Can you still be in menopause at 70?
Strictly, no. Menopause is an event with an end, and at 70 it is long behind you. But that is rarely what the question is really asking. It usually means something closer to this: why does it still feel like it, years after everyone told me it would be over.
Dr. Martin never answered a hormone question with an age. He answered it with a ratio, and the episode this article draws on is him explaining the rule he used.
Dr. Martin, The Doctor Is In, Episode 869Whenever I would test hormones, I always emphasize the significance of balance in hormones and I've been teaching you that.
With men, he says, it is not a matter of balance. With women it is a tightrope. That distinction is the reason he will not read one number and call it settled, and it is why the question of what is happening at 70 does not get a different kind of answer from the question at 45.
The three hormonal events in a woman's life
He organises the whole topic around three points on a line.
Dr. Martin, The Doctor Is In, Episode 869I've talked a lot about this, but there are three hormonal events in a woman's life, the first time they experience menses, first time they have their period, having a baby, and menopause.
At 70 all three are done. That is the honest answer to the question as asked. His illustration for how differently women come through them is turbulence. Some get smooth skies the whole way. Others get thrown around at every one of the three.
What matters for this question is the difference between an event and a state. The events end. The balance between your hormones is a state, and a state carries on being whatever it is after the last event has passed.
What can still be going on at 70
Before any of this reads as estrogen is the enemy, he closes that door himself, and he does it in the middle of the passage where he is most critical of how much estrogen he was seeing.
Dr. Martin, The Doctor Is In, Episode 869Again, estrogen on its own is a beautiful thing ladies, you need estrogen.
Estrogen makes you a woman, he says in the next breath. It is not a bad thing. Then the sentence the whole episode turns on.
Dr. Martin, The Doctor Is In, Episode 869Estrogen becomes a bad thing when it's out of balance.
Read that against the question. Nothing in it is about age. It is about a relationship between two hormones, and a relationship can be off at 70 the same as it can be off at 40. That is his answer to why symptoms outlast the event that was supposed to explain them.
"Estrogen becomes a bad thing when it's out of balance."
Dr. Martin, The Doctor Is In, Episode 869Dominance is a ratio, not a level
Estrogen dominant is his phrase, and it is worth being precise about what he means by it, because the word sounds like a quantity and he uses it as a comparison.
In this episode he says it while explaining why a young woman gets bad periods, so that is the setting the line comes from. The pattern he names is the same one he uses everywhere else.
Dr. Martin, The Doctor Is In, Episode 869You got too much estrogen and not enough progesterone and I've shown you this.
Too much of one against not enough of the other. He says the two have to be in balance with each other, and that is the thing he was testing for. It is why he was never satisfied by a single estrogen number on a panel, and it is why he treated the pairing as the useful piece of information rather than either half of it.
He also had a way of looking for it that most clinicians were not using. He used thermal imaging, which is usually pointed at inflammation, and says he used it to see how much estrogen was sitting in the tissue. That is his account of his own practice, not a test to go asking for.
The thyroid knock-on and the weight that will not shift
This is the part that matters most for a woman in her sixties or seventies who is doing everything she did before and watching the scale go the wrong way anyway.
Dr. Martin, The Doctor Is In, Episode 869When your estrogen is dominant, your thyroid doesn't work properly and you have millions, millions of women, their thyroid slows down and they gain weight.
He gives the mechanism straight after. Estrogen dominance messes up the conversion of T4 to T3, which is the step that turns the storage form of thyroid hormone into the active one. His word for the thyroid is finicky, and his point is that it gets pushed around by whatever else is out of balance rather than going wrong on its own.
What he says he looked at in the office was not the scale. It was eyebrows, skin and hair, and where the weight had settled. He describes the thighs and the backside specifically, and reads that pattern as estrogen rather than as calories.
The reason the thyroid keeps turning up in his hormone episodes at all is the subject of why the thyroid never acts on its own.
What to check before putting it down to age
None of this is a diagnosis and none of it is a reason to change anything you have been prescribed. What it is, is a case for asking a longer question than the one that ends with your age. These are the things his episode suggests belong in that conversation with your own doctor.
- Progesterone alongside estrogen, since he judges the two against each other rather than one at a time
- Thyroid function, including the conversion step and not only TSH
- Where the weight has gone on, which he read as information rather than as a failure of willpower
- What is coming in from outside the body, since estrogen is not only made internally
- How long the symptoms have run, so nobody is assuming they arrived with menopause and should have left with it
The episode these quotes come from is not an episode about being 70. It is an episode about the birth control pill and about balance, which is his way into almost every hormone question he takes. That is also why the answer he gives travels: if the thing that causes the trouble is a ratio, then the question is never really how old you are.
For another number he thinks gets read the wrong way round entirely, read the cholesterol hoax.
Common questions
Can you still be in menopause at 70?
The event itself is over well before then. Dr. Martin's point is that the estrogen and progesterone imbalance behind the symptoms is not tied to age, so the symptoms can outlast the event.
Can you have hormone symptoms after menopause?
In his framing, yes. He says estrogen becomes a bad thing when it is out of balance, and balance is a state rather than a stage of life.
Does estrogen dominance cause weight gain?
That is his position. He says when estrogen is dominant the thyroid does not work properly, the thyroid slows and the weight goes on, and he points at the T4 to T3 conversion as the step involved.
Is estrogen bad for women?
He is clear that it is not. In his words estrogen on its own is a beautiful thing and you need it. The trouble he describes starts when it is out of balance with progesterone.
Read next: What Menopause Does To A Woman, And Why It Varies and High Estrogen In A Woman Over 60: What Estrogen Dominance Means.
Where Hormonal Support Formula fits
Martin Clinic's Hormonal Support Formula is built around bringing estrogen back into balance rather than adding more of it, which is the direction he argues for at any age.
60-day money-back guarantee. For the sleep and the leg cramps that sit alongside this, he names Magnesium Bisglycinate.These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Always consult your healthcare practitioner before starting a new supplement, especially if you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition.
