Salivary Testing for Bioidentical HRT: A Great Way to Waste Your Money

[HD: This is the third post in my series about the use of HRT in menopause. It can be read as a stand-alone piece, but it’s not a bad idea to check out the first two for context, as I do assume you are familiar with the substance of those posts: Why You Shouldn’t Care About Estrogen Dominance and Are Bioidentical Hormones Safe?]

You know what really burns my muffin?

Um…everything?

Y’all are getting a little cheeky, aren’t you? Listen, I’m not a total malcontent, but I do get riled up when I see people wasting their money on worthless, expensive testing that is not covered by insurance. I’m no fan of insurance companies – believe me – but why do you think they typically won’t cover salivary testing for bioidentical hormone replacement therapy?

Because they are in cahoots with Big Pharma, trying to drive women toward FDA-approved forms of HRT that will give them cancer and heart attacks!

Annnnnnnd…there it is. Wow, it didn’t take long today for the conspiracy-theorist trolls to rev their engines. No, salivary testing for hormones like estrogens, progestogens, testosterone, and DHEA is not covered because the results have little to no value for guiding peri/post-menopausal HRT.

No Correlation Between Symptoms and Levels

There are so many problems with these salivary hormone assays that I almost don’t know where to start.  I think the best way to begin is with the bottom line, which was eloquently stated by Boothby et al in a review paper about bioidentical hormones, published in Menopause (2004).

Although attractive on the surface, individualized NHT [natural hormone therapy] is an ill-conceived attempt to apply pharmacokinetic principles to drugs that do not meet the criteria for individualized dosing.

Dr. Boothby’s (PharmD) quote beautifully illustrates a point I have repeatedly driven home on this site. When Medicine has excellent, accurate testing for a condition, Alt Med tells people to ignore the results and focus on symptoms, allowing them to diagnose anybody with anything. On the other hand, when Medicine recommends empiric treatment for a condition that isn’t amenable to objective quantification with lab tests, Alt Med recommends a battery of non-validated testing.

Salivary hormone testing that lacks clinical applicability serves the financial interests of Alt Med, but not the interests of the patient. This type of testing obfuscates and unnecessarily complicates the treatment plan, leading the patient to believe she is receiving highly specialized, individualized care that is superior to the care offered by her mainstream physician. Makes sense, right? Her regular doctor only offered a couple of pills – or maybe a patch – while her Altie did a deep dive into her unique physiology and had a special hormone cocktail custom-compounded for her. Sadly, the only thing generated by this salivary/urine/blood testing is a large bill from the testing facility, along with pages of numbers that aren’t worth the paper on which they are printed.

Getting back to Dr. Boothby’s point, Alt Med wants to test your “levels” so that you can replace exactly what’s deficient. As I described in Why You Shouldn’t Care About Estrogen Dominance:

If you are cycling regularly, you know that your hormone levels will depend entirely on when within the cycle they are drawn.  The only thing those numbers can tell you is that you are cycling (not talking about fertility/ovulation issues today), which you kind of already knew!  If you are perimenopausal and starting to have some irregular cycles plus other symptoms, you know there’s a good chance that your estradiol levels will be swinging widely, which should not affect your choice of treatment.  If you are postmenopausal, then it’s ludicrous to test anything, because estrogen and progesterone levels will be low, by definition.

This is all to say that menopausal hormone replacement therapy is a misnomer. We’re not trying to restore normal physiology by replacing your hormones to a “normal” level. Why? Well, how would you define normal? Is it the estradiol level of an early-follicular phase 20-year-old? A late-follicular phase 30-year-old? A mid-luteal phase 40-year-old? [See menstrual cycle diagram below.]

Attribution: Chris 73 / Wikimedia Commons [GFDL 1.3 (www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

If you are menopausal, “normal” levels of estrogen and progesterone are low, by definition! We’re not replacing hormones that you should be making; we’re performing a pharmacologic intervention to relieve your hot flushes and other menopausal symptoms. And we accomplish this with the lowest dose of hormone therapy that ameliorates those symptoms. Period.

