Reclaiming Your Life from Menopause
The goal is to raise awareness around this natural stage of a woman’s life that has proven to be so disruptive and distressing to so many women.
But “awareness” isn’t an issue for the 27 million women in the U.S. between the ages of 45 and 64 who experience menopause each year.
They don’t need a reminder — they’re more aware of it than they care to be.
During this stage of her life, a woman’s hormone levels decline, periods cease, and more than half of all women experience one or more of the following symptoms:
- Anxiety
- Brain fog (reduced mental clarity/focus)
- Dry, wrinkled skin
- Fatigue (lack of energy)
- Hair loss or changes to hair texture (such as hair becoming much more brittle)
- Hot flashes
- Joint and muscle aches
- Loss of libido (low sex drive)
- Mood swings
- Night sweats
- Poor sleep
- Sadness/depression
- Spotting between cycles, heavy bleeding, uneven cycles, painful cycles
- Tender breasts
- Vaginal dryness
- Weight gain, especially around the belly
Unfortunately, most women who experience these symptoms suffer alone and in silence. About 80 percent rely on non-prescription products, such as dietary supplements, to alleviate symptoms, and only about 17 percent use some form of hormone therapy — often choosing to go back on the pill.
Most of this suffering is unnecessary. Effective treatments are available to restore hormonal balance and get these women back to feeling like themselves again.
What Is Menopause?
Menopause is a stage in a woman’s life when the ovaries gradually start to produce less of the female hormone estrogen, which results in a hormonal imbalance. It’s not simply that a woman has less of a certain sex hormone — such as estrogen or progesterone — it’s that the hormones are out of balance with each other.
This isn’t a brief phase that a woman passes through and then fully recovers. It can last for years on end. Many women have no idea when they experience the first hot flash that they’re standing on the precipice of a major life adjustment that threatens to drain their joy and energy for decades — from peri‑menopause to menopause to post‑menopause.
So, what are women between the ages of 45 and 64 to do? One option is to consider is hormone replacement therapy.
Traditional Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT)
Hormone replacement therapy (HRT), or simply hormone therapy (HT), has been used since the early 1940s to help 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.
By 1992, a drug called Premarin (named after “pregnant mares’ urine” from which it was derived) became the top-prescribed drug in the U.S. Premarin consists mostly of estrone — the main form of estrogen that women produce after menopause.
Premarin was effective for relieving specific menopausal symptoms, but concerns over potential health risks began to arise as early as the 1950s. In the 1970s, one study showed that taking estrogen increased the risk of developing uterine cancer. Women who still have their uterus have often been prescribed a combination of estrogen and artificial progesterone (progestin) to reduce the risk.
By the late 1990s, hormone therapy was falling out of favor as a new study connected it to possible increased risk for breast cancer, blood clots, stroke, gallbladder illness, and, in women over 65, dementia.
Now, with a deeper understanding of hormones and the growing availability of bioidentical hormones, practitioners of functional and integrative medicine are offering much safer and more effective forms of hormone therapy.
Restoring Healthy Hormonal Balance
Menopausal symptoms are primarily the result of an imbalance in sex hormones — too much or too little of one hormone in relation 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 great sex.
Within weeks to months of beginning HT, many women start to experience the following benefits:
- Improved sleep
- Healthier skin, hair, and nails
- Increased energy
- Enhanced sex drive
- Elimination of hot flashes and vaginal dryness
- Reduced anxiety or depression
- Weight loss
Our Approach to Menopause Treatment
Balancing hormones involves much more than merely adding a little of this or a little of that. Many factors play a role in hormone production and how the body processes and uses hormones. We take a personalized approach with the goal of restoring whole health.
We know that diet, weight, and lifestyle play a large role in how you feel about yourself and your inner health. For that reason, we will create a protocol for you of diet, exercise, and supplementation based on your medical history, lab test results, and health and fitness goals. Hormone therapy is like icing on the cake — taking your health and fitness to the next level.
Our approach to hormone replacement therapy starts with a free consultation with our hormone specialist manager to gain insight into your medical history and your specific health and fitness goals. We then 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 may indicate underlying inflammation.
You will then meet with your BioDesign physician to review your lab results and discuss available hormone replacement methods:
- Oral hormone replacement — pills, liquid, or sublingual (under the tongue)
- Topical creams (absorbed through the skin)
- Injections
- Tiny pellets inserted under the skin (subcutaneous)
- A combination of the above choices
Regardless of the delivery method you choose, 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. Hormone levels change over time, so we need to closely monitor your levels for any changes and make suitable adjustments. 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.
Here at BioDesign Wellness Center, we have invested years in research and training to deepen our knowledge and fine-tune our approach to restoring healthy hormonal balance in both women and men. Whether you look for treatment from our Tampa functional medicine clinic or another healthcare provider, it’s important that you enter into hormone therapy fully informed.
If you would like to find out more about the many life-changing benefits of hormone therapy, contact us to schedule your free consultation.
———
Disclaimer: The information in this blog post about hormone replacement therapy for women is provided for general informational purposes only and may not reflect current medical thinking or practices. No information contained in this post should be construed as medical advice from the medical staff at BioDesign Wellness Center, Inc., nor is this post intended to be a substitute for medical counsel on any subject matter. No reader of this post should act or refrain from acting on the basis of any information included in, or accessible through, this post without seeking the appropriate medical advice on the particular facts and circumstances at issue from a licensed medical professional in the recipient’s state, country or other appropriate licensing jurisdiction.