Bio-Identical Hormone Balancing 

Hormones make us feel great, but if imbalanced, they can also wreck our lives. Though there are several that everyone has heard of, there are many more types of hormones performing intimate roles, crucial for normal cell function keeping us balanced and healthy. Hormones are the unsung heroes, balancing blood sugar levels, transporting key metabolites into and around cells, instructing our cells to generate energy, keeping our calcium levels normal and our heart beating perfectly. They even help our liver detoxify, limit our craving for food, balance our metabolism and enable us to go to sleep. Hormones even play a gigantic role in limiting cancer cell growth! They are awfully important.

One particular hormone group gets the most attention - the sex hormones: Estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. These help determine our gender, balance our temperament, soften our skin, grow our body hair, help us keep perspective in crisis, give us strength in turmoil, determine how we age, and how long we may live.

For a menstruating woman with an average 28 day cycle, we number the days of the cycle from the first day of onset of their bleeding as Day 1. At this point your estrogen and progesterone levels are at their lowest, which induces the sloughing of the inner lining of the uterus (the endometrium). As your period continues, your ovaries slowly increase production of Estrogen reaching a threshold that turns off the shedding of endometrial tissue and the bleeding stops. As the level of Estrogen continues to rise, it signals the pituitary gland to release a special hormone that readies another egg - Lutenizing Hormone (LH).

If the pituitary is healthy, it reads the message correctly and releases a spike of LH which causes the release of the fertile egg (ovulation); it is now approximately 14 days into the cycle. LH production is turned off by the increasing levels of progesterone. For the last two weeks of the cycle, estrogen and progesterone production are balanced to prepare the body for pregnancy. Progesterone is made by the corpus luteum, the name given to the follicle once expelled from the ovary, now an independent organ responsible for further support and preparation of the egg for fertilization. The progesterone made by the corpus luteum prevents other eggs from maturing and keeps the uterine lining ready for implantation. More than 90% of the body's progesterone is made by this short lived organ. If the woman gets pregnant, the corpus luteum thrives and makes literally gallons of progesterone to nurture and sustain the fetus. If the woman doesn't get pregnant, the corpus luteum shrinks and dies. With its demise, the progesterone production and thus circulating progesterone levels wane. The cycle has ended with the gradual drop in both estrogen and progesterone and the woman gets her period. The fall of estrogen and progesterone is picked up by the hypothalamus, a part of the brain that senses the hormonal changes. The hypothalamus signals the start of a new cycle and heralds it by secreting another hormone, GnRH as well as communicating to the pituitary. This is the all-important hypothalamic- pituitary axis (H-P axis or HPA) that can literally be burned out by long term birth control pill use.

Most clinics measure these hormones through blood or salivary means and often prescribe supplementation or replacement based upon that reading. I liken the complex cycle of estrogen, progesterone, lutenizing hormone, follicle stimulating hormone, and others to a moving train. Doing a test at one point in the cycle and diagnosing a condition is like taking a snapshot of a moving train and attempting to determine the speed of the train from the picture. It’s ridiculous! I do a FULL CYCLE motion picture of the hormones involved in a cycle. Starting on Day 1 and continuing every 3 days until Day 1 occurs again, we collect salivary samples that are tested and placed of a graph that easily details the rise and fall of all the hormones and clearly defines any problems. From this we begin dosing natural (not synthetic), bio-identical replacements if necessary.

Actually, it gets even more complex. There are precursors and precursor pathways to these systems and a lack of progesterone rise does not always indicate the need for progesterone replacement, but let’s keep it simple for this explanation, we'll same the in-depth investigation for your complete work-up.

Suzanne Sumers utilizes our same approach!