Have you gone to your doctor to ask them to measure your hormone levels, only to be told No?

This is something that happens a lot, and it can be so confusing and frustrating because you may be hearing all about the different symptoms of perimenopause and menopause and how hormone changes make women feel. And you may have been told, go get your hormone levels tested so that you can know what’s going on.

So why is your doctor saying no? Well, sometimes women are told you’re too young to have a hormone problem.

Sometimes they’re told, this is just natural. Everybody goes through it and you know, you just need to ride out the symptoms. There’s nothing to be done about it.

Sometimes they’re told hormone levels change, and so there’s no point in us measuring your level because it’s changing all the time.

The reality is that in medical school, doctors really aren’t trained at how to deal with these kinds of hormone changes. We’re really not trained to measure hormones like this. We’re trained to look for diseases of hormones like tumors, but not for how to deal with these changes that women go through in midlife.

Doctors get very little education on menopause, and what we are trained to do is if you show up having symptoms, we write you a prescription and see you back again next year. And we do know that there’s so much more that we can offer women. See, in the past, we were giving women these synthetic hormones that there’s no blood test for. So once we give you the hormones, we can’t do a blood test to see if it’s the right dose.

So we just didn’t measure hormones at all. Now we can use bioidentical hormones, which is the natural form of hormones, and we can do tests to see what your levels are, make sure that we’ve got them about right, and we can adjust things and fine tune things so that you can feel like yourself again.

But it’s not how doctors were trained to do it. So if your doctor is not willing or able to measure your hormones, whether it’s because they don’t feel confident or comfortable in interpreting the results or in treating you based on what the results say, maybe they’re afraid that your insurance won’t cover it and they’ll get into trouble for ordering it.

Whatever the reason is, it may be that you just need to find another provider who specializes in bioidentical hormones who can help you get back to feeling like yourself again, because there’s no need to put up with feeling bloated or frazzled or any of the other symptoms that go along with menopause.

You deserve to love the way you feel!