Are Your Hormones Making You Crazy?
Dear Kale Blossoms, starting on a positive note, we love partnering with women on their health journeys! It’s the best job in the world! Pinky promise! So please bear with us while we go “negative Nancy” for a sec…
It’s been disappointing to sit with so many women over the last decade who say their doctors have completely dismissed their health concerns. They’ve been told it’s “all in your head,” and issued an anti-depressant on their way out of the clinic. We’ve heard patients relay time and time again, that the blame for how awful she feels is to be placed on the fact that she’s “just a tired Mom” and that’s “part of it”, or given an explanation that it’s because she’s aging and “that’s what happens when you go through menopause, learn to live with it”. Well…we’re two doctors in your corner of the ring, here to let you know…this type of rhetoric is total bologna. The gross, processed, full of added nitrates kind of bologna!
Statistically, it’s been proven that women are dismissed by health care providers all too often—for an array of health issues, not just hormones. The New England Journal of Medicine published a study in 2000 pointing to the fact that women are seven times more likely than men to be misdiagnosed and discharged while having a heart attack. A heart attack, ladies!!! The reason, we think, dates back eons ago…
The word hysteria came from the Greek word hysterika, meaning uterus. In ancient Greece, a “discontented” uterus was blamed for the female condition of “excessive emotion”, hence hysteria came to play. And due to a lack of understanding of basic female physiology, any physical + emotional issues present in women were thought to be due to simply having a uterus. Sheesh! How crazy is that? Unfortunately, this bias in medicine continues today. So much so that articles are being written about it and medical schools are starting to address it. Thank goodness!
No need to wait on a paradigm shift though, we’re here to empower you NOW!! Here goes…
Hormones are teensy little chemicals that pack a mega punch. “They serve as messengers, controlling and coordinating activities throughout the body,” as described by the Merck Manual (like a gazillion, micro air traffic controllers stationed all over your body). They’re in charge of things like making you feel energetic, helping you to manage stress, eliciting hunger, stimulating frisky-ness, managing a monthly menstrual cycle, and so much more. The endocrine organs—hypothalamus, pituitary gland, thyroid + parathyroid glands, adrenals, pancreas, ovaries and even our gut, bones, kidneys, liver, and heart, are the key players creating hormones and communicating with each other to maintain the overall hormonal dance within the body every. And it’s a mighty, special dance, y’all! That has to happen every moment of every single day.
Here’s a real world example, if you encounter a super stressful experience, or like so many of us nowadays, have lots of ongoing stress, your brain let’s your hypothalamus know to get a message to the adrenal glands that you need the fight or flight hormones and a little cortisol, stat. The normal endocrine duties going on at that time, including making progesterone, estrogen, and thyroid hormones, to help you feel vital, sexy, energetic, happy, and balanced, are put on the back burner. When this pattern continues, these hormones become low in inventory or, unfortunately, eventually out of stock. And we all know how big of a bummer it is when we’re shopping for something, we really want, only to find that it’s out of stock. This is exactly how our bodies feel! Our bodies need these things, they really want these things! And they go crazy when they can’t have them! So yes, your hormones may be making you crazy, but there’s way more to the story!
Okay phew, that’s a lot of hormone talk. And there’s lots more ground to cover, so stay tuned as we’ll be posting on this topic again soon. For now, we encourage you to stand up for yourself, and to never be afraid to use your voice, kindly of course! in order to be your own best patient advocate. If you’re feeling dismissed, keep looking for a clinician who will listen to you and who will meet you where you are on your health journey OR complete testing yourself through this awesome lab that allows you to order testing yourself and complete at home! Cuz it’s certainly not all in your heads, ladies. And no one deserves a big load of bologna! Eww!