How do I know if I have endometriosis?

Endometriosis can resemble other conditions, cause subtle symptoms or none, and produce pain that doesn’t reliably reflect how much disease is present. Common clues include disruptive period pain, pelvic pain between periods, pain with sex, pain spreading to the back or legs, and difficulty conceiving, along with cycle-linked bowel or bladder symptoms such as painful bowel movements, constipation, diarrhea, urinary urgency, or bladder pain. Symptoms can vary with lesion location and depth, so we look for patterns over time: cyclic or progressively worsening symptoms and triggers such as bleeding, ovulation, intercourse, or bowel movements.

Adenomyosis involves tissue within the uterine muscle rather than endometriosis lesions outside the uterus; both can cause painful periods and pelvic pain, adenomyosis commonly causes heavy bleeding, and neither condition is consistently more painful than the other.

Our evaluation starts with your full symptom history, past treatments, and what helped or didn’t, to distinguish look-alikes and identify coexisting pain drivers such as pelvic floor dysfunction, gut dysbiosis, vascular congestion, or nerve sensitization. Expertly interpreted ultrasound or MRI may identify suspected endometriosis, endometriomas, adenomyosis, or other pelvic conditions, but normal imaging cannot rule out endometriosis, including when difficulty conceiving is the main clue. When symptoms and findings support surgery, minimally invasive laparoscopy with tissue examination provides gold-standard confirmation, and excision can treat the disease during the same procedure.

If you’re seeking answers, including after normal test results, you’re welcome to schedule a consultation with our team to review your records, map symptoms to likely drivers, and discuss deeper evaluation, targeted testing, or excision planning according to your goals.