I asked a question to Dr. Phillip Warner:

I am post meno 2 1/2 years. I haven't been on any hormone therapy. I have hot flashes quite often. I have acne and facial hair. I had bad anxiety for years but it seems to be letting up with just having episodes instead of being a constant thing (also get the shaking with it.
Driving myself nuts searching the internet so if you could please answer a few questions for me:
-Does this mean whatever hormone that was causing the anxiety is settling down?
-Can you tell me what hormones are causing the hot flashes, acne and facial hair? Is it too much totesterone and if so what do you do about it?
-Should I be taking any hormone therapy being post and will help any of the symptoms I described?

Answer:

I will be happy to answer your questions:

Question 1: The anxiety is not caused by a hormone, the anxiety is caused by lack of progesterone made by the shut down ovaries. In order to completely abolish these emotional symptoms, you need proper doses of bioidentical progesterone prescribed by a doctor and obtained in a compounding pharmacy.
Question 2: The hot flashes are caused by lack of estrogen once again no estrogen coming from your shutdown ovaries.
The acne and facial hair are because there is some residual testosterone but no estrogen to offset this testosterone. The solution once again is to take proper doses of bioidentical estrogen.
Question 3: This is already answered by answers to the previous 2 questions.
Are the tests for estrogen, progesterone and testosterone done by blood tests or saliva tests?




Answer: No blood or saliva tests are necessary. You are not making estrogen, progesterone or testosterone from the ovaries and therefore all tests for these hormones would of course be negative so it is a complete waste of time and money.

Phillip Warner, M.D. (OB-GYN)
Power Surge Medical Consultant

I'm confused if you don't get hormone tests how do they know what and how much to give you? Anyone give me a clue how this works?

Hi surrealife, My take on this is If you are not menstrating then hormone have gone down enough to do that. If you test your hormones or not.... from what I have observed.....Docs usually prescribe the same amount of hormones anyway. And everyone is different in the amount of hormones in your body to make symptoms go away.
I wish it were otherwise! wish it was if we all had say 50 ng/ml of E we felt great but that is not the case.

hope this helps

Surreal,

It is true, testing at this point probably wouldn't really help any, unless they are going to supplement with testosterone...then maybe getting the T levels checked would be worth while. Doctors tend to treat systematically anyways. I didn't have any hormone tests before I started supplementing.

Just going to agree with the other two, you probably don't need tests at this point.