2024-01-27 11:43:50
By Hans Vemer and Broer Scholtens
“Through my daughter’s secondary school, I came into contact with the Hormone Center, which pretends to be a menstrual education institute,” writes a concerned and indignant mother in an email to the Association against Quackery (VtdK). The center in Eersel, Brabant, responds to the insecurities of young girls and uses expertise and research. The mother is angry because the company tells students with incorrect and unfounded information that menstruation can be a reason to miss every month or to demand that you do not have to take a test or do not have to participate in gym.
“My daughter received some emails from the center because she took a test on the company website about her menstrual pattern and the result was that her periods are WORRIING and that the institute can help her,” she wrote. She adds that the institute emphasizes the seriousness by writing ‘WORRIING’ in bold capitals.
A year ago, the VtdK also received complaints and questions about the Hormone Center and about the company’s websites: Men-struatie.nl, which contains background information about the approach and the website Menstruatieinstituut.nl where the company offers its books. On a third company website, the center mainly talks about the research it conducts.
The company’s test, falsely designed to lure people in, consists of a list of questions about pain, fatigue, blood loss and school performance during menstruation. The test is said to have been ‘developed in collaboration with doctors and made with the greatest possible care’, the company reports. It is a strange test, just like the biased diagnosis/result that follows.
Even mild complaints are worrying?
Even someone who reports few or only mild complaints will receive the answer that her menstruation is WORRY. Girls, consistently referred to as ‘girls’ by the company owners, are then advised an intake.
It also happened to the web editors – male, secretly pretending to be a woman, so bland – after completing the questionnaire. Despite the answer ‘mild complaints’, the web editors receive the result of the test via email: ‘You have just completed the test and the result is that you have worrisome menstrual complaints. You don’t have to be shocked right away, 84% of all menstruating women walk around with worrying menstrual complaints without being aware of this. Don’t follow in their footsteps, but approach things differently. Now that you know that your hormones have a huge effect on your happiness, you want to take action. You’re ready to feel that energy again! But where should you start? At the Hormone Center we have 3 consultations ready for you that will help you bring your hormones back into balance,” the center tells the web editors.
This concerns the following consultations: a basic consultation (95 euros), a measuring-is-knowing package (399 euros) and an optimal trajectory (698 euros). The center’s website shows a photo of a man in a white coat with a stethoscope casually around his neck; apparently he does the basic consultation. This is remarkable. None of the practitioners/owners of the center have medical training or are BIG registered, something you would expect from a professional stethoscope user.
We are talking about Anke Verhagen and her partner/co-owner of the center Peter de Vroed. Anke Verhagen obtained a diploma in graphic design and worked (still works) as a print designer before she also started calling herself ‘body and hormone therapist’, an unrecognized profession. Her menstrual knowledge is mainly based on her own experiences. Peter de Vroed, her partner, has been involved in image and sound communication in the past, according to his LinkedIn page.
Stressologist
As a graduate of the Center for Stressology in Maarssen, he calls himself ‘stressologist’, a self-invented profession; it seems contagious: partner Verhagen also calls himself a stressologist. De Vroed’s medical knowledge is based on the ‘many research he has done on the influence of hormonal contraception and the influence of society on the menstrual cycle’, he explains on his company website. He mainly gets his ‘expertise from experience’ and his ‘research’ from conversations with his partner. Both claim to do their work to help women.
Their center seeks to raise awareness among students with an extensive brochure that is distributed door to door in Brabant. The Hormone Center offers various tests: fatty acid determinations via finger prick, assessment of stress levels, nitric oxide determination via saliva, an HbA1c blood test to detect the risk of later diabetes and measurement of neurotransmitters. Measuring hormones – which you would expect, judging by the name of the institute – is not included here.
The measurements that are taken have nothing to do with menstrual complaints. The scientific research they refer to and on which they base these tests and conclusions about menstruation does not exist. The owners of the so-called Hormone Center are not trained to do this type of diagnostic work.
The web editors asked them some questions about this via email. In their response they acknowledge that there is no published science linking these tests to menstruation! When asked specifically why they perform an HbA1c blood test, they answer that they have nothing to do with the results of this expensive test! Another strange answer.
