88. Low Dose Naltrexone: Restoring Mood, Menstrual Cycles & Fertility

If you’ve ever been told that birth control is your only option for endometriosis, PMS, or unexplained infertility—you’re not alone. In this episode of Cycle Wisdom, Dr. Monica Minjeur explores an unexpected yet powerful tool in restorative reproductive medicine: Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN).

LDN was originally developed for opioid addiction, but at much lower doses, it’s gaining traction for its ability to regulate the immune system, reduce inflammation, and increase natural endorphins—all without suppressing your body’s natural hormone systems.

Through the emotional story of Charlotte, a 33-year-old therapist worn down by chronic pain and hormonal chaos, we explore how LDN helped her break free from the cycle of monthly suffering and find renewed hope.

Dr. Minjeur dives into:

• 💥 How LDN reduces inflammation and balances immune response
• 🧠 Its surprising role in improving mental health, mood, and sleep
• 🌸 Why LDN is often used for endometriosis, PMS, and fertility support
• 🔄 How LDN fits into a personalized, root-cause approach to healing—not a one-size-fits-all quick fix
• ✅ Who might benefit most from trying LDN
• ⚠️ Common side effects and what to expect when starting

Whether you're battling hormone-driven mood changes, struggling with fertility, or navigating an autoimmune diagnosis—this episode offers hope and clarity about a tool that could help restore your body’s natural rhythm.

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Imagine if your period pain, PMS or infertility didn’t control your life and your hormones finally felt in balance. Low-dose Naltrexone could be a part of your personalized plan to improve health and promote fertility.
💻 Book a free discovery call at RadiantClinic.com

