Dr. Melissa Glover, ND

Dr. Melissa Glover, ND Patient-centered, evidence-based, natural health care in Victoria, BC.

The word-finding thing in your late thirties is one of the earliest perimenopause symptoms, and almost nobody connects i...
09/07/2026

The word-finding thing in your late thirties is one of the earliest perimenopause symptoms, and almost nobody connects it.

You're mid-sentence, the word is right there, and it's gone. Then you spend the afternoon quietly wondering what's happening to your brain.

Here's what I'd tell you. Estrogen is a brain hormone. Progesterone acts as a neuromodulator. When those hormones start changing, your nervous system has a hard time keeping up, and what you're feeling is your brain responding to that change.

And it's still not where I start.

Before I dig into HRT, I make sure iron is optimized, along with the rest of the baseline picture. If brain fog is genuinely the only symptom, sometimes we'll consider hormone therapy. Usually I want to know there isn't something else driving it first, because a hormonal explanation that skips the workup is an assumption rather than an assessment.

Save this for the next time someone tells you it's just stress.

Before I call something anxiety, I look at the everyday things that can make anxiety feel worse. Caffeine is high on tha...
08/28/2026

Before I call something anxiety, I look at the everyday things that can make anxiety feel worse. Caffeine is high on that list.

I love coffee, and I'm definitely not telling everyone to give it up. But caffeine has a surprisingly long half-life, which means that 2 p.m. coffee may still be affecting your nervous system at bedtime.

For some people, that looks like trouble falling asleep. For others, it's a racing heart, feeling more "on edge," or noticing their blood pressure creeping up.

That doesn't mean caffeine is causing your anxiety. It doesn't even mean you need to quit. It just means it's worth asking whether it's helping or hurting.

One of my favourite ways to find out is a simple experiment: cut back for a couple of weeks and pay attention. How's your sleep? Your mood? Your energy? Are you actually functioning better by the time the kids get home, or just making it through the afternoon?

You don't have to avoid coffee forever. You just need enough information to decide whether it's working for you.

Send this to your fellow afternoon coffee drinker.

When one result looks off, the instinct, mine included sometimes, is to order more and more panels. Often the smarter mo...
08/26/2026

When one result looks off, the instinct, mine included sometimes, is to order more and more panels. Often the smarter move is to re-run what we already have.

A lab value only means something in the context of when and how it was drawn. Test your TSH an hour after you took your Synthroid and it can read differently than if you draw it before your dose, which gives a truer picture of your actual levels. Check hormones without asking what day of your cycle you're on, day three versus day 21, and you can't fairly compare one month to the next. Run cholesterol after a high-fat breakfast instead of fasting and you've added a variable you didn't need.

None of those need a bigger panel. They need the same test, timed properly, or repeated so we're comparing like with like. Strategic beats exhaustive, most of the time.

Follow along for how I actually think through your labs.

Before I ask anyone to cut back on alcohol, I ask them to do something much simpler first:Track it.Not because every gla...
08/24/2026

Before I ask anyone to cut back on alcohol, I ask them to do something much simpler first:
Track it.

Not because every glass is a problem, but because most of us are surprisingly bad at estimating our own habits.

"I only drink socially."
"I usually just have a glass of wine with dinner."

Sometimes that's exactly what's happening.
Sometimes a month of tracking tells a different story. The goal isn't to judge yourself. It's to get curious.

Once you know your baseline, you can decide whether it's worth experimenting. Maybe you cut back for a couple of weeks and notice your sleep improves. Maybe your anxiety feels different. Maybe nothing changes at all. That's useful information too. And for the record, I enjoy a rosé on a patio as much as anyone.

This isn't about taking your wine away. It's about making informed decisions instead of running on assumptions.

Have you ever tracked your alcohol intake? Did anything surprise you?

"I gave blood and they said my iron was fine." I hear this constantly. A blood-donation screen checks your hemoglobin, t...
07/10/2026

"I gave blood and they said my iron was fine." I hear this constantly. A blood-donation screen checks your hemoglobin, the iron you're using right now, not ferritin, the iron you've got in storage.

You can pass that screen and still be running your stores down to almost nothing, which is often where the fatigue, the hair loss, and the brain fog start.

Two different numbers. Two different stories. If your periods are heavy and no one's checked ferritin, that's the one to ask for.

This isn't medical advice. Talk to your provider.

Ever been told your iron's fine after giving blood? Tell me below.

I'm a naturopathic doctor, and I prescribe antidepressants. Those two things have never been in conflict for me.I've wat...
07/08/2026

I'm a naturopathic doctor, and I prescribe antidepressants. Those two things have never been in conflict for me.

I've watched people suffer for months longer than they needed to, white-knuckling it, because they'd absorbed the idea that needing medication meant they'd failed at being "natural." They hadn't failed at anything.