Trudy Vlot
According to the website Men-struatie.nl, there are two doctors associated with the company. Both are known to the Association against Quackery. Trudy Vlot is a medical doctor and works in a practice for Integrated Medicine and Lifestyle Interventions in Genderen, the Achterhoek. She is concerned with ‘nature, neuro-economics and clinical psycho-neuro-immunology’, meaningless and self-invented slogans. Vlot, she reports, mainly treats ‘complaints related to the combination of body and brain (conditions such as depression, chronic fatigue, brain fog, ADHD, autism, cancer and IBS (irritable bowel syndrome)’.
Laila Alberts, the other doctor who advises the Hormone Center in Eersel, is also a medical doctor and after her training specialized in oddities such as homeopathy and (electro)acupuncture. propositions.html Both primary care doctors behind the center are therefore not specifically trained in the field of menstruation.
It should not go unmentioned that the test on the center’s website states: ‘This test is made possible by me-luna menstrual cups’. The advertising text is decorated with the logo of this company in Kampen.
Guest lessons
The owners of the Hormone Center give guest lessons at schools. They ask the girls they speak to answer questions. The website now reports that ‘15,500 girls aged 13 to 19’ have participated. The research focuses on the question ‘What influence does menstruation have on school performance and absenteeism?’
That research would show that girls and women ‘suffer from menstruation much more than many think’. A meaningless conclusion. The results are only published on their own website. The center reports that they collaborated with researchers from Radboud UMC in Nijmegen on the study. When asked some time ago, the UMC stated that it had never collaborated with the Hormone Center but had only elaborated on an inventory of the center by Peter de Vroed.
In one of the scientific articles about this in the British Medical Journal Open the Nijmegen authors thank Peter de Vroed and others ‘for their valuable contributions in the development and dispersion of the questionnaire’ and nothing more. When asked, Radboud UMC reports that it has requested the Hormone Center several times to remove the suggestion about collaboration from its website. The center did not respond to this.
On its website, the Hormone Center brags about education it would provide to doctors. Inquiries reveal that these are two (one-off) presentations for 1st and 2nd year students of VU Amsterdam and Maastricht University. Or perhaps they are just starting medical students, possibly on their way to becoming a doctor.
Hormonal imbalance
Owner De Vroed mentions some causes for menstrual complaints on his website, including hormonal imbalance, xenoestrogens, eating sugar and the influence of di-indolyl-methane (DIM). This is nonsense: hormonal imbalance is a broad concept that you cannot use. Xenoestrogens are substances that occur naturally, for example in plants, or that are made synthetically and that have the effects of female hormones. For example, they are found in contraceptive pills. You cannot say in general that xenoestrogens are better or worse than your own hormones. Nowhere has a clear influence on menstruation from eating sugar been described. And to wrap it up: di-indolyl-methane (DIM) is made by the body after eating cauliflower and broccoli. There are no publications showing any connection between DIM and cycle complaints. De Vroed uses complicated texts to create a scientific impression.
When asked about this, the owners of the Hormone Center, Verhagen and De Vroed, write that there is no scientific publication behind these statements. In an email to the web editors they talk about a: ‘suspicion.’
The Hormone Center has recently added a new branch to its revenue model, training as a cycle therapist. Verhagen and De Vroed are the teachers, teachers without relevant training. You can’t deny both creativity and brutality. They rake in 899 euros for a ‘preliminary training’, 2598 euros for the ‘further training’. The number of places is limited, demand is high, so hurry up and register, is their advice: ‘absenteeism in the workplace due to menstrual and menopausal complaints is high. The business community is crying out for cycle therapists,’ they state on their website.
The next course starts on February 2, 2024 or March 1, 2024. “If you start the training now, you can start working as an independently certified cycle therapist in January 2025,” is the promise. You can use a silly test on the website to find out whether it makes sense to take the course. Many have been persuaded: 22 prospective cycle therapists have now registered, 21 women and one man,” the Hormone Center reports on its LinkedIn page.
Our advice: stay away from this expensive nonsense and the selling of hot air with which Anke Verhagen and Peter de Vroed of the Hormone Center stay just within the lines of the law.
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