Transcript

Monica: 0:02

Welcome back to Cycle Wisdom, where we empower women to restore natural menstrual cycles, to improve health and promote fertility. I'm your host, Dr. Monica Minjeur, and I'm so glad you're listening today. If you've been told there's nothing else you can do, or there's no other option other than birth control, but you're still struggling with severe menstrual pain from endometriosis. Or maybe from PMS that knocks you out, or unexplained infertility, you are not alone. Today we're diving into a surprising tool that's been changing the game for many women. It's a medication called low dose Naltrexone. Okay. Low dose naltrexone was originally developed to block opioid receptors, which are a part of how your body reacts to pain responses in your brain. However, low dose naltrexone is being used in smaller doses to help regulate the immune system, to decrease inflammation and to support hormonal balance and mental health, especially in women. So let's dig in a little bit more and talk through how this powerful medication can be impactful and to help you discern if this is right for you. So let's start off with meeting Charlotte. I. Charlotte was a 33-year-old mental health therapist. She had been dealing with endometriosis and debilitating PMS for many years. By the time she came to see me, she told me she felt frustrated, exhausted, and at war with her body every single month. She had tried multiple different treatments over the past years from well-meaning doctors, including oral birth control pills. An IUD and antidepressant medications. Unfortunately, many of these treatments left her with increased moodiness, increased weight, decreased libido, and extreme fatigue. Charlotte told me, I just want to feel like myself again, but every month it's like, I might as well just disappear for a week. She was managing daily pain and mood swings that disrupted her work and relationships. And she was left with a deep feeling of helplessness that her body was controlling her and dictated when she was able to actually function on a regular basis. So after we got started with some cycle tracking, we talked through nutritional and hormonal support, but at that very first visit we talked about low dose naltrexone and how it might be a good fit for her. Okay. Over the course of the next three cycles, Charlotte's PMS symptom intensity had dropped significantly. She described it to me like a fog had finally lifted. Her pain was more manageable with her periods. Her moods were more stable, and for the first time in years, she couldn't tell when her cycles were going to start, just based on her mood alone. Charlotte was not just coping anymore and not just letting the diseases of endometriosis and PMS run her life. She is now thriving low-dose Naltrexone, along with other hormone balancing and lifestyle changes, helped Charlotte to get her body to stop fighting itself, and she's now more in tune with her cycle than ever. So what is this miracle drug? What is low-dose Naltrexone? Again, as I mentioned in my introduction, naltrexone was originally a medication that is prescribed for opioid addiction or alcohol withdrawal. Typically in higher doses, like 50 to a hundred milligrams. However, at low doses like what we use for low dose naltrexone, we typically are talking about dosages as low as. 0.5 milligrams upwards to 4.5 milligrams. So literally anywhere from one to 10% of the conventional dosing. And when we use it at this lower dosage, it has a completely different mechanism. There are three primary ways in which Naltrexone works, and in fairness, nobody understands a hundred percent of all of the different aspects of it, and we continue to find different ways in order to use low-dose naltrexone. But the primary three mechanisms of action that we know about and have. Seen and have proven in many different realms of medicine are going to be first and foremost reducing inflammation. And so we'll talk a little bit later how we use this specifically for women's health, but this medication does oftentimes get used for people that have chronic pain. So for those that are suffering from long-term arthritis or injuries, it does tend to help with chronic pain. So it is being used. More and more for people that are working through chronic pain, fibromyalgia, other similar symptoms. The second way we know that NOLA dose naltrexone works is by modulating immune response. So we think about this in treatment with autoimmune diseases, and I'm gonna talk about this a little bit more later, but this is not just specific to women's health, and so low dose naltrexone can be utilized for the treatment of many different autoimmune conditions because it helps to improve your body's response to that autoimmune antibodies. And the third way that we talk about it helping specifically in women's health, is by increasing endorphin production. So what it does is it temporarily blocks those opioid receptors that are in your brain, and that gives your brain a signal to say, Hey, it's time to secrete more of your endorphins, which are going to be things like serotonin and dopamine. And so if you've done any study into the research in the field of, you know, neuroscience or mental health, we know that. Serotonin and dopamine are those feel good or those happy hormones that are secreted by our brain. And so if we can get your brain to secrete more of these, we are helping to restore your body's natural function. So low-dose Naltrexone fits nicely into the world of restorative reproductive medicine because we're seeking to treat those root causes and support your body's natural systems. And Naltrexone does just that by helping to gently encourage your body to function better on its own. So let's talk about some specific uses for low-dose naltrexone, specifically when it comes to women's health. The first area I always think about low-dose naltrexone is if we are looking to treat endometriosis. So for example, if you come in and you've been dealing with debilitating or severe pain around the time of your menses or maybe some infertility issues, we know that if there is endometriosis there, that endometriosis is an inflammatory condition. We also are gaining additional evidence that there may be an immune response when it comes to endometriosis. And so treating with low dose naltrexone will help to decrease the inflammation that happens and support that balance of immune modulation. Oftentimes, we'll add in low dose naltrexone if over the counter anti-inflammatory medications or other hormonal treatments aren't enough. Or aren't well tolerated. Now, there is a caveat here in that Naltrexone and any other medication does not cure you from endometriosis, and still the only definitive treatment for root cause of endometriosis is good surgical excision, as we've talked about in lots of my other episodes. But while we're awaiting surgery or while we're trying to deal with the symptoms of endometriosis, low dose naltrexone can have a significant impact on the inflammation. That is happening when you're dealing with your menstrual cycle. We also utilize low-dose naltrexone for fertility support. So there are many different immune balances that can be regulated by low-dose naltrexone. So one of the theories on fertility support is things like a low A MH or anti-Mullerian hormone. Are thought to be due in part to autoantibodies that are fighting against the ovary. So basically, your body can produce antibodies that are fighting against the ovaries, and this is an autoimmune situation. And so treating with low-dose naltrexone, in addition to following an anti-inflammatory diet and reducing other sources of inflammation in your body. All of these things can help to impact not only implantation, but early pregnancy and fertility support. The way it does this is by modulating the immune response. Again, decreasing the inflammation and improving your endorphins by enhancing that signaling of ovulation to happen. So again, we can't force your body to get pregnant, but if we can create the right environment for implantation and