Hormones are chemicals released by the body that affect the way cells function, and they are the way one part of your body sends messages to another to stimulate metabolism, growth, moods, reproduction, sexual arousal, hunger, puberty, menopause, and even parenting. Hormones help with reactive situations, and send signals to allow the body to perform better during a crisis (e.g. the classic "fight or flight" response).
A hormone imbalance can affect your every day activities; from waking up, to eating, to attitudes, to exercising, and even back to sleeping. In one commonly understood example, menopausal symptoms are caused by the reduction of female reductive hormones as the body shifts into a non-reproductive state. Pharma companies have created synthetic hormones to manage menopause, but these increase the risk of breast cancer and heart disease and come from strange sources (synthetic estrogen is made from pregnant mares' urine). Bioidentical hormones created from plants are chemically indistinguishable from the hormones our bodies create, but are still synthetic and still being evaluated for risks.
On this page you can find a number of user-submitted remedies in complementary and alternative medicine to help balance your hormone levels. Some of our Earth Clinic reader favorites are apple cider vinegar, blackstrap molasses, garlic, and Kundalini Yoga. In addition to our cures we have a number of ongoing discussions with helpful information and other related topics such as acromegaly. Let us know what you try from Earth Clinic to help balance your hormones; and if you know of a cure that we do not have listed here, please don't hesitate to share it with us.
