Hormone Imbalance in your Thirties – Wendy’s Story
Hormone Imbalance in your Thirties – Wendy’s Story
Do you experience severe fatigue, infertility, depression, brain fog, irritability or muscle aches and pains? Has your doctor told you that you will have to live with it? Hormonal imbalance is commonly misdiagnosed and mistreated by mainstream medicine. There is a natural solution. Watch Wendy’s amazing story!
Video Transcription:
Deborah: Welcome back. Our next guest was at the end of her rope. She was tired all the time, had muscle aches and was in a fog. To how many of you does that sound familiar? After years of doctors visits, she still didn’t feel any better until now. Please welcome Wendy Walsh and the man who got to the bottom of her health issues, Dr. Steven Hotze, with the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. He’s also the author of the book Hormones, Health, and Happiness.
By the time you were in your mid-30s, you were feeling horrible. When you think about your mid-30s, you’re still vital and you shouldn’t feel horrible at all. What were the symptoms?
Wendy: In my mid-30s, I was irritable all the time. I was moody. I was depressed and I went to the doctors and they told me that that was all a part of getting older, in my mid-30s.
Deborah: Throw in the towel in your mid-30s, and then you were offered no other answers, or were they offering to treat the symptoms?
Wendy: No other answers. They said next year to come in for my checkup and I said, “I’m still not feeling well,” and they just said that was normal. There was nothing they could do for me. Finally I asked the doctor, I said, “Well, can you please run some tests just to make sure?” I said, “Something’s not right. I don’t feel well at all,” so he ran some tests and sure enough, my hormones were not balanced, so he put me on counterfeit hormones, which for a while helped and I didn’t realize that it’s kind of like a band-aid for the symptoms. It doesn’t really replenish any of the hormones that my body was needing, so for a few years I did okay, then I’d start saying, “I still don’t feel well,” so he’d put me on different ones.
Deborah: When you say you didn’t feel well, how bad did it get?
Wendy: It got so bad that when I went to Dr. Hotze’s center about two and half years ago, I was so tired I could barely go to work. I would have to take a nap every day at lunchtime just to make it through the rest of the day. I’d go home at night and fall into bed with my clothes on. I’d sleep the whole weekend, just to save enough energy to make it through next work week. That’s how bad I’d gotten. I was depressed.
Deborah: You had the test that said, “Yeah, you got a hormone problem,” but it doesn’t stop there. You got to know how to read that test and Dr. Hotze, you are really big on what are you replacing the hormones with.
Dr. Hotze: Wendy had classical symptoms that many women have in mid-life, is their hormones become imbalanced with their female sex hormones, which adversely effects their thyroid hormone, and their ability to utilize thyroid.
Deborah: The domino effect?
Dr. Hotze: Right and so all that affects your metabolism, so the metabolism goes down. In other words, you don’t produce enough energy, which she wasn’t, so she felt tired, fatigued, chronic fatigue, and had to sleep all the time. Whenever she could get a chance, trying to replenish her energy.
Deborah: Muscle aches?
Wendy: Oh yeah, muscle aches, too.
Dr. Hotze: Felt depressed and then the Dr. put her on antidepressant. “Honey, your problems not, you just need some antidepressants.”
Wendy: It was all in my head.
Dr. Hotze: “It’s all in your head.” When she came in, of course, it was very common presentation. She had the fatigue, inability to focus and think clearly, difficulty sleeping, insomnia, even though she was tired all the time, the joint and muscle aches and pains, the depressed moods, and she was on the antidepressants. She wasn’t any better, so we said, “Why don’t we just do this? Why don’t we replenish what your body is lacking. You’ve gone through the change early.” She went through the change 10 years early and put her on the counterfeit, the horse estrogens and all that, so what we did is we took her off all that, weaned her off the antidepressants and put her on desiccated thyroid, natural thyroid hormone replacement. Put her on bio-identical female hormones, progesterone
Wendy: Her body’s not recognizing that it’s not producing it, itself. It’s not looking at it as a, “I’ll use some of it if I have to, but it is counterfeit.”
Dr. Hotze: Right, a counterfeit hormone is a drug that mimics hormones that the drug companies make to mimic the hormones, rather than the Dr. prescribing the natural bio-identical hormone. They can’t patent those. We use that. That’s what I recommend. Why would we not use the same thing our body used to make? We replenish that. We fill up the tank. The hormone tank has gone empty. We fill it back up and put it at optimal levels and then the proof’s in the pudding. What happens? That was 2 and a half years ago. What happened?
Wendy: It was night and day. They say “you got your life back.” I did get my life back, plus my husband got his wife back!
Deborah: One thing you did miss out on … This is something that just needs to be looked at carefully. You tried to get pregnant in your 20s, couldn’t get pregnant, did all kinds of tests, fertility drugs, all that type of stuff.
Dr. Hotze: Didn’t you have some miscarriages?
Wendy: Yes, I did. I had trouble conceiving and we had all the testing done. It wasn’t my husband’s problem, which he was very happy about, so it was all me. For years, tried to conceive. I did actually conceive 3 times. 2 ended in miscarriages and 1 was an early termination.
Deborah: Knowing what we know now, it was probably-
Dr. Hotze: Low thyroid and imbalance of the female hormones, but low thy-, that’s a classical finding in hypothyroid patients. Unfortunately, most physicians don’t think about thyroid problems, and if they do, they use a blood test only to make the diagnosis and the blood test is so broad, so wide, so large, that 95% of the people fall within the range, so there’s literally millions of people, I’ve figured 70 million people walking around America today that are hypothyroid …
Deborah: I was one of them.
Dr. Hotze: … and they’re not being treated with thyroid medication and I’m talking about desiccated thyroid as opposed to the synthetic.
Deborah: We have a couple seconds left, but something that we touched on when you said muscle aches, whole bit, which is reminiscent of fibromyalgia, which you say is also caused by…
Dr. Hotze: Fibromyalgia’s caused by hypothyroidism. It’s chronic muscle aches and pains associated with fatigue, classical features of hypothyroidism. Any person that’s been diagnosed with fibromyalgia ought to be given a clinical trial of desiccated natural thyroid.
Deborah: As opposed to medicating the pain.
Dr. Hotze: Absolutely. Instead of putting a band-aid on it, why don’t we go ahead and treat the underlying cause?
Deborah: Dr. Hotze, thank you very much. Congratulations on getting your life back.
Wendy: Thank you, Deborah.
