Photo Credit: Mathilde Langevin
Women often come into my office suspecting they have hormone issues. Yet, they aren’t able
to pinpoint exactly what is wrong and how it correlates to a hormonal issue. So, what type of symptoms will
you see when your hormones are out of balance?
Headache
Inability to lose weight
Heavy periods
Irregular periods
Bad period cramps
Hair loss on their head
Hair growth on their face
Mood swings such as anxiety or depression or both
Sleep issues
Digestive issues
Thyroid issues
PCOS
Endometriosis
And many more…
Often these women have gone to see their traditional medical provider without many answers.
Their blood work suggests “normal” hormone levels. So, their doctor shrugs off their
worries as mere anxiety and the underlying issue remains untreated.
Frankly speaking, this isn’t good enough.
Most of the time, there IS a valid hormone issue. Yet, the testing isn’t function-based, it is
disease-based. Let me explain.
Modern blood work testing is geared towards evaluating disease-based hormones. This type of
blood work is intended to only recognize severe function loss—not subclinical irregularities.
This means that you may have a functional problem—symptoms you will notice—that the
blood work test will not pick up.
Again, I don’t believe relying on this is good enough.
So, what alternative does functional/integrative medicine have to offer? Let me outline a few
tests that can identify a functional issue and help us know WHERE to start treatment.
1. Blood work: Yes, we will occasionally do a series of blood panels to identity the issue.
However, we do not read the panels for disease, but instead interpret them for function.
You don’t want just to be “in range” for lab values, you want OPTIMAL ranges for health
and function. The other caveat that’s different in function levels is that we order a more
extensive number of markers. Let me give you an example. If a typical primary care
doctor suspects a thyroid issue, the doctor will order a TSH (thyroid stimulating
hormone, which comes from the brain) marker and a T4 (inactive thyroid hormone)
marker. This is currently the standard of care for thyroid management. This, once again,
is not sufficient to identify most thyroid issues. Functional doctors will also order
markers for T3, which is the active thyroid hormone. If you don’t order both T4 and T3
you don’t know the conversion rate and thereby won’t know how your body is
ACTUALLY using the hormone once it’s in your body. We will also order antibody levels if
we’re suspecting Graves (hyperthyroid) or Hashimoto’s disease (hypothyroid) markers,
if clinical presentation supports it. Unless you rule out an autoimmune presentation
which is impairing your thyroid, you will continue to chase your tail and never address
the issue. We will often see autoimmune patients being put on thyroid hormone with
little results for many years, still experiencing many of those type of symptoms. So, it’s
important to order ENOUGH of the markers.
2. Saliva testing: Saliva testing, unlike blood work, measures ACTIVE hormones that your
body can utilize, instead of protein-bound hormones. When you measure active
hormones, your results are more accurate because it is like measuring the number of
players on the bench who CAN play. A protein-bound hormone is a hormone your body
has, but can’t necessarily use. Saliva testing, in my opinion, is more accurate and will
quickly identify issues when the blood work reads everything as being normal. We do
this type of testing for hormones such as estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, insulin,
DHEA, LH and FSH just to name a few. This is an easy, quick and cheap way to identify
problems at the root level.
3. DUTCH test: The third way that we look at hormones and identify issues is what’s
known as the DUTCH test. It’s a dried urine test that measures the CLEARANCE of
hormones through the body. This means that if you aren’t clearing hormones at
appropriate rates, they can build up and cause toxicity in your system, which often
messes up your hormone balance.
4. Muscle testing: However, my favorite and most accurate test is the one which we do in
office. Muscle testing gives us a LOT of information quickly and it shockingly correlates
with what we find in other types of testing. Muscle testing is a neurofeedback
mechanism which tests your body and its response to various stressors. It’s able to
identify the root causes of health issues in real time. Why I prefer to always start there is
because once it identifies the issue, we can also identify the stressor and remove it. For
example, if you do a series of hormone tests and they are “out of range,” you then still
have to dig through the history and trial and error of treatments to figure out WHY the
hormones have gone out of balance. With a muscle test you get both sets of
information right away and are able to deal with the trigger right off the bat. Personally,
in my practice, this is where I start. By being able to identify the stressors and removing
them, we can give patients the lifestyle tools, as well as
herbs/supplements/homeopathy to get to the root cause and bring those pesky
hormones back into balance.
If you are interested in further addressing this topic, please feel free to reach out and schedule an appointment. Dr. V is a Chiropractor and Functional Medicine Doctor in Elmhurst, Illinois who evaluates patients from the inside out, focusing on areas including hormone imbalance, digestive health, anxiety/depression, autoimmune disease, and many others.