Measure Your Hormones
The first step in your treatment program is to measure your hormones. Symptoms are not a good guide for hormone treatment because too much of a hormone can cause the same symptoms as too little of the hormone, and every symptom can be caused by problems with several different hormones.
Hormones exist in a variety of forms. They can be bound to protein (protein-bound hormones) or they can be free from protein (free-fraction hormones). Hormones often travel through the blood stream in a bound form that is not active, and has very little effect on the body until it is converted into the free form. The most useful lab tests are the ones that measure free-fraction hormones.
Hormones can be measured in the blood, urine and saliva.
· Blood tests measure protein-bound hormones unless special free-fraction tests are performed. Most conventional doctors use this type of hormone test. Bound hormones can be a useful approximation of the free-fraction form, but not always.
· Saliva tests are the best way to measure free-fraction hormones. Saliva testing is newer, and it gives us the most useful and cost-effective information. It is much less expensive to measure free-fraction hormones in the saliva than in the blood. Some hormones can not be measured easily in the saliva yet.
· Urine tests are the best way to measure how the liver is breaking down hormones.
Protein-bound hormones measured in blood do not always parallel free-fraction hormones. For example, a man’s level of protein-bound testosterone goes up with age, but the level of free testosterone drops. It is especially important to measure testosterone in the free form. It costs $30 to measure free testosterone in saliva, and $200 to measure it in blood.
Topical hormones that you take through the skin in a patch or a cream tend to accumulate in fat tissue, and this can cause an overdose of the hormone. Topical hormones circulate primarily in the free-fraction form, so it is especially important to monitor the levels of topically applied hormones (including natural progesterone creme) with salivary hormone tests.
I usually recommend saliva hormone tests that you complete at home and mail directly to the lab. The lab sends the results to me in about two weeks.
