LOST IN THE LAND OF THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS – It’s a Hormone Jungle Out There
The body seems to have all these interweaving systems, and the endocrine system seems to be one of the more complex. The major endocrine glands include the pineal gland, pituitary gland, pancreas, ovaries, testes, thyroid gland, parathyroid gland, and adrenal glands. These glands make hormones. Hormones are chemical messengers. They travel through your bloodstream to tissues or organs. Hormones work slowly and affect body processes from head to toe. The endocrine system influences how your heart beats, how your bones and tissues grow, even your ability to make a baby. It plays a vital role in whether or not you develop diabetes, thyroid disease, growth disorders, sexual dysfunction, and a host of other hormone-related disorders. The endocrine system affects almost every organ and cell in the body,
Wish it Were Never-Never Land, but No Luck
The endocrine has a feedback system that helps control the balance of hormones in the bloodstream. If your body has too much or too little of a certain hormone, it signals the proper gland or glands to correct the problem. A hormone imbalance may occur if this feedback system has trouble keeping the right level of hormones in the bloodstream, or if your body doesn’t clear them out of the bloodstream properly. Because there’s there are so many endocrine glands, it’s sometimes hard to know what’s going on one way or another. Not fun, but it happens. And can happen to anyone.
A Jurassic Park of Disease and Disorder
Needless to say, we’re not going to go into the endless list of endocrine disorders. It could fill years of blogs. You could get old and grey just trying to keep up. Intimidating? Understatement. But just a peek at some of the different types of endocrine problems is enough to make you send up the “help”! signals.
- Acromegaly (Say what???)
- Addison’s Disease
- Adrenal Cancer
- Adrenal Disorders
- Anaplastic Thyroid Cancer
- Cushing’s Syndrome
- De Quervain’s Thyroiditis
- Diabetes
- Follicular Thyroid Cancer
- Gestational Diabetes
- Goiters
- Graves’ Disease
- Growth Disorders
- Growth Hormone Deficiency
- Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis (Who’s this Hashimoto?)
- Hurthle Cell Thyroid Cancer (Someone else’s name?)
- Hyperglycemia
- Hyperparathyroidism
- Hyperthyroidism
- Hypoglycemia
- Hypoparathyroidism
- Hypothyroidism
- Low Testosterone
- Medullary Thyroid Cancer
- MEN 1
- MEN 2A
- MEN 2B
- Menopause
- Metabolic Syndrome
- Obesity
- Osteoporosis
- Papillary Thyroid Cancer
- Parathyroid Diseases (Can you even pronounce it?)
- Pituitary Disorders
- Pituitary Tumors
- Polycystic Ovary Syndrome
- Prediabetes
- Reproduction
- Silent Thyroiditis (If it’s silent, how will I know?)
- Thyroid Cancer
- Thyroid Diseases
- Thyroid Nodules
- Thyroiditis
- Turner Syndrome
- Type 1 Diabetes
- Type 2 Diabetes
Bring in the Big Guns
This is where endocrinologists, rub their hands together…aha! “Let me get my hands on some of these”. But whoa, take a breath, and don’t assume you’ve got one or even all of these maladies. You could take endless tests and still get no answers. Because they are all related to how your hormones function, a good place to start might be to make an appointment with Dr. Stephen A. Goldstein MD, F.A.C.S. at Denver Hormone Health. Years of expertise and experience have made him one of the most skilled specialists in the endocrine system and the hormone replacement therapy that might be needed to correct it. No matter what you tell him, he cares. He listens and then with simple tests can tell if hormones could be the culprit. If they are, he then creates a plan tailored to take on what’s really going on in your body. (You can stop sweating and catastrophizing now.) His single goal is to get you feeling your very best.
Get on with life. And a great one, at that.
