Treatment Decision Tree

What the Treatment Decision Tree does

The Treatment Decision Tree asks a short series of Yes/No questions and points you toward one category of care to raise with a clinician. It is not a diagnosis and does not prescribe anything. It sorts your answers into one of seven paths: perimenopause symptom management, standard hormone therapy (HRT), late HRT initiation with a specialist, a PCOS workup, GLP-1 weight management, a mood-primary presentation, or a preventive screening baseline.

The tree opens with the symptoms that most often send women looking for hormonal care. The first question asks whether you regularly have hot flashes, night sweats, or vaginal dryness. Answer yes and the tool follows the menopause branch, next asking whether your cycles have been irregular or absent for 12 or more months, then whether you are under 60 or within 10 years of menopause onset. Answer no to the first question and it pivots to weight and metabolic changes, then to signs of androgen excess, then to mood. Wherever you land, you get a plain-language outcome card with a suggested care category, concrete next steps such as specific lab panels to ask about, and links to related pages on this site.

Every path, question, and outcome is written into the code as fixed text. The same answers always produce the same result. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere, scored, or compared against other people. You can go Back to change an answer or Start over at any point.

How to read your result

Read the outcome as a starting category for a conversation, not a verdict. Each card names a care direction and lists next steps — often a specific lab panel (for example FSH, estradiol, and TSH on the menopause paths, or A1c, lipids, and thyroid on the GLP-1 path) and the kind of clinician to see. Those are prompts to bring to an appointment, not orders you can act on alone. A prescriber can confirm whether the category fits you and whether the labs are appropriate.

The path you get is decided entirely by which buttons you press, so the honest answer is the useful one. If you are unsure on a question, try it both ways and read both outcomes — the tool makes that easy with the Back button, and seeing two adjacent cards often clarifies which situation actually describes you.

Treat the thresholds in the cards as the tool's rules of thumb, not personalized medical advice. The '12 or more months without a period' question reflects the standard line between perimenopause and menopause. The 'under 60 or within 10 years of onset' question reflects the window in which the tool treats HRT as most favorable. The GLP-1 card mentions a BMI of 27 or higher with a related condition, or 30 or higher on its own. Whether any of these apply to you is a clinical judgment, not something this page can settle.

What the result is based on

The result comes only from your Yes/No answers walked through a fixed branching map defined in the tool's source. There is no statistical model, no dataset, no machine learning, and no clinical validation behind it. It is a series of if-this-then-that steps that an editor wrote by hand, and the numbers it cites — 12 months without a period, the under-60 or within-10-years window, the BMI 27-with-comorbidity or 30-alone reference for GLP-1, and the Rotterdam-criteria framing for PCOS — are thresholds hardcoded into the questions and outcome text, not values calculated from your input.

clearhormones.com is an affiliate-supported information site. It does not sell, prescribe, or provide medical care, and the links on each outcome card are navigational — they take you to provider comparison pages, related quizzes, or explainer articles so you can research options. They are not treatment sign-ups.

What it cannot tell you

• It branches on one symptom at a time, so overlapping situations get flattened. If you have both menopausal hot flashes and significant weight gain, the very first question routes you down the menopause branch and the tool never asks about your weight — the GLP-1 and PCOS paths are only reachable when you answer no to hot flashes, night sweats, and vaginal dryness.
• Every question is a binary Yes/No. There is no room for 'sometimes,' 'mild,' or 'I'm not sure,' and severity, duration, and frequency beyond the single 12-month cycle question are not captured.
• It never asks about your medical history, medications, family history, blood clots, breast cancer risk, cardiovascular disease, pregnancy, or contraindications. The HRT paths in particular point you toward hormone therapy without knowing anything that would make it unsafe for you — that risk-benefit assessment belongs entirely to a clinician.
• It records no measurements. It mentions BMI, waist circumference, and lab values in the next-steps lists but does not collect or check any of them, so it cannot tell you whether you actually meet the thresholds it references.
• The outcomes are a fixed set of seven categories. Conditions outside its map — thyroid disease as a primary driver, endometriosis, fibroids, primary ovarian insufficiency, or male-partner factors in fertility questions — have no path and will get sorted into whichever nearby branch your answers happen to trigger.
• It cannot diagnose anything or confirm you have menopause, PCOS, or any other condition. It only suggests which category of care and which questions to bring to a prescriber.