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Hormone-related health issues should always be addressed using the safest approaches possible.
To get started, a thorough case history, nutritional and hormonal exam, and lab testing will guide your doctor to form a diagnosis and report of findings. They can then design a comprehensive treatment plan that is both safe and effective for you.
Improving your diet, environment and lifestyle can make hormone treatment more efficient. For example, optimizing intestinal and liver clearance of hormones is the most basic step in hormone safety.
Enhancing diet to your unique needs and neutralizing lifestyle stress can also be helpful. Once the physiological self-healing mechanisms are tuned up, then other therapeutic intervention is added when needed.
Herbal/botanical support can be effective in symptom relief in some cases.
When hormones prescriptions are used in treatment, we want to make them safe and efficient in the body. Following are some important factors to ensuring safety:
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Precise Physiologic Doses — It's best to use a portion of what the hormone gland should normally secrete. Overdoses are those above the maximum daily secretion in young healthy adults.
Your doctor can estimate the optimal dose for you by checking your lab test results, noting hormonal signs during physical exams, and from hearing your feedback. |
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Bio-Identical Hormones — Bio-identical hormones are structured to exactly mirror the structure of the hormone naturally secreted by the body. Non-bioidentical (or modified) hormones do not match this natural structure and therefore can cause excessive binding or unstable and incomplete binding to the hormone receptor sites, which cause different effects. The liver was not meant to process non-bioidentical hormones, so the processing is slower and those hormones can accumulate in the body. |
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Best-Type Hormone Preparation — Bio-identical hormones are more suitable for longer term use than the synthetics. |
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Safest Route of Administration – Use the safest and most efficient hormone treatment, personalized to your needs. There are many options from which to choose, including: oral, sublingual, buccal, nasal, transdermal, subcutaneous, intramuscular, and vaginal. Talk with your doctor about what's most comfortable for you.
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Simultaneously Correct All Important Hormone Deficiencies — The body uses hormones in balance with one another, and major goal is to mimic nature in the balance intended. This is a safer approach. For example, thyroid replacement treatment is not well tolerated if a person also has a cortisol deficiency. Similarly, estradiol treatment, when balanced with bio-identical progesterone, is safer and better tolerated by the body.
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Correct Startup for Treatment — Some hormones require working up to the therapeutic dose, while others are best started at the therapeutic dose.
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Follow-up Appointments and Testing — Regular check-ins with your doctor ensures better safety, and allows for fine-tuning of your treatment based upon changes in diet, work, sports, sleep, disease, and stress.
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Education for the Patient — It's most helpful if you are well-informed about your treatment, so have your doctor explain everything to you. Be sure to share feedback with your doctor so they can adapt the treatments to fit your needs.
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Specific hormone safety testing can be done as a baseline and also at intervals during treatment. These tests can be done with blood, urine, or saliva, and they seek to determine whether metabolites (breakdown products) of hormones are proceeding appropriately in the body. If they are not, the tests detect it and treatment is altered accordingly.
To further ensure safety during hormone treatment (and as a general rule), it's recommended that you get yearly pelvic and breast exams, pap tests and mammograms.
Talk to your doctor about your family medical history and any other specific risk factors or concerns you have about hormone use and your safety.
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