From PMS to Menopause: Feeling Bad is Not Normal.
There is little to no proper diagnosis, understanding, or treatment for women’s specific health issues in conventional modern medicine. Women are almost universally led to incorrectly believe that things like PMS, painful and irregular periods, PCOS, and menstrual migraines are just something you have to live with.
Functional medicine uses lab testing and clinical analysis of your health history to understand the root causes of your health issues and resolve them from their roots.
Other disorders, including depression, autoimmune disease, hypothyroidism, and IBS are also far more common in women. 78.8% of all autoimmune diseases are in women, twice as many women deal with depression than men. Over twice as many women have IBS, and women are 5-8 times more likely to be hypothyroid (and up to 60% of all people with hypothyroidism go undiagnosed)!
Not surprisingly, for many women, a lot of these health conditions are going on all at the same time.
“Functional medicine connects the dots and helps you understand why your symptoms are not separate conditions, but tips of the same underlying ‘icebergs’.”
How does your doctor diagnose these conditions? Except for autoimmune disease and, in severe cases, hypothyroidism (remember: 60% are undiagnosed), there are no biological or specific clinical diagnostic criteria or understanding of why they occur.
PMS: Moody and in pain during your period? Congratulations, your diagnosis is PMS.
Been diagnosed with PCOS? Many women are diagnosed with PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome) without even testing for any of the three criteria that roughly diagnose the condition: cysts on your ovaries, elevated androgens, or insulin resistance.
How about IBS? Whether it’s constipation or diarrhea, bloating or abdominal pain, unless it’s IBD (Inflammatory Bowel Disease) it’s all called IBS.
The truth is, any condition with the word “syndrome” in its title has very little diagnostic criteria or validated treatment plan. Why isn’t there any better biological understanding or differential diagnosis of women’s health conditions? Because science has spent minimal effort in trying to understand women’s bodies.
What are your options for treatment? Birth control, more hormones, immune suppression, and antidepressants and symptomatic relief with digestive aids. While there certainly can be a role for each of these interventions, they fall far short of addressing underlying causes, or in most of us, really allowing us to feel truly well.
But you have far more and better options. Options that allow you to not just bandaid your symptoms but give you a path to wellness. Where do you begin?
Nutrition
If you aren’t already, you may be pleasantly amazed at how much a nutrient-dense, unprocessed diet will magically improve everything from PMS to IBS to depression. In fact, it is often where we start in Functional medicine, and there simply is no medication, supplement, or herb that can take the place of a nutrient dene, unprocessed nutrition plan.
Think of it this way: processed food and much of any sugar (really anything but seasonal fruit and a little honey) weren’t introduced into the human body until the 1940s. Is it any wonder your body is not optimized eating foods and chemicals it never evolved to use?
Start by eliminating sugar, flour, chemicals, and preservatives. Add in more colorful vegetables and organic animal products. Try skipping gluten and dairy for a few months. Relearn how to cook with herbs, spices and bones. See how you feel and let me know.
Gut Microbiome Testing
Why? Because 75% of our entire immune system is in our gut. Have inflammation anywhere? Start with the gut. This means what you eat and gut microbiome dysbiosis testing.
What is the gut microbiome, and what is gut microbiome dysbiosis? Along with 75% of our immune system, there lives in our gut approximately 100 trillion microbes! It’s a diverse and complex community. Dysbiosis is when microbes that aren’t healthy members of our gut microbiome get too numerous, or the microbes we do want are too few. This can cause the immune system to react to get things under control, and this immune system activation, what most of us would call inflammation, can ricochet throughout our whole body.
Our diet is the first place to start improving our immune-gut system; the next step is a Comprehensive Stool Analysis that tests what microbes live in our gut microbiome as well as functional gut health markers such as digestion, inflammation, and short-chain fatty acids.
It’s The Hormones, Honey.
The hormone or endocrine system, like every other part of the body, is incredibly complex. You don’t get much hormone testing from your PCP, or, perhaps surprisingly, your OBGYN or endocrinologist (who confusingly mainly treats diabetes, and not endocrine, or hormone, issues….).
Functional medicine regularly checks hormone balance and uses narrower ranges that better correlate with health, rather than waiting for lab markers to be out of range so far that they indicate actual disease.;
Science is still working (probably not hard enough) to understand which hormones and hormone patterns contribute to PCOS, PMS, migraines, menopause, infertility and women’s significantly higher propensity to autoimmune disease, depression, and IBS. But advanced hormone testing such as DUTCH and more complete blood panels have go a long way to enable us to significantly improve these conditions and get you feeling a lot better.
Want to get started addressing the underlying causes of your health conditions and feeling your best? Call us at 804-288-1111 or contact us here.