What is YOUR hormone story?
So many women come into my clinic and promptly burst into tears! Perhaps it is my motherly look and finally being heard or perhaps they just know that they can get some help.
You see I am a hormone expert.
Happy endocrine glands (they make your hormones) makes for a happy, healthy life and when these marvellous messenger makers work as a cohesive team hormonal symptoms can just fall away. After all, symptoms are just there to get your attention.
Do you have any of these symptoms?
- hot flushes, night sweats
- skin crawling
- chin hairs
- fuzzy thinking, headaches, memory loss
- emotional outbursts, moodiness
- angry…a lot
- depressed
- anxious
- accelerated ageing
- no energy, exhausted all the time
- allergies
- blood sugar worries
- acne
- stressed out
- brittle or thinning hair, nails and bones
- painful, heavy or irregular periods
- loss of sex drive
- Are you finding it difficult to get pregnant or maintain the pregnancy?
- Postnatal challenges?
- Do you ever feel like killing your husband just because?
- Have you forgotten what joy is like?
- Do you have teenage daughters going through their own hormonal dramas…AGH!
Women’s hormones change moment to moment.
Someone just has to walk into the room and our hormones change. We are changeable adaptable creatures and when we can’t it is not pretty for anyone! This is one of the reasons I am not so interested in blood tests. We would need a year’s worth of data to get a better picture of what is going on. Plus hormones in the blood stream don’t necessarily get used. Chemical messages can be blocked by all sorts of stresses – physically, biochemically, mentally, energetically and emotionally.
Male hormones are much more static.
Men are really easy to work with, once their wife has pushed them in the door! Generally speaking, of course.
So now let me tell you the story of your endocrine glands…
The hypothalamus
Using a corporate analogy your hypothalamus, the boss, determines the direction of the company (your life) and who gets what resources for what project. This information is taken down by the secretary, the pituitary gland, and she passes on the messages.
The pituitary gland
Like all truly gifted secretaries she intricately knows the workings of the company and all its players. She knows who is talking to who and who is squabbling and underperforming. Truly overworked, she needs a holiday in the sun with lots of magnesium cocktails. So if you are not feeling the joy your pituitary is probably exhausted.
The pineal gland
The pineal gland is the time keeper and keeps monitoring the environment around you (S.A.D., constantly running late etc).
The thyroid gland
The thyroid gland is the doing it NOW, staying in the moment human resource manager determining our metabolic rate with very strong influences over the symptoms of anxiety and depression. This is where clients pull their hair out in great clumps, sob and say “But my doctor says my thyroid levels are normal.” One of the issues here is that the ‘norms’ for blood tests vary from clinic to clinic, country to country. As they should! You see there is an individual set-point of the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis that is determined by genetic and environmental factors (1.) We are all truly unique. Your genetics combine with your life experiences and this makes even identical twins unique. I know because I have identical twin daughters. Proud Mummy moment.
Now what REALLY needs to be taken into account is the seesaw balancing act that the thyroid plays with the adrenals. Deal with the stress of the past (adrenals) clashing with the present (thyroid) and the future (hypothalamus) and your thyroid gets to be back in balance. Throw in a happy pituitary and good things will soon be happening.
The parathyroids
The parathyroids are the engineers dealing with the quality of your mineral building construction for hair, nails, teeth and bones.
The heart
The heart, yes it too has hormones, is the mediator of the work place. Hormonally your heart balances the gut and the head. When head, heart and gut are all working together those wonderful synchronicities show up more and more in your life.
The thymus gland
Your first aid team, the thymus gland, looks after your immune system. Unfortunately many people are walking around with this gland shrunk down to next to nothing or even turned off all together. Stress, pollution, electromagnetics, colourings and preservatives are just a few of the things that can knock this team out. Fortunately exercise and sex can turn it back on! Oops did I just say that?
The liver
The liver, whilst not truly an endocrine gland, certainly acts like one as it cleans up and recycles hormones into their amino acid component parts for recycling. Sometimes the liver is simply too busy with the toxins we eat, drink, slather on our skin or breathe in. Compound that with all those emotions that we swallow and we are now creating trouble. Traditional Chinese medical practitioners call the liver the editor. Swallowed emotions get “edited” ; anger stays with the liver, grief gets redirected to the lungs and resentment heads off to your gall bladder. Now don’t go getting gall bladders removed. Deal with your resentment and electromagnetic issues first! That is a story for another day…
So with all this going on the liver simply squirts those hormones back into the blood stream as they are. Havoc results as a little bit of hormone goes a long way, especially when the timing is off!
