Hormone Health
Restore balance to your hormones.
Regain Your Energy
Improve Your Focus
Restore Your Vitality
Have you been losing hair, gaining weight, or feeling less interested in sex?
It could be your hormones.
At Holistic Healing Arts, we take special interest in your hormone health.
We understand how hormonal imbalances affect your quality of life.
We rebalance your hormones using methods tailored to treat your individual imbalance so you can live with more focus, energy, and happiness.
Our treatment options range from herbs, nutraceuticals and lifestyle to bio-identical hormone replacement such as:
Pellets, injections, troches, creams or patches
An Out-of-Tune Melody
Understanding Hormone Imbalance
Your hormones affect just about everything in your body – from growth to mood, energy, focus, and yes, even your sex drive.
Hormones are your body’s chemical messengers. They travel through blood to deliver vital information to your cells.
Your body produces more than 50 different hormones. Some well-known hormones are estrogen, insulin, cortisol, progesterone, testosterone, dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), and adrenaline. All of them work together to keep you healthy.
Hormonal changes are a normal part of aging. But regardless of age, your hormones need to be balanced to feel your best. Changes can also occur as a result of health challenges, infections, stress, toxin exposure, pregnancy, or grief.
Symptoms of Hormone Imbalance
Think of your hormones as an orchestra. If one section of the orchestra is playing out of tune, the music produced won’t sound quite right.
A hormonal imbalance can have a similar effect and can present itself as:
Mood swings, depression, irritability, anxiety
Irregular menstrual cycles
Premenstrual syndrome (PMS)
Ovarian, breast, or endometrial cysts
Insomnia or difficulty falling and staying asleep
Weight gain
Hot flashes
Thinning hair
Excess or abnormal hair growth
Prostate changes
Miscarriage
Fatigue
Brain fog
Urinary frequency
Night sweats
Bone loss
Sexual dysfunction or decreased libido
Vaginal dryness
Acne
Infertility
You can experience any of the above symptoms, or a combination of them. But these symptoms are also “nonspecific,” meaning they can be related to many conditions. It’s easy to see why many doctors dismiss them.
But all my labs are “normal.”
Consider this—when establishing their reference ranges, many labs don’t consider a patient’s stage of life, medications, lifestyle, diet, or genetic variations. These factors can have profound effects on “normal” reference ranges.
To get around this, some labs establish their own—using samples from patients who are usually having their blood taken because they’re already concerned about their health. These patients are more likely to have hormonal issues than not, yet an average of their levels establishes the reference range.
Put simply, there is a vast difference between ‘average’ and ‘optimal’ on labs. We aim for optimal, and base it off symptoms.
We have hormone panels as low as $100 for those who don’t have or want to use insurance. These labs often retail at closer to $1,000
What does this mean for you?
It means your hormonal imbalance can be overlooked by traditional lab tests. Without the training necessary to assess and manage hormonal imbalances, a physician may simply dismiss your case as “normal.”
At Holistic Healing Arts, we know “normal” doesn’t necessarily mean “optimal.” We want to help you feel better than average.
Through our advanced, comprehensive hormone training, we have the experience to evaluate symptoms of hormonal imbalance as well as results from blood, urine or saliva tests.
Common Hormone Problems
Adrenal Issues
Hormones produced by the adrenal gland include cortisol (your primary stress hormone), DHEA, adrenaline, and aldosterone.
If your adrenal glands make too much or too little of certain hormones, you may have an adrenal disorder. This is one of the most common issues we see when someone has been dealing with a chronic illness.
For example, chronic stress can lead to adrenal insufficiency, which means your adrenal glands cannot produce enough hormones. Symptoms of adrenal insufficiency include fatigue, body aches, weight loss, low blood pressure, loss of body hair, nausea, and vomiting.
Thyroid Issues
Your thyroid gland produces hormones that affect your mood, food metabolism, weight, sexual function, body temperature, muscle contraction, and even heartbeat.
When the thyroid produces too many hormones, you may experience rapid heartbeat, irritability, weight loss, or sleep disturbances.
On the other hand, when the thyroid gland is underactive, it fails to produce enough hormones. Symptoms of hypothyroidism include fatigue, dry skin and hair, weight gain, and inability to tolerate cold.
Thyroid “normal” ranges can vary dramatically based on which reference you look at. We find that looking beyond just a TSH level can help us determine what is really going on with the thyroid and can help to optimize function in a more comprehensive way.
Female Hormone Imbalance
Typically, estrogen and progesterone keep each other in check. But adrenal fatigue and aging can lead to declines in progesterone production, resulting in estrogen dominance.
