Why Does a Woman Have Hot Flashes?

by Glen Depke, Traditional Naturopath

I have worked with over 5,172 women dealing with menopause symptoms through the years and one of the most significant frustrating symptoms is the dreaded hot flash.

If you dealt with hot flashes yourself, you know how disruptive this could be for you.

Perhaps you finally found some time to relax, snuggle up with a fuzzy blanket and read a good book, only for the hot flash to hit you head on forcing you to through off the blanket in frustration and ruin the one moment of peace and relaxation you had in your day.

Or maybe you have just spent the past hour plus getting yourself looking extra sharp for an event; perfectly placed makeup, dressed sharp and looking beautiful. Only for the hot flash to come and take away all the work you did on your makeup, hair and the embarrassing perspiration marks on your clothing.

I hear this all the time from my clients…

So why do women have hot flashes?

If you are thinking “because I am in menopause” this is really not the case.

First off, it is important to distinguish if your hot flashes are hormonally driven or an immune response.

If you only have hot flashes or what you may refer to as night sweats and they are only at night during your sleep hours, this is typically not hormonal.

When your body is heating up at night and you are perspiring when you are sleeping, this is typically an immune response. If this is the case for you, likely you have an infection that your immune system is attempting to eliminate and this is a positive response also known as a healing crisis.

If this response only last a few days or less, you can be confident that your body has completed your healing crisis and the job is done. But if this continues long term, it would be best to test for the infection your body is attempting to eliminate and utilize a protocol to assist your body’s immune system in overcoming this infection.

For this purpose I always recommend a stool collection kit from a company called BioHealth Labs referred to as 401H – GI Screen w/HPylori. We use these test kits with great success with our clients at Depke Wellness on a regular basis.

Now if your hot flashes come and go through the day and are not only occurring during your sleep hours, this is likely due to a hormone imbalance.

The typical conventional knowledge will tell you that hot flashes are because of low estrogen hormone production, due to menopause, and that the only way to overcome these is to take estrogen hormones.

While this can be the case, many women continue to have hot flashes even after the have been taken estrogen hormones.

So if there is a cause and effect such as this with the end result being hot flashes, why would the hot flashes continue?

Here are some answers for you.

• You could be using estrogen creams and your vascular absorption through your skin is poor, thus the estrogens are not making into your blood and simply building up in your tissue (BTW, not only is this still leaving you suffering with hot flashes but a buildup of estrogen in your tissue is potentially dangerous.)
• While you may have increased your estrogen hormone levels in your blood, these estrogen levels may be fluctuating throughout your day due to poor hormone rhythms.
• If you have slow motility of your colon, which would be one bowel movement per day or less, estrogens that are marked for elimination may be moving through your colon walls and eventually back into your blood stream.
• You are still not fixing a deeper hormone imbalance based on your stress hormone system known as your adrenal glands
• You could also be living with a deeper thyroid hormone imbalance (keep in mind that this is typically because of a gut, liver, adrenal and/or autoimmune issue.)
• This could also be due to a deeper issue with inflammation and your gut/brain connection.

Now if this is simply tied into low estrogen hormone production and/or fluctuating hormones, there could be an easy solution for you that you could focus on right now.

There is a combination of herbal ingredients that can assist your body in increasing estrogen hormones naturally without any concern of creating too high of estrogen production or the potential dangerous buildup of estrogen in your tissue.

This is why we offer the Depke Wellness Prime Hot Flash Relief supplement to our clients that are challenged with hot flashes.

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