The adrenals
Of course the adrenals, your security team, can also create hormonal chaos. Our modern society has our sympathetic nervous system turned on busier than ever. Stress doesn’t get burnt off as it is politically incorrect to yell, stomp and run away from big or small stressors. Adrenalin then stays in our body creating problems. The stress from the past creates upsets in the present.
The mind does not differentiate between real or imagined stress and the modern day T-Rex can be a tax audit or divorce! This stress then limits cerebral thinking function. We fall into those reptilian back brain patterns, mirroring what it did in the past to simply survive in a seemingly similar situation. This is where the past keeps replaying in true Ground Hog Day style. A four year old’s reaction is possibly not going to work best as a 50 year old. Not kidding.
Defence is the adrenal glands domain. If and when we feel threatened adrenals come on fast and blood simply leaves our higher order cognitive functions. A little section of the left brain is left to get us out of there. Fast.
Reverse adrenal syndrome is being stuck in the past. The hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis has been flipped because survival trumps everything. Now the adrenals are running the show. We start living from patterns and turn into our Mum. AGH!
With all that adrenalin surging in our systems the secretary wants that holiday, the thyroid is sweating, the pancreas is being bullied as adrenalin is demanding sugar and dragging it out of the cells (creating greater and greater demands on insulin) and the boss tucks the problem in a shoe box at the back of the filing cabinet because it’s hands are tied. After all why expend any more time on this issue that is not resolving? The body is after all an energy conserving machine and if the adrenals won’t back off after the 600 thousandth memo let it go. Forget about it. Pretend there is no problem. This is when neurological disconnect kicks in.
The adrenals then demand to be fed more sugar because they are exhausted. In fact probably 10 times more exhausted than you realise as the adrenals are artificially propped up with alcohol, cigarettes, lollies and perhaps sex or bungy jumping. You are wearing your self out.
All of this stress and sugar cravings invites in parasites and overgrowths of candida to compound your problems. These little internal critters set up their own biochemistry labs and they are SMART. They adapt, go into hiding and feed off of each other to keep coming back time and time again. Killing them off can even create a formaldehyde overdose!
The ovaries
Now for the ovaries… A longer story in the making. Painful periods, endometriosis, PCOS, infertility and menopausal symptoms are simply NOT normal and nor do they need to continue (or be drug suppressed). Dr Igor Trabrizian, (2.) Integrative Medicine Practitioner, tells a fabulously depressing, all too prevalent story about a girl who grew up craving chicken and chocolate. Having painful periods her doctor put her on The Pill at 13 years of age. Time passes, oral contraception has depleted zinc and now, being low in progesterone, she has trouble conceiving with a few miscarriages following. Copper accumulates along with post partum depression and endometriosis so back on the pill she goes. With weight gain, skin changes, depression, anxiety and exhaustion anti depressants and thyroid replacements are brought in. Finally she goes off the pill and heavy, painful periods follow.
What The Pill just masked the problem and didn’t fix it! Well who would have thought?
Perhaps also the COMT gene (warrior or worrier gene depending on its expression) could have been looked at, along with that MTHFR gene…
Next a hysterectomy for the fibroids. She is put on oestrogen only HRT until oestrogen receptive breast cancer is discovered. Chemo, then tamoxifen and five years later more cancer with secondaries spreading to the liver. Oops. Sorry, nothing more we can do. That whole story was unnecessary.
Another, Happier Hormone Story…
This is a better story of one of my clients who had reached a truly desperate state. She had chosen her suicide date. This wife and Mum of two had been to all the experts and I was her last one. After a month of working together she told me all this in a letter. The difference was that now she felt “calmer, relaxed, happier and pain free even with the same children, husband and financial situation”.
We used no drugs or special eating plans.
Neurotraining, using gentle muscle testing, identified what SHE needed to get better, naturally. She got so well that she went off her medications (in consultation with her doctors) and remains drug free even now many years later.
So for a calmer, happier, joyful, more energised you consider coming in for your personalised hormone assessment and get those endocrine glands working together efficiently as a team again. Allow your hormones to shine brightly and support you at every stage of your life’s journey. You and your family will thank you.
Trudi Hemetsberger B.Ed., Dip. NT., Dip Kin.
1. Andersen S , Pedersen KM , Bruun NH , Laurberg P. Narrow individual variations in serum T(4) and T(3) in normal subjects: a clue to the understanding of subclinical thyroid disease. J Clin Endocrinol Metab . 2002;87:1068–1072. Google ScholarCrossrefPubMed
2. Dr Igor Trabrizian, “Nutrition – The Good, the Bad and the Politics”
3. Andrew Verity, College of Neurotraining