The “No’s” of Salivary Hormone Testing

When it comes to using salivary hormone testing to guide bioidentical HRT, the word “no” seems to come up a lot:

  • no standardization of different assays offered by different labs
  • no independent quality control programs
  • no universally accepted reference ranges
  • no evidence for correlating levels with symptoms
  • no evidence for how to use testing to adjust medication dosages for either efficacy or safety

Compounded Hormones Have Unpredictable Pharmacokinetics

As demonstrated by the above list of problems with salivary testing, it’s hard to know what to do with your test “results,” other than toss them in the shredder. Tabling that for a second, do you think your Alt Med provider understands the pharmacokinetics of the cocktail she has prescribed? Does it result in a rapid rise in estradiol levels with a quick crash? Maybe a delayed crash? A slow initial rise with sustained levels? Do the salivary levels of the hormones vary dramatically depending on when your sample is taken in relation to a dose?

I guarantee you she doesn’t know the answers to these questions, because none of this has been well-studied. One of the few studies out there comparing the pharmacokinetics of FDA-approved therapy to cBHT found that 24-hour area under the curve of E2 (estradiol) was 80% lower with the compounded product (Sood et al, Maturitas, 2013). Take that for whatever it’s worth.

If you want to approach this whole HRT thing from a data-driven perspective, what I can tell you is that Steingold et al published a paper in JCEM in 1985, which demonstrated that circulating blood E2 levels of 60-80 pg/mL were sufficient to control symptoms in most women. This E2 range is similar to early-midfollicular levels in normally cycling women. But Steingold’s findings have not been reevaluated since then, so again – take that for what it’s worth.

Everyone is Special

Look, I get that it’s appealing to be treated as an individual. What you need to understand is that your mainstream healthcare provider (HCP) is treating you as an individual when she offers you FDA-approved formulations of estradiol and progesterone. She is doing exactly what Alt Med loves to promote for other types of hormone therapy (e.g. thyroid): she’s treating your menopausal symptoms. Your HCP will adjust the dose of your estradiol/progesterone until your hot flushes and other symptoms are under the best control possible.

What your HCP will not do is offer you a battery of worthless salivary/urine/blood tests that do not aid in clinical decision-making. I realize that many of you believe that more testing = more thorough = superior care. I also understand that, when your Alt Med provider spends an hour with you, a provider-patient bond has more time to develop, leading to greater trust in their recommendations. If your mainstream HCP could get reimbursed adequately for 1 hour visits, she would do the same thing. Our medical system is broken, so she just can’t.

Here are my asks: stop spinning your wheels with Alt Med, stop paying for expensive and unnecessary lab tests, and stop paying for pricey compounded products when safe and effective FDA-approved alternatives are available. It’s ok to expect to be treated as an individual, but demand that your provider treats you based on the best available medical evidence which – in the case of menopausal HRT – does not require pages upon pages of worthless labs.

Still have questions after reading the menopausal HRT series? Want to share your story? Comment below!

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Image Credit: Photo by Alfred Quartey on Unsplash

10 Replies to “Salivary Testing for Bioidentical HRT: A Great Way to Waste Your Money”

  1. The irony of it is rich. While mouthing that allopathic medicine is in cahoots with Big Pharma (and making a litany of outrageous, and frankly, offensive, claims against physicians, pharmacists, and corporations), the Alt Med types truly are the ones hosing patients out of thousands of dollars and providing no real valuable treatment. On most days it’s aggravating and time-consuming; on other days, it’s absolutely gut-wrenching to watch what some patients will go through, physically, emotionally, and financially, at the feet of these voodoo practitioners.

    1. Agreed. One point: I stopped using the term “allopathic” to refer to conventional medicine when I learned from a reader that allopathic was originally coined as a pejorative term by alt med. I’d rather call myself a lame stream medical doctor than an allopath!

  2. I see all over Instagram Alt med practitioners pushing the DUTCH hormone panel, very expensive and not covered but their claim is its not enough to know the estrogen level but you must know the metabolites also. If the metabolites are off, meaning the body is making the wrong kind of estrogen then their cure is a supplement like DIM. MY guess is this can also be crossed over to the other testing they offer, like heavy metals and stool samples. Something that you will probably not be able to answer, but like everything else they push, why is this such a black and white issue, alt med only want saliva but traditionally trained want blood? Side note, do you know if Maca has any proven data and studies as a treatment for managing peri/meno symptoms? Thyroid related, why do I see these same practitioners putting their patients on natural thyroid or T3 when their thyroid panel is all normal range? Someone i follow on IG, putting her labs out there, her values not even close to abnormal range but she says she has hypothyroidism because her T3, is in the lower range of normal. Her alt med doc put her on T3, 6 weeks later the labs did not change, now she is taking natural thyroid in addition to the T3. Thanks for your time in making and answering the posts.

