I didn’t plan to specialize in hormones. I trained as a naturopathic doctor with a focus on mental health, drawn to questions of mood, anxiety, resilience, and meaning. And hormonal health found me anyway, as a language that explained everything I was already seeing.
It feels fitting that a naturopathic doctor would focus on hormones because hormones don’t belong to one organ or one diagnosis. They belong to systems that connect everything in us to everything else, like a tree with many branches and extensive root networks. They connect us to nature. They are shaped by food, sleep, stress, safety, relationships, and time. They respond to the world we live in, cycle with the sun, moon, and seasons, and undulate through the decades of our lives, affecting how we feel, think, crave, and cope.
Naturopathic medicine views the body as an interconnected ecosystem, and hormones serve as its communicators, keeping our parts in conversation. They respond to and influence our emotions, habits, cravings, fertility, and energy levels.
Hormones ebb and flow across the day, the month, the year, and the lifespan in predictable rhythmic waves. When those waves shift out of tempo, symptoms emerge: disrupted sleep or nighttime waking; anxiety, low mood, or increased emotional reactivity; fatigue or reduced stress tolerance; changes in body weight or composition, especially around the abdomen; and menstrual changes, such as heavier, more painful, or irregular cycles. This is when most of us seek help from the medical system.
The medical model is built on a reductionistic framework that assumes one symptom means one problem, and that the solution is to remove, replace, or suppress the malfunctioning part. Diabetics need insulin, depressed individuals need serotonin, and pain needs to be suppressed through analgesics or anti-inflammatories: one problem, one malfunction, and a neat one-drug solution.
Sometimes these interventions are coherent, necessary, or life-saving. And sometimes they oversimplify, making a more dynamic, rhythmic, and circular conversation linear. In the worst case, they override physiology and obfuscate the body’s attempts to find balance, sometimes worsening the underlying condition and causing unwanted side effects.
Hormonal conditions spill out of the clean lanes of the reductionist medical model. I often have patients come in or write to me with various concerns: anxiety, fatigue, weight gain, sleep issues, heavy periods, changes to skin, hair and nails. “I have so many things wrong with me,” many will exclaim, or “I know this sounds crazy, but I sometimes notice—” They often have a long history of being dismissed or medically gaslit by a system that can’t hold or make sense of their experiences. But these rather mysterious and chaotic symptoms often fit into a coherent, predictable pattern of imbalance once we understand how hormones work.
Hormones don’t behave like broken parts in a machine that can be tightened, tweaked, plucked, and patched up. Hormones are nodes in a network. The word hormone comes from the Greek hormao, meaning “to excite” or “to set in motion.” They are signalling molecules released from endocrine glands such as the ovaries, thyroid, adrenals, and pancreas that travel through the bloodstream to convey information to every body cell about metabolism, ovulation, energy, mood, cravings, and sleep.
These messages respond to and adjust to the body’s internal and external environments. They respond to physiology, stress, safety, meaning, nutrient levels, sunlight, time of day, and food. Oftentimes, they are trying to find balance in a system where communication is interrupted or distorted.
When one thread in this communication web is yanked, such as chronic stress, disrupted sleep, under-fueling, or inflammation, other parts shift to compensate in an effort to find balance. Symptoms often indicate that the system is not broken, but adapting.
Throughout my years of clinical practice, I have spent a lot of time teaching my patients about their hormones. I believe when we know better, we can help ourselves feel better. After all, the word doctor comes from the Latin word docere, which means “to teach.” One of the naturopathic principles is the tenet “doctor as teacher.” I firmly believe that healthcare providers have a duty to care for our patients through education, support, and empowerment. Informed consent is essential in medicine, and you cannot give it without the right information.
I wish we knew more about our hormones.
I’ve had several patients on oral contraceptives (“The Pill”) claim that their periods are regular, coming every twenty-eight days like clockwork. They were offered the pill to “regulate” their cycles, and none of them were taught that the pill doesn’t produce a menstrual period, regular or not, but a well-timed withdrawal bleed.
