Although hot flashes and weight gain may be the most talked-about menopause horrors, the potential maladies of menopause are every bit as diverse as the millions of women who experience them every day. Your body chemistry is unique, as are the changes menopause can bring your hormone levels. This means only precise, customized measurement, treatment and monitoring of your individual hormones can put you back on track.
We’ve all heard about what menopause can do to our bodies, but the mental and emotional effects are often much worse. Here’s a list Oprah Winfrey compiled from interviewees when she was struggling with her own mid-life changes: “Anxiety. Fatigue. Low-grade depression. Lack of confidence, curiosity, drive, ambition. A sense of being overwhelmed. Feeling flat and dead and afraid. A general feeling of malaise.”
All that could make you want to give up, but please don’t until you consider trying the methods that soon had Oprah saying: “ … the sky was bluer, my brain was no longer fuzzy, my memory was sharper. I was literally singing and had a skip in my step.”
Oprah, who has long had access and means to the best medical care available anywhere, found her former zest through a proper diagnosis and customized treatment by an anti-aging physician who specialized in BHRT: bio-identical (natural) hormone replacement therapy.
BHRT, also offered by Wilmington’s Metro MediSpa, differs from traditional “synthetic” hormone replacement therapies in that bio-identicals are derived from natural plant sources like soy and wild yam extracts and mimic the hormones naturally produced by a woman’s body, thus avoiding the ill health effects of synthetic hormones.
Most important is how much variation there is among different women’s hormone levels, especially during menopause; what worked for your girlfriend, or maybe even your sister or mother, isn’t likely to address your deficiency symptoms. A BHRT/anti-aging specialist can test to pinpoint your personal hormone deficiencies and prescribe individually compounded formulas to meet your specific needs, just as Oprah’s specialist did. Because bio-identical hormone replacement therapy is natural and customizable, it offers the potential for much better results than the outdated methods of treating menopausal symptoms with the “one-pill-fits-all” dispensing of synthetic pharmaceutical hormones.
