In this video, Dr. Tina Marcantel explains why salivary hormone testing is an effective way to screen for signs of adrenal fatigue or adrenal insufficiency.
Transcript of video:
Q: What kind of testing do you do for adrenal fatigue?
Dr. Marcantel: Over here, we do saliva testing. Blood testing is good for other things–chem panels, CBC, and such as that–but the saliva testing tests the amount of hormones that are free. And the free hormones are the active hormones inside of the cell tissue, whereas the blood hormones are attached to proteins in the blood, which makes them inactive. [For a more complete explanation of this, see our article, “Hormone Testing: Saliva or Serum Blood Test?”]
So when we’re testing, we always test the hormones with the saliva test kit. It’s more sensitive than the blood test, and it always seems to line up with the patient’s symptomology.
I do have quite a number of patients who come in and say, “Well, I’ve had the blood test and everything looks normal, but I’m not feeling good. What’s going on with me?”
They trust themselves; they know there’s something wrong with their body because they’re not feeling good. And we take the saliva test, a more sensitive testing, and they can see their results, and one of the things I hear quite often is, “Oh, it’s not all in my head! I’m not going crazy!”
So they see how their symptomology lines up with the results of the salivary hormone testing.