Common symptoms of estrogen dominance include water retention, headaches or migraines, weight gain, hair loss, and PMS. It also puts you at higher risk of certain cancers and thyroid dysfunction.
In perimenopause, hormones plummet, leaving us feeling older than we should, and not having the same bone, cancer and cardiovascular protection they previously had.
Testosterone Imbalance
Testosterone is an essential hormone in both men and women. Low testosterone symptoms in men include reduced sex drive, poor exercise recovery, fatigue and depression, weight gain, and in extreme cases, erectile dysfunction. Women may experience fatigue, sleep disturbances, loss of motivation, low libido, weight gain, and loss of bone density.
Testosterone is often the first hormone to drop in women, often in the 3os! Testosterone production in the body is also suppressed by oral birth control methods.
Evaluating Your Hormone Health
Our experienced physicians will conduct a comprehensive evaluation of your symptoms and medical history. Then we perform hormone tests and other relevant tests, including thyroid or adrenal stress testing.
Testing for Hormone Issues
Since different hormonal imbalances can present with the same symptoms, it’s important to test your hormones prior to treatment.
We evaluate your hormones using a variety of testing methods, including blood hormone testing and dried urine testing (DUTCH). We typically use blood tests to evaluate for estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and DHEA imbalances.
We also use blood tests to test for FSH (follicle stimulating hormone), LH (luteinizing hormone), thyroid and prolactin.
Saliva testing can be particularly useful to look at adrenal and cortisol patterns over the day, especially if you are exhausted and also have insomnia.
We have great pricing on labs for those who are not using insurance, making testing easy and affordable!
Once the hormonal imbalance is identified, we use various treatment options to help you regain the balance you need.
Treatment Options For Hormone Health
Treatment of a hormonal imbalance is not a one-size-fits-all approach. No matter how similar your symptoms are to someone else’s, the root cause of your imbalance may be different.
In some cases, herbal, nutraceutical and lifestyle changes may be sufficient to bring hormones back into balance.
For those with very low hormones (for example perimenopause or andropause), replacement with bio-identical forms may be the best option. There are various forms of delivery, all with different pros and cons:
Pellets- Inserted under the skin in either the buttock or flank. They slowly release hormone over a 3-5 month period and are very effective at increasing hormone levels, most closely mimicking physiological conditions. Unfortunately, not covered by insurance.
$375 every 3-4 months for females
$650 every 4-5 months for males
Troches- This is a sublingual delivery system that involves melting a little cube in your mouth each day for absorption into your bloodstream. These get compounded at a compounding pharmacy.
Approximately $100 for a 3-month supply (if not covered by insurance)
Injections- These are generally reserved for males and require self-administered injections of Testosterone twice weekly in the belly, and are very affordable.
Can be under $30 a month with GoodRx. May be covered by insurance
Creams- These require daily application, and can be a good starting point for people, however they rarely achieve complete symptom relief because of the delivery method.
Approximately $100 for a 3-month supply. May be covered by insurance
Patches- This is another alternative most often for Estrogen, often applied 1-2 times a week. Work great for osteoporosis
Can range from $30-$50 a month with GoodRx. May be covered for insurance.
Oral pill (Progesterone)- This is only reserved for Progesterone, NOT a good delivery method for Estrogen or Testosterone. This is often added if someone is replacing estrogen so it can be balanced, but can also be added on its own to help with sleep and protect the endometrium of uterus.
Cost can be $15 a month for generic with GoodRx, or around $30 a month for compounded higher quality.
Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy
Traditional HRT uses synthetic hormones in an oral form. While they may be effective for relieving menopausal symptoms, they can increase risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease. With these risks, traditional HRT is not recommended for long-term use.
BHRT uses bioidentical hormones, which are the closest to the real thing. Since they’re chemically identical to the hormones your body makes, they have fewer harmful by-products than synthetic hormones. This means fewer side-effects and greater, faster benefits. BHRT has been shown in recent studies to significantly lower the risk of developing: Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, osteoporosis and cancers.
Hormone optimization can change your life. But no matter which treatment method you choose, testing frequently will ensure your hormone levels stay within optimal range.
Our Hormone Specialists
Dr. Amy & Dr. Marina
Our doctors have been diving into more extensive hormone training with both Evexias and the Hormone Health Institute to not only learn about pellet therapy but all of the other hormonal delivery forms. Where we differ as Naturopathic Doctors is we also understand the use of herbs and other therapies to help support detox pathways or for those who don’t tolerate hormone replacement.
Whether you’re experiencing a problem with your adrenals, thyroid, pituitary, sex hormones, or all of the above — our doctors uses labs, along with ART and a detailed history to identify the imbalance and find the right treatments to restore balance to your endocrine system.
