If you're on oestrogen gel, you'll know this conversation. "Let's try three pumps instead of two and see how you get on." Off you go — and then what? Weeks pass. You feel… maybe a bit better? Or is that the weather? Or that you slept properly for once? By the time you're back in front of your doctor, the honest answer is "I genuinely can't remember."
"Change your dose and see how you get on" is fine advice from your doctor, but it quietly puts all the measuring on you, with no instrument to measure with. So I built the instrument.
The problem with "see how you go"
A dose change only tells you something if you can compare before and after. But the before is already gone — it's last month, fading by the day. Our memories are kind, unreliable narrators, especially through brain fog. We remember the last few days vividly and the previous six weeks as a blur. That's not a personal failing; it's just how memory works. It's also why so many of us end up shrugging at appointments and guessing.
How to actually do it (truthfully, no magic)
Here's the honest mechanism — no AI deciding anything for you, just the app spotting the real patterns in your own data and showing them to you:
- Log how you feel every day, before you change anything. Mood, energy, brain fog, whichever symptoms matter to you — a quick daily tap. This builds your "before."
- When you change your dose, update it in the app. Two pumps becomes three. Your strengths are stored as free text, so it records exactly what you're actually on, whichever brand you're using.
- Keep logging. Same quick daily tap.
- See what the app pulls out for you. Look at the weeks before the change and the weeks after. HRTMe doesn't just hand you raw numbers — it picks out the real patterns in your own logs and highlights them: your most-logged symptoms, whether you're logging more or fewer than before, the days in your cycle that tend to be your best and worst, the symptoms that keep landing together. So you can actually see whether your better days got more frequent, whether the brain fog lifted, whether the night sweats eased off.
That's the honest mechanism. No AI guessing how you feel today, no made-up "your mood improved 23%," and — whatever I add in future — your data is never shipped off to be fed into a cloud AI. Just the real patterns in your own logs, spotted and surfaced for you so you can finally see the shape of it. The app does the spotting; the judgement stays yours.
Why charts beat a notebook here
You could, in theory, keep all this in a notebook. I did, for a while. The trouble is a notebook hides patterns inside pages of scribble — you can't flick back through three months of notes and see a trend. When the same logs become a simple chart, the before-and-after jumps out. The notebook had the data the whole time; it just never let me see it.
You'll also spot things you weren't looking for — that your worst days cluster at a particular point in your cycle, say, or that two symptoms keep turning up together. That context makes a dose change much easier to judge than a single "better or worse?" gut feeling.
Then take it to your doctor
This is where it really pays off. Instead of "I think three pumps is maybe better?", you walk in with your GP report: here's the date I changed, here's how I was before, here's how I've been since. That's a completely different appointment. Your doctor can make a proper call with a proper record — and you're an active partner in your own treatment instead of a guesser.
Experimenting with your dose is normal and often necessary. You just deserve to be able to see the result, not squint at a feeling. That's the whole reason this part of the app exists.
— Jane
HRTMe is a medication reminder and wellbeing tracking tool. It doesn't provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Any change to your dose should be agreed with your prescribing clinician. Read more about what happens if you take HRT late, and see the full HRTMe FAQ and guided by your prescribing clinician.