MONDAY, April 22, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- Joy Palevsky had fibroids in her uterus so large she looked five months pregnant, and her gynecologist was urging her to get the standard treatment for the condition: a hysterectomy.
However, the New York City woman didn't want something that drastic, so she tried holistic medicine instead.
Today, Palevsky's symptoms are gone, and she is a convert to a treatment that many in modern medicine might find strange.
Dr. Allan Warshowsky, director of the women's program at the Continuum Center for Health and Healing in New York City and author of Healing Fibroids, uses a combination of supplements, nutrition and spiritual techniques to shrink the noncancerous tumors and circumvent the need for invasive procedures.
"A great many women come to me already scheduled for surgery," Warshowsky says. "I'd say of all those scheduled, more than three-quarters never have uteruses removed."
At the heart of Warshowsky's philosophy is the theory of "estrogen dominance" -- that too much estrogen in relation to progesterone is responsible for the fibroids.
The hormone, he says, is in oversupply in the modern world. It's found in everything from pesticides to commercial meat and dairy products to violence on television, which can affect the limbic system of the brain and change levels of the hormone in your body.
Deficient levels of vitamin B6 can also rob the body of magnesium, which also contributes to hormonal imbalance. And an increase in levels of the stress hormone cortisol can deplete progesterone. Eating too much sugar can lead to insulin resistance and, again, too much estrogen.
Warshowsky's methods are not universally accepted within the mainstream medical community.
However, Palevsky believes.
The 46-year-old first went to see Warshowsky two years ago, after she had refused a hysterectomy.
Warshowsky put her on a regimen of supplements, including chaste berry and silymarin, and gave her a list of foods she could eat (chicken, meat, certain types of fish such as salmon and mackerel, grains, greens, berries) and foods she should stay away from (dairy, wheat, yeast, gluten). A 10 percent progesterone topical cream brought levels of that hormone up, and had the added effect of eliminating any vestiges of PMS.
Palevsky also used a castor oil pack -- flannel soaked in castor oil placed on her abdomen with a heating pad on top -- which drains toxins through the lymphatic system.
Within two months, Palevsky's uterus was down to a 16-week pregnancy size.
Today, her uterus is at the 12-week pregnancy size, and is virtually unnoticeable.
According to Warshowsky, the American College of Gynecologists and Obstetricians guidelines say if the fibroids aren't symptomatic, they don't need to be removed.
"My first job is to remove symptoms, and the major symptom is usually bleeding," Warshowsky says. "Once you reduce the bleeding, then you give yourself some time to work on growth [of the fibroids]. Usually, you can get them to stop growing and often, if we have enough time -- eight months or a year or longer -- we can start seeing a reduction."
What To Do
For more about uterine fibroids, check out The Fibroid Place.
Go to the Continuum Continuum Center for Health and Healing for more information on the holistic treatments for fibroids.
