

Rather than decreasing the amount of estrogen your body produces, it just makes sure it’s channeled down the proper pathways. DIM is an extract of cruciferous vegetables like broccoli. I had also seen DIM mentioned frequently as a solution to estrogen dominance, which tends to be the underlying issue when you have an endometrioma or endometriosis. Those results - combined with the fact that NAC at those doses has virtually no side effects - were enough for me. At the end of the 3 months, about half of the women in the NAC group were able to cancel their scheduled laparoscopies due to a disappearance of symptoms, 8 of whom had their cysts disappear altogether, while almost all had at least some reduction in the size of their cysts (versus the control group, most of whom experienced an increase in cyst diameter over the 3 months). The study followed 90 women with endometriomas at least 3cm in diameter, half of them getting NAC (600mg, 3X/day, 3 days/week, for 3 months) and the other half untreated. I’m not clear on why the researchers in the above study used NAC instead of glutathione, but that wasn’t as important to me as the results they achieved.
#GREAT LAKES HYDROLYZED GELATIN FREE#
It’s where the buck stops when it comes to handling free radicals and getting rid of toxins: they stick to glutathione like glue and before they know it, it’s carrying them out of the body like a bouncer at a posh club. NAC is a precursor to glutathione, which is considered the mother of all antioxidants.


N-acetylcysteine (NAC), how do I love thee … One of the most impressive was a study involving N-acetylcysteine (NAC). At least for three months.Īs I slogged through page after page of the same old recommendations, the less common ones began to stand out. But with the prospect of surgery looming, I figured I could learn to live without it. I was addicted to my decaf cappuccino every morning, which just is not worth bothering with if it doesn’t include real half-and-half (organic and hormone-free, natch). My doc had recommended eliminating all of these, too, as well as dairy. Most of what I found were recommendations that I had either already counted out (milk thistle and maca root, for instance, which do weird things to my cycle) or those that I had already taken onboard, like eliminating wheat, (most) sugar, (some) caffeine and alcohol. Trained in allopathic medicine, but having helped her mom through some health issues, she became fully convinced of the value of natural and alternative approaches and is now what I would call an integrative medicine physician.)Īnyway, armed with the knowledge of what I had growing on my poor ovary, and alarmed at the size of the thing (think small lime), I immediately jumped online and started searching for natural treatments. (Though she also emphasized that I didn’t have to have surgery… I could do whatever I wanted.

She recommended that we recheck it in 3 months, and if it was any bigger, that would be the time to start planning for a surgery. The doc told me that the cyst looked (on ultrasound) like an endometrioma, also known as a chocolate cyst. Surgery is a thing far better suited to careful planning than spontaneity.) (Plus, you don’t want to be at the mercy of some random emergency room of questionable standards. Whether you need the ovary or not, if you’re unable to get to a hospital and into surgery in time, you could end up with gangrene or God knows what other complications. She told me that when they get to 6cm, the recommendation is to have them surgically removed because they can rupture the ovary. So when I went back at the start of this year, she checked it again and saw that it had grown to 5cm. She didn’t seem particularly concerned about it (though she’s not an alarmist anyway), but said we’d keep an eye on it. When I went for my annual exam at the start of 2018, the doc told me I had an ovarian cyst that was 4cm in diameter. So when I found out that my 5cm ovarian cyst had completely disappeared, I knew I couldn’t keep this protocol to myself, when so many women are struggling with this very issue and with endometriosis, in general. And it wasn’t until this cyst thing popped up that I finally got some first-hand experience healing myself. But ever since my mom’s second cancer diagnosis 13 years ago, I’ve been more than a little obsessed with natural yet effective ways to prevent and treat disease. There are a gazillion people far more qualified than I who are already doing just that. I had not intended to write about health issues on this blog.