Regular cycles, more than being convenient, are important medically because they more often than not indicate regular ovulation. Ovulation is necessary for producing progesterone, a hormone that gets little attention compared to estrogen but that is essential for sleep, bone health, metabolism, skin health, and mood. Women with PCOS, or endometriosis, or perimenopause, or hypothalamic amenorrhea are not menstruating regularly because they are not ovulating regularly. Sometimes they are put on the pill to “regulate their cycles,” but the pill does not support ovulation; it suppresses it in order to prevent conception.
Oral contraceptives aren’t wrong; they are a miraculous technology that has revolutionized society, women’s rights, and women’s health. Many of my patients, upon learning that the pill isn’t actually regulating their cycles, choose it anyway. And that’s absolutely fine. However, we have a right to understand what interventions are doing in our bodies: what they suppress, what they add, and what effects to expect. We have the right to informed choice, not to be told that a medicine is doing one thing, like regulating cycles, when it is actually doing something entirely different: suppressing ovulation and creating a bleed at regular intervals once the hormonal pills in the pill pack are paused.
Many of my patients in their 40s are unaware that perimenopause can start in their late 30s, and that early symptoms include changes to mood, menstrual cycles, and sleep well before the first hot flash. In our youth, we were given books about our periods and taught how to use condoms. I wish, in our late 30s, someone would interrupt our work and caregiving responsibilities to hand us a manual on perimenopause and what to expect in our upcoming decade of hormonal change.
If we understood our hormones, we might be able to anticipate, recognize, and respond to these changes, rather than seeing them as concerning personality change, meeting them with fear, or consulting endless practitioners who might also be clueless about perimenopause. There are only 7,000 PubMed studies on perimenopause. In contrast, there are over 1.2 million studies related to pregnancy. Half of humanity is women, and every woman who lives long enough will go through perimenopause, yet this remains a niche area of research.
I wish my patients in their 40s could discern what information is useful and what is not when it comes to Google searches, long lists of supplements, or advice from influencers.
Not everyone may or should choose hormone replacement therapy, but I wish more of my patients were informed of its risks and benefits, how it works, and what each hormone does in the body, choosing based on values, symptoms, and health goals rather than fear.
Much of the hormone replacement conversation around perimenopause and menopause focused on estrogen replacement. Progesterone, however, is anti-inflammatory, acts on nearly every cell in the body, and declines once ovulation becomes irregular or absent, sometimes as early as age forty. Perimenopause has recognizable phases, and many of them begin with low or unstable progesterone.
I was once on a bus reading a book about hormones, and the woman beside me, glancing at the title, remarked, “Hormones, I’ve heard about those. They say they’re important.”
Hormones aren’t just important; they’re the web that keeps everything together, creating the very experience we were sharing, being on the bus, thinking about hormones, conversing with one another. This woman was somewhere in her 50s, and I supposed that she had no idea that vasomotor symptoms like hot flashes, and future bone, cardiovascular, and metabolic health are all deeply tied to hormonal levels and can all be affected by the hormonal change of menopause.
I’m not sure what her perimenopausal journey looked like, but an in-depth conversation about hormone therapy with her doctor might have improved her quality of life and health trajectory as she ages.
I’ve seen a myriad of patients told that their thyroid labs are normal, without context. Patients have come into my practice on dozens of supplements, spending hundreds on specialized hormone testing without understanding what they offer (or don’t) or how to interpret the results.
Many symptoms are dismissed by the medical establishment as “stress” or “aging.” Stress is an important hormonal input, as the stress response itself is hormonally driven, but stress is not one thing. It has phases, shapes, durations, and distinct manifestations. Stress hormones interact with and are impacted by nervous system capacity and resilience. These hormones shift ovarian, thyroid, and metabolic hormones in various ways.
