Functional Endocrinology

Hormones play a very important role in our daily lives, they affect our overall health and vitality and the way our bodies age.  As we age, hormones will decline for both men and women, although that does not mean we have to resign ourselves to symptoms associated with declining hormones such as fatigue, depression, tissue laxity, muscle loss, sleep disruption, and more.  Functional endocrinology aims to optimize a patient’s life experience by supporting optimal production of all hormones including thyroid, cortisol, testosterone, progesterone, estrogens, and DHEA.  If supporting innate production of these hormones is not sufficient, we will often prescribe low doses of hormones to target a balance in the body where the patient feels great and labs support responsible doses.

Additionally, as functional endocrinology practitioners, we will not settle for the patient to simply be in the normal range but instead will shoot for OPTIMAL ranges.  These small tweaks in doses can have a dramatic effect on how a person feels.  The most common example of this is seen with thyroid hormone prescriptions.  Often a patient will be told they have normal thyroid labs but they present with many symptoms consistent with hypothyroidism and often a small change in their prescription moves them into the optimal range and they feel much better.  This is an approach not often used by conventional endocrinologists.  Optimizing thyroid prescriptions is a modality we take great pride in and have extensive experience using a variety of tools to achieve success.  These prescriptions are highly individualized, what works for one patient may not for the next.  As functional medicine practitioners, we have a variety of tools to use that very often results in superior outcomes.