DECATUR - A year ago, Cheryl Zollinger, 50, was worn out. The Garfield Montessori School teachering assistant was living with dizzy spells, insomnia, lethargy and night sweats.

"I felt like nobody believed me or it wasn't enough of an issue to do anything about," she said.

Her search for answers took her to Dr. Tom Rohde of the Total Body Wellness Center. Rohde has been using alternative medicine to treat his patients for more than 10 years.

"I grew up with supplements at home," the son of a German physician said. "You got a bruise on your leg; you used some arnica instead of getting medication."

Still, in his own medical training, Rohde said he didn't get much information regarding nutrition and alternative medicine, so he started learning on his own.

For years, Rohde has been treating area women's menopause symptoms using bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, an alternative to traditional hormone replacement.

"The big dictum from the drug companies was when you go through menopause, your estrogen level drops," Rohde said, adding that the standard treatment is a fixed-dose synthetic hormone replacement therapy.

He said he sees many menopause-aged women in whom the estrogen levels are normal or high and progesterone is low.

"The problem is most people, like I said, don't need estrogen," Rohde said. "They need progesterone, or they need a little bit of estrogen with their progesterone."

Most important, Rohde said, is the balance between the two hormones and balance throughout the body's systems.

When he tested Zollinger's hormone levels, Rohde discovered her

progesterone was, in fact, low. He treated her with a topical, bioidentical progesterone cream. She puts a pre-measured dose on the inside of her wrists every morning. Zollinger's thyroid was out of balance as well, which Rohde also treated.

"Honestly, I've never felt better," Zollinger said of the changes she has experienced since starting the bioidentical treatments.

Within several weeks of using the cream, she noticed a difference. One of the biggest changes Zollinger has experienced in the past year is a newfound love of exercise.

"Any kind of activity was an effort," she said of life before the hormone therapy.

Two recent segments about bioidentical hormones on Oprah Winfrey's talk show piqued the interests of women across the country, Rohde said. Winfrey revealed she is using the hormones to deal with symptoms related to her own menopause, generating buzz and a lot of questions about how they work.

Women tend to network, Rohde said, and many are referred to his practice by word-of-mouth.

"As we age, this becomes a personal thing," Rohde, 49, said of his interest in helping women and men deal with hormonal changes related to getting older.

Patients sometimes come in from doctors outside of the community or pharmacists who prescribe bioidentical hormones to people without monitoring them.

"When we start measuring hormones, we get these astronomically elevated levels," he said.

Rohde's treatment starts with testing, which is crucial, he said.

"There are a lot of people that are either doing this on their own or with other practitioners who aren't monitoring this properly," he said. " ? This needs to be done together with somebody that can monitor this."

Rohde works to measure hormone levels, treats any imbalance with the lowest dose possible and then measures again.

"We never did that with women's hormones," he said of traditional treatments for menopause. "I don't understand why."

Bioidentical hormones are near-exact molecular copies of the body's own hormones, created using plant extracts such as those from yams or soybeans, Rohde said.

"They're still made in a lab," he said. "They're just as close to our normals as they can be."

Rohde uses patient history, blood and saliva testing and consultation to determine each patient's regimen and has a compounding pharmacy customize the dose. This approach differs from the standard fixed dose common to synthetic hormones, he said.

However, no pharmacy-compounded hormone replacement drug has been approved by U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which means the agency has not tested and regulated the treatments' safety and effectiveness.

According to an official FDA statement, some compounding pharmacies market bioidentical hormones as safer alternatives to FDA-approved drugs for the treatment of menopause and state that the drugs can reduce the risk of heart disease, stroke and breast cancer. Early last year, the agency sent warning letters to seven compounding pharmacies making these claims, stating that the assertions are unsubstantiated by medical evidence.

"The FDA respects a healthcare provider's decision that his or her patient should receive a pharmacy-compounded hormone replacement drug, but the FDA also wants to assure that women and their healthcare providers understand the risks and benefits of those drugs," the statement reads.

Rohde addressed these concerns by saying that disreputable operations marketing bioidentical hormones for the wrong purposes or prescribing them improperly have drawn the frustration of drug companies and the scrutiny of the FDA. This puts the regimens of carefully monitored patients like Zollinger in jeopardy, he said.

"If they stir up enough controversy, it will keep people from doing that," he said, adding that if bioidentical hormone therapies were not available on the market, patients would likely seek out other venues to continue their treatments, with potentially dangerous consequences.

"What they're paying for is my knowledge and some guidance," Rohde said.

He insisted that, in his experience with the treatments, management of hormone imbalances based initially on symptoms and then carefully monitored is both safe and effective. Rohde said he, too, is on hormone replacement for issues related to getting older.

"I think this totally affects people down to the core," Rohde said. "I mean, if you're tired all the time, and you can't think straight and you haven't got the energy to participate, it affects all avenues of your life ?"

Zollinger said the treatment has given her a better outlook. She said she is more involved and invested in her life.

"I didn't realize how blessed I was until I got my life back," she said.

agetsinger@herald-review.com|421-6968