    1. …why is this such a black and white issue, alt med only want saliva but traditionally trained want blood?

      Wherever opportunity exists for Alt Med to do something that we don’t do, they’ll take it. Then they’ll claim that it’s more in-depth, more advanced, more customized, etc. In the case of salivary hormone testing vs blood for menopausal HRT, we don’t want saliva because the test is meaningless; we don’t even want your blood. We just want to treat you with a dose of estrogen/progesterone that makes you feel better, while minimizing risks as best as possible.

      do you know if Maca has any proven data and studies as a treatment for managing peri/meno symptoms?

      PubMed turns up a few papers looking at Maca for vasomotor symptoms in menopause. I have not reviewed this topic in-depth, but it looks like there might be at least some evidence for it. I just don’t know how strong it is without doing more research.

      why do I see these same practitioners putting their patients on natural thyroid or T3 when their thyroid panel is all normal range?

      I’ve covered this in detail in many of my thyroid posts, but basically: this is a classic example of Alt Med ignoring normal lab tests and making a diagnosis of hypothyroidism based on the presence of “hypothyroid” symptoms. Unfortunately, hypothyroid symptoms are nonspecific and can be due to almost anything. But, when the only tool Alt Med has is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

    1. Well-done, Clare. I’m so sorry your “functional medicine” doctor made you feel like the miscarriage was something you could have prevented, “if only you took your health more seriously.” Like you said, even though you know it’s not true, planting that seed of doubt was destructive.

  3. Thanks for saving us money on the salivary tests. And for giving us information about the one study involving E2 levels. My plan was to look at E2, as well as LDL, because when my E2 level dropped off a cliff, my LDL was high for the first time in my life. So I figure it would be good to compare that after ERT, too. Thanks again!

  4. I’ve received significant benefits from my bioidentical hormone therapy and the testing was very useful in diagnosis – especially when I was over medicated and experiencing significant symptoms.

  5. Hi lovely to meet you. I was diagnosed about five years ago with hypothyroidism my tsh 5.49 range 0.27-4.20 t4 was 12-22 mine was 14 I have tpo antibodies of 700 and tgrab antibodies of 1000 I have hashimoto’s I’m also peri menopause I’m on hrt for palpitations racing heart fatigue tremors anxiety etc . Now recently I was taking into hospital with platlets of 7 mine always 140 or above they are saying its another autoimmune response have you heard of this I’m on 70mg pernidslone steroids for the bruising and Pv bleed now my platlets up to 96 and rising this is all out of the blue I’m on 25mcg levothyroxine five days and sat & sun 50mcg . I no you cant give advice but is itp part of autoimmune diseases have you seen it with hashimoto’s thyroiditis. My endo said eventually my hashimoto’s will destroy my thyroid. So overwhelmed and scared of all this I’m 47 . Thanks a million

    Yvonne

  6. I agree that BHT and saliva testing is expensive, useless, and possibly dangerous. I am not a fan of alternative medicine. The problem is that it’s possible to come down with a condition that is not well-served by conventional medicine. This is frightening and frustrating and can drive just about anyone to consider these measures. After menopause I had a mysterious headache which progressed to a chronic condition whereby I have intense reactions to eating foods with histamine. This is still causing a migraine every single night. In every other way I am fine. There is extensive research on this in PubMed but it has not made it into clinical practice in the US yet. My symptoms have been dismissed or disbelieved by most specialists. This is what drives people into the arms of functional medicine. I had to try to solve this myself. There is lots of good information on this site about female hormones and how they vary before and after menopause. There is not much on all of the symptoms that women experience as a result of these variations. For example, many women get migraines at certain times in their cycle. So the system hardly works in an ideal way and it is fair to explore ways in which the levels of hormones might create symptoms. I did some research and found some evidence that estrogen down-regulates an enzyme that helps with the clearing of histamine in foods, and progesterone up-regulates it. I had a terrible migraine trying estrogen so this made sense. So I tried progesterone. It has really alleviated the intensity of the food reactions and the migraines. When I consulted a BHT specialist she recommended saliva testing, estrogen, and those pellets. Considering the intensity of the migraine that I got with just a small amount of estrogen (and the pellets need to be surgically removed) this would have been a disaster. As it stand now, the progesterone is just one tool in my toolkit to fight in my quest to be able to eat normally. Unfortunately, I still need to be on antihistamines. I think the attitudes of doctors in conventional medicine feeds alternative medicine. They should listen to, and believe their patients. Then maybe alternative medicine will diminish.

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