Hello, I have just set up this new category: Clinic Notes, primarily for practitioners. Focused on practical stuff I see that you can use immediately in-clinic to help improve your practice and get more people well. If you’ve ever wanted someone to just get to the ‘clinical pearl’ quickly and save you time, these posts are for you.
The blog automatically subscribes existing readers – which is a pain, so sorry! – but you can unsubscribe from this category and manage what posts you get if you want to. Go to www.wordpress.com/read, click on Purehealth, click on the toggle icon top right and manage subscription and then you can turn on or off any of the blog categories. If you get stuck, just ask me. I was just trying to be tidy with everything all in one place, fool, fool 😉
A lady contacts you and says: ‘I want to measure my hormones before I go on HRT, 3 months and 12 months later.’ You’d think that was simple, wouldn’t you?
But you’d be wrong. When was anything involving hormones simple?!
I thought: ‘Aha, I shall just do a DUTCH or serum test. Oh, or should I do saliva? Ermmmm…’. And a whole hornet’s nest opened up!
In case it helps with your patient work, here’s what I said to her:
If you want your GP to take notice of your results, you will need to use serum as that’s the only type they use. Your GP can do the testing, of course, or I can recommend a serum test eg, this one: https://regeneruslabs-myportal.com/products/sex-hormone-complete-blood-test-female-venous-draw?variant=40337773985858&sca_ref=303654.Xq3FIcsCOI
However, it really does depend on what type of HRT you take – topical, oral, vaginal etc – because you monitor them effectively in different ways – just to make life nice and complicated! Here are some useful resources for you to consider. It is always best to use the same lab and testing method when measuring progress so we need to find which type you are likely to have and test your pre-HRT hormones with the same one we will test on and 3 and 12 months later, if you see what I mean!
I tend to use the DUTCH dried urine test for many hormone test needs nowadays. They have a great chart here that shows you which methods are best for which types of HRT: https://www.dropbox.com/s/n192ir50ori0qyh/DUTCH%20HRT%20Guide.pdf?dl=0
A breakdown of when to use each method from ZRT: https://www.zrtlab.com/sample-types/hormone-testing-for-different-supplementation-types/ and they have a chart here: https://www.zrtlab.com/media/1441/zrt-guide-hormone-testing.pdf
Good podcast on the subject: https://www.drkarafitzgerald.com/2021/07/12/comparing-saliva-urine-and-serum-hormone-testing-choosing-the-best-test-for-each-patient/
Once you have worked out which type you want, you can get hormone tests here: https://regeneruslabs.com/collections/hormones?sca_ref=303654.Xq3FIcsCOI and order at the lab direct.
I’m off for a lie down now…