Sometimes medication is what lowers the volume enough that someone can finally sleep, move, and reconnect, the things that felt impossible when they were barely hanging on. It's not the whole plan. It's not the enemy either. It's one good tool, used when it fits.

If you've been told you should be able to push through this on your own, you have my permission to stop.

This isn't medical advice. Talk to your provider.

Follow for more straight talk on mental health.

Your legs finally go quiet the second you lie down. Then they start buzzing like they've got somewhere to be.Here's the ...
07/06/2026

Your legs finally go quiet the second you lie down. Then they start buzzing like they've got somewhere to be.

Here's the part that often gets missed: restless legs at night can be an iron story, and not the kind a standard panel flags. Most labs call a ferritin of 15 "normal." But ferritin is your iron savings, not the iron you're spending today, and for restless legs the research points a lot higher. A JAMA guideline puts the target around 100.

So you can land at 30, get told everything looks good, and still lie there every night wondering what's wrong with you. Nothing's wrong with you. The number that explains it just wasn't the one anyone was looking at.

This is the part I love going through with patients: the full picture, including what's "normal" and why that isn't the same as optimal. It's usually where the "I wish I'd known this sooner" lands.

If your legs won't settle at night, ferritin is worth a real look. This isn't medical advice. Talk to your provider, and ask for the actual number.

Save this for your next bloodwork conversation.

A patient asked me last week if she had to keep doing it the hard way. The answer was not yes.She had been managing anxi...
06/26/2026

A patient asked me last week if she had to keep doing it the hard way. The answer was not yes.

She had been managing anxiety for six years with discipline. Sleep, exercise, routine, willpower. It was working in the sense that nothing had visibly broken. But she was exhausted by the effort of it, and nobody had ever offered her a different conversation.

What I do before anything else is investigate. Labs, deficiencies, the full picture of what is actually going on. Because sometimes what looks like an anxiety management problem is partly a ferritin problem. Or a vitamin D problem. Or a blood sugar problem. You do not know until you look.

Then we have the options conversation. Not a prescription. A conversation. Sometimes the next step is getting the foundations working better. Sometimes counseling gives someone somewhere to actually put it down. Sometimes targeted nutrients help. And sometimes medication is part of the picture, and that is a completely valid path, not a fallback.

What changed for her was not a single intervention. It was that the question shifted from "how do I keep doing this" to "what do I actually want to try."

The option does not need to be forever. It can be short term.

This is not medical advice. Talk to your provider about what is right for you.

If you have been managing this with discipline for years, a discovery call might be a good place to start. Link in bio.

Hormones and mental health are not two separate conversations. The way they get siloed, in medicine, in the wellness spa...
06/24/2026

Hormones and mental health are not two separate conversations. The way they get siloed, in medicine, in the wellness space, online, is exactly why so many women spend years with half an answer.

A patient walked in recently with a cluster of changes she could not explain. New acne. Irregular periods. A family history of early menopause. Anxiety that had been building for months. Her labs came back inconclusive. PMOS (PCOS) or perimenopause, the numbers were not drawing a clean line.

The treatment plan converged anyway. Not because the diagnosis was certain, but because her symptoms, her goals, and her history in context with each other pointed somewhere. That is what clinical reasoning actually does. It holds ambiguity and still moves forward.

What I want the women reading this to understand is that "am I going crazy or is it hormonal" is the wrong frame. The question is what is driving it, and in what proportion, and what that means for how we approach it. That is not a question a search engine or a symptom checker can answer. It requires someone who is looking at the whole picture.

If you have been handed half an answer and told to manage the rest on your own, that is not the standard of care you deserve.

This is not medical advice. Talk to your provider about what is right for you.

If you have been Googling this and finishing more confused than when you started, let's book an intake. Link in bio.



Hemoglobin is what is circulating. Ferritin is what is stored. They tell different stories, and the storage one is usual...
06/22/2026

Hemoglobin is what is circulating. Ferritin is what is stored. They tell different stories, and the storage one is usually where the symptoms live.

Think of your iron stores like a bank account. You can have your day-to-day spending covered while the savings account sits at zero. When something pulls from reserves, there is nothing there. Ferritin in the 20s and 30s can leave a patient feeling exactly that way, even when the lab report stamps it normal.

The fatigue that does not respond to rest. The brain fog that makes it hard to think clearly by afternoon. The hair that keeps coming out in the shower. These are not separate problems. They are often the same depleted system showing up in different places.

This is part of why I look at the full picture, not just the flag. If you have been told your iron is fine but your body is telling you something different, that conversation is worth having.

If this is naming what you have been feeling, let's look at whether oral iron or an infusion makes sense for where you are. Link in bio to book.

Address

Tall Tree Integrated Health/5325 Cordova Bay Road
Victoria, BC
V8Y2L3

Opening Hours

Monday 8am - 8pm
Tuesday 2pm - 8pm
Wednesday 8am - 2pm
Thursday 8am - 2pm

Telephone

+12506589222

Website

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