What is PMDD? An Alternative View Point

The mainstream narrative of PMDD, even on support pages/ websites such as the IAPMD, is categorised as: 

"Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) is a cyclical, hormone-based mood disorder with symptoms arising during the premenstrual, or luteal phase of the menstrual cycle and subsiding within a few days of menstruation. It affects an estimated 5.5% of women and AFAB individuals of reproductive age. While PMDD is directly connected to the menstrual cycle, it is not a hormone imbalance. PMDD is a severe negative reaction in the brain to the natural rise and fall of estrogen and progesterone."

This statement is categorically UNTRUE.

PMS and PMDD is primarily an endocrine disorder, so therefore 100% one of hormonal imbalance! Does this produce mental health issues? Yes.  Because, when hormones become grossly unbalanced, your brain suffers, as does the rest of your metabolism.

Mainstream medicine does not generally calculate ratios between said 'normal' hormones, and there's the little problem that progesterone isn't routinely included on a standard hormonal panel when you visit the doctor. I wonder why???

Why is one of the most important hormones that we require for balancing health, and opposing estrogen, left off testing regimes?  I'll leave you to ponder that one. 

Back when PMDD was actually termed severe PMS, Dr. Katharina Dalton had already published her pioneering work on the use of micronised progesterone for the undesirable symptoms some women experienced each month.  

PMS or Premenstrual Syndrome was the term she created.  Her books, "Once a Month" and "The PMS Bible" are classics. 

 The symptoms are physical - such as headaches, fluid retention, bloating, breast swelling and tenderness, and emotional - such as anxiety, severe rages, crying, sleep disturbances, bipolar syndrome symptoms, and even the threat of suicide, or homicide. But her successful treatment of PMS with progesterone was highjacked/ sidelined when a drug named Prozac produced by Eli Lily was coming off patent. 

https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/loweringthebar/61457

They funded a study to show that the mental health and emotional symptoms of PMS, now renamed PMDD or "Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder" could be treated by this class of drugs, named selective serotonin receptor inhibitors (SSRI).   

Prozac light, Serafem could produce a 61% improvement of symptoms, Eli Lilly successfully managed to get PMDD included in the DSM mental health manual as a disease in 2013.

And as a result, this action completely sidelined progesterone therapy which can often relieve all the symptoms of PMS and/or PMDD, but now doctors had new treatment protocols to follow. 

PMDD Conventional Treatment

So to avoid progesterone at any cost, practitioners are taught to use the gold standard of SSRI’s to treat the symptoms. 

If that doesn’t work, using 'progesterone' (really synthetic progestin) birth control pills to suppress ovulation is the next step.

These endocrine disrupters have a synthetically altered progesterone molecule that will block progesterone from its receptors, and consequently prevents ovulation (and therefore any natural progesterone production via the release of the corpus luteum) therefore preventing the luteal phase. These come at a cost, which is that they subsequently serve to increase the concentration of estrogen throughout the body, causing an estrogen dominant state. This treatment option proves to be the most divisive because patients are often told they are 'progesterone intolerant' when they cannot cope with synthetic progestin medications. Convincing them of the healing powers of REAL progesterone is often a battle you'll never win, due to the severe reactions to progestins due to the severe progesterone deficient/ estrogen dominant state they create.

Drugs called GnRH blockers, also called the chemical menopause injection, which prevent the pituitary signals to the ovaries to produce hormones are used, with a side benefit of also blocking estrogen production (which is really the giant elephant in the room here), which can make patients feel periodically well, but they also block production of thyroid hormone, and progesterone too. Two major hormones that are of HUGE benefit to ensuring metabolism suctions well.

And the final solution is removal of the uterus and the ovaries to stop the ovarian production of the supposedly normal hormones, with the promise that HRT will be much better at providing a steady and more stable amount of estrogen without the need for progesterone.

Then women find that they have been really misled.  They are offered the single hormone, estrogen, as the cure for all their symptoms.   However, many find they never get relief because their long, hard journey which was the result of excessive estrogen to begin with (that same elephant in the room - estrogen dominance) and severe progesterone deficiencies become even greater with the unbalanced estrogen only HRT. Right back where they started pre surgery!

They seek relief from physician to physician, all of whom have been taught to disregard the anguish of their patients clear symptoms, and stick on the narrative that progesterone is only needed to protect a womb.  

You have recurring symptoms?.... take more estrogen!!

They prescribe antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, sleeping pills, anti psychotics, statins for high cholesterol, and many pain relievers for the headaches, and joint and muscles pains that ensue.  

Anything but the real, natural hormone progesterone. 

And therein lies the tragedy of PMDD protocols, and treatment. And the main reason that most mainstream medical sources will tell you that they don't know what causes PMDD, and that there is 'no cure' for it.

Dr. Dalton knew what cured it way before the term PMDD was even invented. And those PMDDers that are following her treatment protocols, in spite of their doctors insistence that it won't work, are having success too.