Many of us (an estimated 88%) sit somewhere on the insulin-resistance spectrum, often without our awareness. This can result in abdominal weight gain despite no meaningful change in diet or exercise. It can also contribute to symptoms like anxiety, low mood, pain, fatigue, and low energy. Insulin resistance, or even diabetes, is not simply “a bad diet,” but a distinct hormonal pattern that is influenced by menstrual hormones like estrogen and progesterone, stress hormones, and circadian rhythms.
Many people with insulin resistance aren’t even aware they have it, instead reassured that their glucose levels are normal because we aren’t taught how insulin works or how to advocate for insulin testing.
This gap in hormonal research and healthcare leaves us open to influencers and social media marketers swooping in. We are inundated with conflicting health advice from online professionals and various health “experts” who all swear they have special knowledge and a unique solution. We’re sold complicated plans and protocols, and oversold supplements, in the hope that they will relieve our suffering. But these solutions are imposed without an understanding of what is causing symptoms. Understanding is everything because it helps you discern and choose wisely.
The most expensive, fancy supplements are often not the most indicated or effective for your particular pattern or condition. The most effective plans are often those chosen with context, and the right ingredients, forms, doses, and timing in mind, where the intervention is matched to the specific presenting pattern.
To understand hormones, our bodies, health, and nature, we must become systems thinkers of the Biopsychosocial Model. Systems thinking asks not what is broken, but how our parts interact. Instead of isolating a single symptom or lab value and treating it as a standalone problem, it examines how different systems in the body influence one another.
In hormones, this means understanding the ongoing conversation between the adrenal, ovarian, thyroid, and metabolic systems. These systems are connected and constantly communicating with our biochemistry, organ health, and external environment. A change in place, such as constipation or a lack of light exposure, ripples throughout the human body.
Systems thinking also requires a sense of time. Hormones don’t just fluctuate day to day; they shift across weeks, months, years, and lifetimes. Puberty, contraceptive use and disuse, peak fertile years, perimenopause, and menopause are transitions that reorganize the system, alter physiology and how we experience energy, mood, motivation, appetite, and even self-trust.
When hormones are viewed through a systems lens, symptoms stop feeling random and become information. We can start tracing the threads back to identify where the system might be under strain, what it is adapting to, and what support it is asking for.
This way of understanding hormones also requires interoception: the ability to sense and interpret what is happening inside the body. Interoception is how we perceive internal signals, such as hunger, fatigue, tension, warmth, restlessness, and calm, before they become symptoms or diagnoses.
Interoception is more than a “gut sense.” It is embodied awareness paired with understanding. Without context, bodily signals can feel confusing or alarming, but with context, they become useful data that we can learn to decipher and respond to. We can observe a gradual shift in menstruation or mood, including pain, sensations, energy levels, and swelling. We can learn to interpret shifts in stress exposure, blood sugar, inflammatory load, recovery, and felt sense of safety.
For most of human history, this kind of awareness was reflected in how we lived. Bodies were understood in relation to light and dark, hunger and satiety, and the seasons of activity and rest. Menstrual cycles were observed alongside lunar cycles. Energy rose and fell with daylight. Fertility, recovery, grief, and productivity were shaped by seasons, weather, and community demands. This wasn’t mystical knowledge so much as practical attunement, an understanding that bodies change in response to time, environment, and meaning.
Much of that literacy has been lost as modern life flattened time and disconnected us from natural cues. Regaining it requires paying closer attention. Through tracking, reflection, and education, we can rebuild a relationship with our bodies that was once cultural and natural knowledge.
Tracking can help build this awareness. When we track sleep, energy, mood, appetite, and cycles, and learn the signs of ovulation, we can shift our relationship with our bodies, riding the waves of hormonal rhythms with ease rather than being thrashed around by them. This is how we build agency.
Health is not the absence of disease or even the feeling of being well all the time. I believe health is an empowered state of connection with our bodies, where we become fully engaged in their care, as we are with a child or a pet. What am I feeling right now? What does my body need?
I also believe that naturopathic medicine is not just about the interventions: whether it be supplements, nutrition, acupuncture, or even medication like hormone therapy. There are many responses that might be appropriate for an individual depending on their context, values and health goals. The difference is collaboration and choice. No matter how gentle or effective the intervention, the best one is that chosen with information and consent.
