If you’re looking for a hormone therapy clinic in Tampa and are interested in using a practice that takes a functional medicine strategy to medical care, then this article is for you.
Initially, we’d like to offer some background regarding hormone replacement therapy (HRT) or hormone therapy (HT), which doctors have been prescribing to ladies since the early 1940s.
HRT is recommended to relieve menopausal symptoms, including menstrual cramps, hot flashes, night sweats, and mood swings. It also protects against age-related health conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, certain kinds of cancer, and osteoporosis.
In fact, by 1992, Premarin became the top-prescribed drug in the U.S., with sales going beyond $1 billion by 1997. (The drug was named Premarin after “pregnant mares’ urine” from where it was derived, and it consisted mostly of estrone– the main estrogen women produce after menopause.).
Premarin was effective for relieving specific menopausal symptoms, but not without controversy. As early as the 1950s, issues over possible health dangers began to swirl around hormone therapy.
In the 1970s, some studies showed that taking estrogen boosted a woman’s danger of cancer in the uterus. Women who still had their uterus were recommended a combination of estrogen and artificial progesterone (progestin) to protect versus this problem.
In the late 1990s, hormone therapy began falling out of favor as a new study connected it to possible increased dangers for breast cancer, blood clots, stroke, gallbladder illness, and, in women over 65, dementia. As a result, doctors have scaled back their use of hormone therapy considerably.
Currently, with a deeper understanding of hormones and the growing availability of bioidentical hormones, specialists in functional and integrative medicine are offering much safer and more effective methods for restoring healthy hormonal balance in women.
Identifying the Symptoms of Hormonal Imbalance.
If you’re a woman around the age of 50, your ovaries slowly generate less and less estrogen, resulting in a hormonal imbalance. You may start to experience hot flashes and observe undesirable changes to your skin and hair appearance.
Belly fat swells as your sex life fades, and you can say goodbye to a restful night’s sleep. It’s not simply that hormone levels are less than they were. It’s that they’re out of balance with each other.
You may be experiencing hormonal imbalance if you experience any one of the following usual signs:.
- Anxiety.
- Brain fog (reduced mental clarity/focus).
- Sadness/depression.
- Dry, wrinkled skin.
- Fatigue (lack of energy).
- Hair loss or changes to hair texture (such as hair becoming much more brittle).
- Hot flashes.
- Loss of libido (sex drive).
- Mood swings.
- Difficulty falling or staying asleep.
- Spotting between cycles, heavy bleeding, uneven cycles, painful cycles.
- Tender breasts.
- Vaginal dryness.
- Weight gain, especially around the belly.
This isn’t a brief phase that you go through and from which you recover rapidly. It can last years and even the rest of your life if your balance isn’t recovered.
Lots of women have no idea when they experience their initial hot flash or that they’re standing on the precipice of a major life adjustment that endangers to drain their joy and energy for decades– from peri‑menopause to menopause through post‑menopause.
Finding Bliss in Balance.
Menopausal symptoms aren’t connected so much to low levels of specific sex hormones as they are to imbalances in sex hormones– insufficient or too much of one hormone relative to others.
Restoring hormonal balance can put you back in control of your health and reverse most of the signs of aging. With the ideal balance, you can look forward to living a full life with a sharp mind; restful sleep; stable moods; healthy skin, hair, and nails; optimal weight; and fantastic sex.
Within weeks to months of beginning HT, many women can expect to experience the following benefits:
- Improved sleep quality.
- Healthier skin, hair, and nails.
- Increased energy.
- Enhanced sex drive.
- Elimination of hot flashes and vaginal dryness.
- Reduced anxiety or depression.
- Weight loss.
How We Recover Healthy Hormonal Balance at BioDesign Wellness Center.
Balancing hormones needs much more than just simply including a little of this or a little of that. Many factors play a role in hormone production and how your body processes and uses hormones.
We take a customized method that begins with bringing back entire health. Hormone therapy is like icing on the cake– enhancing your health so that you feel your very best.
Our process for hormone replacement therapy starts with a free consultation with our hormone specialist manager. This will assist us to know your medical history and your certain health and fitness goals.
We order a blood draw and lab tests, and our doctors carefully examine the results. We analyze your levels of sex hormones– estradiol, estrone, progesterone, testosterone, follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), and luteinizing hormone (LH); levels of thyroid hormones, vitamin D, and blood sugar; and biomarkers that might suggest underlying inflammation.
You will then meet with your BioDesign physician to thoroughly examine your lab results and discuss your hormone replacement methods:.
- Oral hormone replacement– pills, liquid, or sublingual (under the tongue).
- Topical creams (absorbed through the skin).
- Injections.
- Tiny pellets are inserted under the skin.
- A combination of the above choices.
We will recommend and apply the option( s) you prefer. Regardless of the delivery method you pick, we use bioidentical hormones– hormones that have the same chemical composition as the hormones women generate in their bodies.
Follow-up consultations will be set up to monitor and adjust your dosage as needed. Hormones are consistently in flux throughout life, so your treatments will need to be aligned accordingly.
It’s important to be on the right bioidentical hormones for the right amount of time and to change levels and ratios as needed to optimize your well-being.
Our goal is nothing other than to help you look and feel your absolute best, and we achieve that by tracking and adjusting your treatment to accommodate changes in your biology.
Learn More About Hormone Replacement Therapy & Other Treatments to Help with Menopause.
As we shared at the outset of this post, the team here at BioDesign Wellness Center has invested years in researching, training, and discussing hormone replacement therapy.
Whether you look for treatment from our Tampa, Fl, functional medicine clinic or another healthcare provider, it’s important that you enter into the hormone replacement therapy procedure fully informed.
Our dedication is to help our clients feel young, younger and energized. We provide bioidentical hormone therapy treatments as well as highly specialized procedures created to satisfy the personal needs of our clients and to reverse the effects of aging and energy loss triggered by menopause or andropause.
Working with our extremely trained and qualified staff, you’ll be able to achieve renewed expectations and regain the vitality of your youthfulness.
If you would like to find out a little bit more about the many life-changing benefits of Hormone replacement therapy, please call us at (813) 445-7770.