Thank you to my nutrition professor, who first taught me about vitamin B6 (pyridoxine or pyridoxal-5-phosphate) for PMS. It is an effective, reliable treatment for premenstrual mood problems, including PMDD.
Back then (30 years ago), vitamin B6 helped me so much with my own premenstrual symptoms that it was a eureka moment in how I thought about periods. I realized that although premenstrual mood symptoms are common, they’re not normal. And going forward, I had much higher expectations of what a period should be like.
As my patients can tell you, I prescribe magnesium for almost every hormonal condition including PCOS, insulin resistance, PMDD, migraines, and perimenopause.
Our stress response system—the HPA axis—is calibrated for intermittent, severe threats such as lions. Not for the incessant, trivial threats of modern life, such as difficult phone calls. We don’t want our hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis to charge up and release cortisol every time we drive in heavy traffic, but it will do so.
Thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) was supposed to be a simple way to detect thyroid disease. Before its invention in the 1970s, doctors diagnosed thyroid disease by symptoms.