Endometriosis - the why, what and how of feminine health
March is Endometriosis Awareness Month so we thought we would take the opportunity to create awareness around endometriosis. So, I'm going to explain what endo is, what the symptoms are and how it gets diagnosed.
Endometriosis is when the endometrial lining that lines our uterus is actually growing outside of the uterus - usually in the ovaries, fallopian tubes or in other tissues of the pelvis.
What happens when we have endometriosis is there's quite a few symptoms that come with that for most people. A lot of those symptoms are pain related. It can be pelvic pain; lower back pain; painful periods; heavy periods; painful ovulation and there can be lots of pain around the abdomen pelvic area at different times of the cycle with endometriosis. The pain is usually cyclical as well, so you'll notice that it's worse at certain parts of the cycle.
Keep a diary – track your period
When it comes to diagnosing endometriosis, this can get a bit tricky. So, if you are experiencing more pain than you think is normal around your period (normal being very tolerable) and even having to take pain medication, then chances are your hormones are out of balance. Not necessarily endometriosis, but something's not right for there to be a level of pain that's not tolerable. Really, periods should be fairly pain free when hormones are in balance.
So, when it comes to diagnosing it is a matter of exploring the pain and the best thing to do is start taking writing a diary to track your period to know when in the cycle there is pain. This way, when you go to your GP, you have some information on hand that can be used to explore other possible causes for the pain. This exploration will probably be via pelvic ultrasound, possibly an internal ultrasound as well, and cervical screening. If you haven't had one of those in the past five years then you will get one of those as well. Just to start ruling out any other possible causes for the pain.
Now, if the pain is quite bad, then you would then take that next step in getting diagnosed, which is a laparoscopy. This is an investigative surgical procedure to see what is going on in there. That's when they can see that the endometrial lining is growing outside the uterus.
This is what makes endometriosis challenging to diagnose because the procedure to definitively diagnose endometriosis is quite invasive. That's the kind of path GPs may go down when patients are experiencing quite a lot of pain.
We focus is on getting to the root cause of endometriosis
We regularly work with endometriosis in our clinic and what we focus on is getting to the root cause. We look at the health of the gut; balancing the microbiome so we don't have that toxicity being created by the gut; and then really looking at getting the liver clearing things out properly. Clearing those toxins out and detoxifying hormones properly as that has a big factor at play when it comes to endometriosis.
This is a video series!
In the video series we look at more specifically, what we do in the clinic to start relieving the symptoms of endometriosis.
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