages revived. “The greatest benefit is an overall sense of well-being that’s hard to quantify,” Dr. Friedman says. “It makes you feel like someone’s blowing back your hair all day long. Like this…whoosh. Like you can do anything!”

Foley says hormones had a dramatic effect on her. She credits growth hormone in particular with burning 10 pounds of belly fat she’d begun referring to as her pooch and restoring muscles she thought were gone forever. She claims the sun damage and fine lines on her face started to fade. She slept better and had more energy. “Whatever dangers they say it has aren’t a concern for me. The benefits outweigh them,” she says.

Continue reading the full article at Self Magazine