Too often, we are handed a prescription without being told what it does, what it changes, what information it obscures, or what alternatives exist. That lack of context erodes trust not only in the medical system but also in one’s own body. The implied message is that the body is something to fear, manage, control, and override.
In other instances, we are actively taught to ignore our bodies, told the message is “all in our heads,” that labs are normal, and we are fine. This attitude can delay a diagnosis of endometriosis by as much as 10 years. During that time, people are often told their pain is normal, their symptoms are stress-related, or that they should simply manage. Interventions may be offered, but without curiosity about the underlying pattern that can be associated with infertility, anxiety, and bowel changes, along with painful periods.
Hormone therapy is another important topic of nuance. Women in midlife are prescribed antidepressants more often than hormone therapy, when the “root cause” is a shift in hormones, not brain chemistry. We need to have more conversations about hormone replacement grounded in evidence rather than fear.
Much of the public conversation about hormone therapy is shaped by outdated interpretations of research, incomplete explanations of risk, or oversimplified narratives that swing between panic and promises of anti-aging.
Bioidentical hormones, for example, are often discussed as if they are either a miracle or a marketing gimmick. In reality, the term simply refers to hormones that are structurally identical to those produced by the human body, such as estradiol or micronized progesterone. These hormones have been studied extensively. Their effects, benefits, and risks depend on dose, timing, route of administration, and the individual context of the person taking them. None of this can be reduced to a single headline or blanket recommendation.
Dose matters. Timing matters. Whether hormones are taken orally, transdermally, or vaginally matters. Age, symptom profile, metabolic health, inflammatory status, and cardiovascular risk all matter. Research reflects this complexity, but that nuance is rarely translated into patient-facing conversations. As a result, many people are either frightened away from therapies that could help them or pushed toward them without sufficient understanding.
Agency in hormonal healthcare does not require rejecting medical care, but we should be informed enough to participate in decisions. We should understand what therapies are intended to do, what trade-offs they involve, how success will be evaluated over time, and what testing can show. It means knowing when a symptom is expected, when it signals the need for adjustment, and when further investigation is warranted.
The patients who tend to have the best outcomes with hormonal health interventions are supported in understanding their bodies as dynamic systems. They are given time, information, and follow-up. They are allowed to ask questions. They are not rushed into decisions, nor are they left to navigate complex choices alone.
Understanding our hormones is not about memorizing biochemical pathways, hunting for a single root cause, taking on extensive lifestyle changes or expensive, heavily marketed supplement regimes, nor is it about approaching the body as something that needs to be fixed.
Instead, learning about hormones is about orientation and learning where you are in a larger pattern and how the system is shifting over time. You learn how to participate in decisions rather than feel subjected to them. You know what questions to ask, what information matters, and what changes are expected versus concerning.
Most importantly, it allows you to interpret change without panic. Hormonal systems adapt and fluctuate. When those fluctuations are understood within context, they can be met with curiosity, adjustment, and care rather than fear, urgency or self-blame.
I wanted to respond to this information gap by creating a course on hormone health. I didn’t want to offer a quick fix, another set of rules, protocols, or promises, but to share the framework I use clinically when people come in confused by their symptoms and unsure how to make sense of what their bodies are doing. I wanted to create a resource that walks you through your hormonal systems so you can feel empowered in your health.
This course replaces late-night Googling. In 10 modules, I teach you how to recognize patterns as they shift; understand hormonal changes across cycles, seasons, and life stages; ask better questions; interpret information without panic; and participate more fully in decisions about care.
I gathered everything I’ve learned from the hundreds of books, research papers, and courses I’ve taken, as well as the thousands of patients I’ve worked with to create a course for women who want to understand hormones without reducing themselves to a diagnosis, a lab value, or a label, and who want a way of relating to their bodies that is informed, grounded, and humane.
Because I wish women knew more about their hormones.
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