Why We Are Unique
Hormone Wellness was created to fix five key issues that we kept repeatedly seeing women having to deal with
Women are experiencing challenging perimenopause symptoms due to:
- the increased levels of stress
- toxic chemicals
- exposure to hormones from the pill
- environmental pollution in the modern lifestyle,
- a diet that is often full of processed food, high in carbohydrates and low in proteins and good fats
- a negative diet culture that has contributed to confusion and disordered eating.
- a history of symptoms such as IBS and autoimmune conditions
The current medical guidelines for how doctors work with menopause means that women who are perimenopausal are often overlooked when it comes to effective treatment options
Symptoms are commonly misdiagnosed and mismedicated, with women often being put on antidepressants and beta blockers instead of being offered the right support and hormone replacement.
As a standard metric, women aged 37 and over are beginning the perimenopause transition but this doesn't fit into the medical perception that menopause doesn't start until late 40s - early 50s.
The guidelines promote that doctors should offer women synthetic progesterone instead of body identical progesterone.
The toxic effects of synthetic progesterone are highly documented. The synthetic progesterone has some serious side effects associated with it and often doesn’t alleviate the symptoms of menopause leaving women feeling confused and unwell.
There is a huge blind spot around the benefit and necessity of progesterone in a women’s health. This is a topic we talk about in great depth in our book, due to be published with Jessica Kingsley Publishing in 2024.
GPs are not trained in menopause as a standard part of their medical training which means that they often have no idea how to support the women in front of them.
Private menopause doctors work in the same way as the GP and unless they state they are functional medical practitioners who offer a variety of options including body identical hormones, will be offering the same HRT options as the GP.
One of the most well-known private menopause clinics, is the offering by Dr Louise Newson.
Dr Newson is currently in the spotlight and being investigated by the GMC for recommending women take high doses of oestrogen. We have seen first-hand the damage that this approach causes and having worked with dozens of women who have been to Dr Newson’s clinic and ended up feeling worse.
How do we work differently
We assess your health history to ensure that all aspects of your wellbeing are optimised. We help you be in the best position to choose the approach to your menopause that feels right for you, be that with natural supplementation and diet, or with HRT. If your gut and liver are under duress, or you are under high levels of stress, it is unlikely that HRT will be a silver bullet.
Our highly trained practitioners work with the Triangle of Hormonal Health and the Stages of Wellness. This whole health approach gives you the tools and pathway to feeling the best you can feel.
What we offer:
The current medical guideline for menopause is called “The 2023 Practitioner’s Toolkit for Managing Menopause”, originally developed in 2014, this approach is endorsed by The British Menopause Society.
This is because it should be simple to diagnose a woman of this age with menopause if she has had no bleed for 12 months and offer HRT. However, symptoms and issues associated with peri menopause are commonly happening many years before periods become irregular or stop altogether, and as women are getting to 45, we are commonly in the most unstable part of our menopause, where we have too much of some hormones and not enough of others. By not testing what is happening with a woman’s hormones, doctors are blindly offering her a full dose of HRT which she may not need or be able to tolerate, which often makes her feel much, much worse. This guideline in our view is stopping millions of women from getting the support they need and deserve.
This test will be a single observation of the hormones FSH and oestrogen but NOT progesterone or testosterone. As we discuss in many blogs and videos, progesterone is the most important hormone to test in the early stages of perimenopause. This guideline leaves women feeling lost and helpless when commonly their test results come back as ‘normal’ when they feel anything but.
This testing does not test for progesterone so many women can go for years and years without a diagnosis.
This is a major oversight as progesterone is hugely implicated in a woman’s mood, (and her ability to sleep) and most functional doctors do offer body identical progesterone to women who have had a hysterectomy.
We refute the concept that synthetic progestin is essential for women when natural progesterone is available and is stated to have fewer side effects.
Breast cancer is a contraindication to the use of HRT
This is due to the lack of research available but, in our view bearing in mind how many women cannot tolerate the standard HRT route, it seems remiss to continue to avoid doing the research.
Whilst it is acknowledged it may improve sexual desire there is no evidence. As many reports show, testosterone does a lot more than increase our libido and so again we say, go and do the research.
This highly important point is in the small print and not in the recommendations. This leads us to question why synthetic progesterone is therefore being promoted.
This again is a hugely overlooked recommendation and is in absolute contrast to the trend for offering women more and more oestrogen without any exploration as to why their HRT isn’t working for them.