allow healthy hormone communication, this can be really impactful. In fact, I have had a few patients in my practice just over this past year who even before we went through the full hormone evaluation, had come to me with multiple months and in some cases years of unexplained infertility. And we started them on low-dose naltrexone from the start for other reasons, whether it was inflammation or chronic pain or endorphin deficiency. And before we even got through the full process of evaluation to check for hormone imbalance or other things. All three of these women that I can think about all found themselves pregnant just by being on the low dose naltrexone, so again, can be a very powerful medication for fertility support in the right women. We also utilize low-dose naltrexone to help with that endorphin deficiency. So I think about things here like PMS, premenstrual syndrome, mental health and mood dysfunction. So again, as I mentioned at the start, low-dose naltrexone helps to increase those natural endorphins, which improves your mood, your resilience, and it can also improve sleep. And let's be honest, most of us. Aren't getting enough or adequate sleep, and so that can play a huge role when it comes to your mood. Okay. Low-dose naltrexone is especially helpful in hormone driven mood issues like PMS or PMDD or postpartum depression or anxiety. And one of the things I love most about low-dose naltrexone is that it works quickly. It avoids some of the side effects that we have from otherwise utilizing some of the antidepressant medications and it helps women get back that. Inner ability to respond instead of just to react to their situation. And so by giving your brain more of those natural endorphins, you are able to effectively improve your overall serotonin and dopamine and really have that impact very quickly. We also utilize low-dose naltrexone, as I mentioned, for many autoimmune conditions. So this is not just specific to women's health, but we utilize it in thyroid antibody disease like Hashimoto's or Graves Disease. We also see low-dose Naltrexone used in other rheumatologic conditions like lupus or Sjogren's syndrome or rheumatoid arthritis. In the world of GI Health, we use it to treat Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, and it's also used in many other chronic conditions like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, and irritable bowel syndrome, many of which are underdiagnosed in women or hard to pinpoint. Again, the way that low-dose Naltrexone works for these autoimmune conditions is it helps to calm down the immune system without suppressing it. And so this is really beneficial because many women with autoimmune conditions are placed on these anti-rejection medications or these immune modulating medications that then make them more susceptible to other infections and can come with their own serious side effects and health consequences. And so instead, if we can find this balance with helping to just calm the immune system down, we're able to have better regulation of not only the chronic autoimmune condition. Also the other hormones that can be regulated because of that. And the last category that I'd like to just mention with low-dose naltrexone is that we can utilize it to help with the treatment of PCOS or a polycystic ovarian syndrome. And so many different symptoms of PCOS are benefited from the treatment with naltrexone, including blood sugar imbalance or insulin resistance. Liver inflammation, depression, or anxiety with that endorphin deficiency and infertility or recurrent miscarriages. Now most of the time with naltrexone and PCOS, we are still utilizing that low dose naltrexone. However, there is a small set of some women, usually around 10% with PCOS, that actually get more irregular cycles if they're on the low dose naltrexone. And in those cases, we sometimes will try the higher dose or the normal dose of Naltrexone at a dosage of 25 to 50 milligrams daily in order to restore normal cycles. More studies are still needed as PCOS is oftentimes still underdiagnosed, and we oftentimes see that it's treated inappropriately and not from a restorative standpoint most of the time. So again, low dose naltrexone can be used for so many different conditions when it comes to women's health, and it's really important to consider it, especially when some of the mainstream things haven't worked out. So how do you know if low-dose naltrexone is right for you? It's typically a fairly well tolerated medication and does have some potential side effects that I always like to tell people about. So initially you can experience some restless sleep. Low-dose naltrexone works best when you give it right before bedtime, and typically we say somewhere between 9:00 PM to 1:00 AM is where it really works the best. And so by taking it right before bed, it can cause some restless sleep initially. Many patients that I prescribe this medication to do report that they have vivid dreams. Now, this typically is not nightmares, but it generally is just very vivid details or more vibrant colors, and oftentimes that persists. Again, that's a good sign because we are secreting more endorphins. You are getting into that deeper sleep and typically it helps overall with long-term sleep. And then the last side effect we consult patients on is a potential for GI upset. This can be anywhere from nausea to vomiting, to diarrhea, and generally it's a very rare side effect we see. But if it's not tolerated after a couple of weeks, it might not be a good fit for you. So overall the medication is very well tolerated. We see significant improvement and generally fairly rapidly. Most women come back to me even within a few days or a week afterwards and they say, oh my goodness, I had no idea how much I actually needed this medication. I feel so much better very quickly. Now low-dose naltrexone is a prescription strength medication, so you can't just go and pick it up over the counter. And I always recommend that you would get this from a prescriber who is familiar with utilizing low-dose naltrexone because it is not a common medication that is utilized across the board. But it is not just specific to the healthcare field of restorative reproductive medicine. And again, as with all medications, it's best when it's combined with a personalized restorative approach specific to you in conjunction with lifestyle modifications and additional hormonal balancing and support where needed. If you felt dismissed in the past or like your body is constantly working against you, please know you're not imagining it and there are real potentially reversible things going on beneath the surface that deserve attention. If you're curious about whether low-dose Naltrexone could help with your symptoms of endometriosis, P-M-S-P-C-O-S, or fertility troubles, let's talk. Book a free discovery call, and I'd love to hear more about your story and explore options that actually support your healing. Imagine if your period pain or your PMS or infertility didn't control your life and your hormones finally felt imbalance. Low-dose Naltrexone could be a part of your personalized plan to improve health and promote fertility. If you're ready to work with our elite team of healthcare professionals, go to our website, radiant clinic.com to schedule a free discovery Call with me and learn more about our package based pricing for comprehensive care. We are currently able to see people for in-person appointments in our Cedar Rapids, Iowa Clinic. Or can arrange for a telehealth visit if you live in many different states across the us. Check out our website for current states that we can serve medical clients and let us know if your state is not listed to see if we can still cover you there as we are constantly expanding our reach. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Please share this podcast with someone in your life who would benefit from our services. Remember to subscribe to this podcast for more empowering content that I look forward to sharing with you on our next episode of Cycle Wisdom.