Modern / Women's Medicine · 2015
Period Repair Manual
Lara Briden
Your cycle is a monthly report card on hormones, thyroid, iron and stress.
The cycle as a vital sign
Briden's framing: a regular, ovulatory cycle is evidence that the whole system — brain, thyroid, adrenals, nutrition, insulin — is functioning. Irregularity is information rather than an inconvenience.
Ovulation is the point
Ovulation produces progesterone, which supports sleep, mood, bone and thyroid function. A bleed on hormonal birth control is a withdrawal bleed, not a cycle; she is careful to distinguish the two.
Common causes she works through
PCOS in its insulin-resistant and post-pill forms, hypothalamic amenorrhoea from under-eating or over-training, thyroid disease, and iron deficiency from heavy bleeding. Each gets a distinct pattern of symptoms rather than one blanket remedy.
Food, then supplements, then medicine
Her order of operations: eat enough and regularly, address insulin and inflammation, then consider magnesium, zinc, iodine or iron with testing, and use pharmaceuticals where indicated. Not a rejection of medicine — a sequence.
What to actually track
Cycle length, bleed length and heaviness, pain, PMS timing, cervical fluid and basal temperature give a usable picture to bring to a doctor.
What to take from it
Track for three cycles before drawing conclusions, and treat pain and floods as signals worth investigating.
Lines to keep
- “The cycle is a monthly report card.”
- “A pill bleed is a withdrawal bleed, not a cycle.”
- “Under-eating is a common and reversible cause of a missing period.”
Practice
- · Track three full cycles: length, flow, pain, mood, temperature.
- · If bleeding is heavy, get ferritin tested.