Hormone Imbalances Occur At All Ages – Let’s Make The Connections

July 29, 2011

Once you make the connection between your symptoms and lack or imbalance in your hormones, you will find that treatment with the proper combination of natural, bioidentical hormones offers remarkable improvement in your symptoms.
 
When I first started working with bioidentical hormones, all the scientific literature I read focused on their use in women who suffered with symptoms of menopause. Thus, my early days of clinical practice in the area of hormone balance focused on the treatment of menopausal women with bioidentical hormones. At the time, in the early 1990s, Dr. John Lee, the father of natural progesterone therapy, only addressed the use of bioidentical progesterone in menopausal women. Not much else was offered in the area of natural hormone balance.
 
Ten years later, not much has changed especially in the area of conventional medicine.
 
You already know that should you approach your conventional doctor with complaints of hot flashes, night sweats, weight gain, loss of libido, all symptoms of hormone imbalance, the doctor will quickly discard your symptoms and send you off with an antidepressant if you are still menstruating or find yourself outside the statistical age for menopause. How ridiculous and short sighted!
 
As my experience in the field of hormones and bioidentical hormone therapies expanded, I started to see younger women (30-50) with serious complaints related to hormone imbalance in need of treatment with bioidentical hormones that fell between the cracks in both conventional and integrative medicine.
 
Cautious at the beginning, in an area where no other physician had tread before, I started keeping track of these women. They were always desperately seeking help with symptoms poorly diagnosed and grossly mistreated by their conventional doctors.
 
Here is what these younger women told me:

1.They found themselves gaining weight that no longer came off with a change in diet or more exercise.
2.Diets that used to work or still work well on their husbands or other friends no longer produced results for them
3.Sex drive was declining in spite of good relationships and loving mates and their own youthful ages
4.Moods were less manageable and irritability once limited to the week before the period became a month long ordeal
5.Sleep was becoming increasingly difficult, disturbed and unpredictable
6.Migraines kept them in bed and were never effectively treated with conventional methods
7.Hot flashes and night sweats once thought to afflict only menopausal women were symptoms these young women often experienced 
8.Infertility became an issue even though all results of exhaustive testing were normal and failed to identify a treatable cause
9.Urinary tract infections recurred almost monthly or when sexual activity picked up 
10.Yeast infections tortured them
11.Itching and rashes popped up without rhyme or reason.
12.Exhaustion became a way of life and no matter how much rest, these women were always tired and lived in constant brain fog
13.Thinning hair on the head and hair growth on the face and other undesirable locations became irritating and common problems.
14.Anxiety attacks and food cravings only worsened the picture
15.Arthritis, restless leg syndrome, chronic fatigue, depression, GERD, ADD, SAD, Lyme disease and other diagnostic labels were tossed at them during infinite numbers of visits to a never ending procession of specialists, sub specialists and even alternative practitioners they pursued in the desperate hope of finding relief or at least a viable diagnosis and regaining their lives.

These women suffered with hormone imbalances.
 
The connection was clear to them since they had come to seek me out from all over the country. Since no medical diagnosis fit and the women got no help from the obstetrician, gynecologist, endocrinologist, internist, neurologist, psychopharmacologist, gastroenterologist, infectious disease expert, their situation became desperate.
 
When all the tests are normal and the woman feels terrible with symptoms including those described above, there are two options in conventional medicine: pat them on the back in a paternalistic, condescending fashion and tell them it’s all in their heads, or give them a pill and a return visit in a few months for another battery of tests. The pill is either a synthetic birth control pill or hormone or better yet, an antidepressant. The women I saw had done it all and were now at a point where they chose neither.
 
They maintained there was something wrong with them even though the doctor could not find it in the tests so they did their research and figured out faster than the doctors that the problem was hormonal. The only thing needed was a doctor who listened, cared and was willing to give them bioidentical hormones even though they were not menopausal.
  

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