Interesting thread. I recently finished a book by Ray Peat called "
From PMS to Menopause". It is available for free to download
here.
What I found most interesting was that Peat, like others (including Hans Selye and Albert Szent-Gyiorgi), classified estrogen as a stress hormone... not a "female hormone". It puts forth that the idea of assigning gender to a hormone neglects the sheer complexity and global functioning of each individual substance, and inevitably hampers our ability to understand the way that it functions. From what I understand, Selye showed that estrogen mimicked the "shock" stage of the stress reaction, and that it rapidly deprived tissues of oxygen, therefore inducing local hypoxia.
The above book makes the statement that carcinogenic and estrogenic effects are synonymous with eachother, as both effects are essentially similar (namely, depriving a cell of oxygen, amongst other things). The author's premise is that there is probably no such thing as "good" estrogen which can counter the "bad" estrogen. Rather, he points out that estrogen is a powerful stimuli for growth of tissue, a potent mitochondrial inhibitor, and if left unchecked (due to a lack of progesterone or other factors) ultimately leads to pathology - both local and systemic. His view (based on some pretty convincing evidence) is that estrogen is generally a "pro-stress" hormone, while progesterone is an "anti-stress" hormone. This is disregarding female or male assignments. Aside from the xeno-estrogenic substances we come across in the environment, he particularly focuses on polyunsaturated oil's uncanny ability to induce the formation of estrogens, mainly by prompting the conversion of other hormones via aromatases.
He argues that synthetic progestines actually inhibit progesterones actions. But he also showed in his research that the most effect solvent for progesterone was vitamin E.
I don't know much about the natural progesterone cream's effectiveness. But I have read that he has had great results with prescribing topical progesterone solution dissolved in vitamin E to both men and women for a variety of estrogen dominant conditions (which in his view, is most acquired conditions).
After reading his and other's research, I started using pregnenelone w/DHEA from IdeaLabsDC (dissolved in DMSO) on my testicles to hopefully increase my progesterone and testosterone levels, to counteract some of the excess estrogen I have.
Granted, I don't know much about menopause, so I can't really vouch for the ideas presented in the above book. But it is a pretty fascinating topic, and from what I can see, the research seems to support most of Peat's statements. And it is also interesting to do a search on PubMed to see estrogen levels in different pathologies, because all seem to be elevated.
So the company I use is called IdealabsDC, run by a guy on the "raypeatforum". He produces quite a few different supplements, all of them seem to be high quality, one being progesterone which is dissolved in DMSO. The supplement is called "Progestene" for anyone who might be interested, and the link for the website is
here. 
