06-21-2023 Primetime Living - Flipbook - Page 8
8 A Special Advertising Section of Baltimore Sun Media Group | Wednesday, June 21, 2023
MENOPAUSE
All about
menopause
Clearing the air on what
is safe and what is not
By Margit B. Weisgal, Contributing Writer
Dr. Avrum Bluming
E
Dr. Carol Tavris
Dr. Wen Shen
Dr. Daniel Minkin
very year I see my gynecologist, Dr. Daniel Minkin at Aurora Women’s
Health, and every year we would have a pretty easy appointment except for
one bone of contention. He wanted me to go off estrogen, and I didn’t. We
never really talked about why I was being so stubborn.
Menopause is a very personal subject
for me. When I was 39, I was diagnosed
with cervical cancer. As was the procedure at the time, I had a hysterectomy (removal of the uterus) and a partial
oophorectomy (removal of one or both
ovaries) due to cysts. (Hysterectomies are
no longer a standard treatment for early
stages of cervical cancer.) Three years
later, the remaining partial ovary stopped
producing estrogen, and I started a very
atypical menopause.
For women like me, the drop can be
sudden, like plunging off a cliff, and it can
set off a cascade of symptoms.
I was overwhelmed with hot flashes
(medically referred to as flushes) – as
many as 20 to 30 a day – and night
sweats, a feature of sudden menopause
due to surgery. It took my doctor over six
months to come up with an effective dose
of estrogen to control what were enervating, debilitating symptoms. He would try
one combination of pills and dosages,
then six weeks later it would stop working. This was repeated over and over
again until, finally, we found a combination that worked. Almost 20 years later,
unlike most women whose symptoms last
an average of seven and half years, mine
were still going strong.
Then, as you’ll read below, the
Women’s Health Initiative study claimed
hormone replacement was dangerous
and should not be prescribed. My symptoms were still raging, so I ignored the
headlines, as did my doctor, and stayed
on estrogen.
Years later, with a new gynecologist,
I was still fighting the battle. In 2019,
Minkin, as he did annually, asked me
again to stop estrogen and see how I
felt. I, to my detriment, finally acceded.
Then, after six urinary tract infections in a
row, another health issue due to estrogen
depletion, a referral to Dr. Aisha Taylor, a
urogynecologist, and more tests, I asked
if I should go back on estrogen. “Yes,”
Taylor said emphatically, so I did.
Then, this year, when I had my annual
appointment, Minkin told me I may have
been correct to stay on estrogen replacement. I asked what happened.
“The change has been gradual,” he
explains. “I was reading articles, discussing the issue of hormone replacement
with colleagues, and there were my own
misgivings about how my patients were
suffering with symptoms. Either we were
hesitant to write a prescription, or they
were hesitant to accept it. Then I heard
a podcast with Dr. Avrum Bluming and
Carol Tavris, Ph.D., coauthors of Estrogen
Matters: Why Taking Hormones in
Menopause Can Improve Women’s WellBeing and Lengthen Their Lives – Without
Raising the Risk of Breast Cancer, and I
read the book. After that, I was all in.”
It is long past time to revisit what we
know about menopause. We need a better understanding of how it affects women’s health and their day-to-day lives,
what options are available for symptom
relief, and the long-term effects of those
remedies. It’s also time for the doctors
who minister to us during menopause to
update their knowledge instead of relying
on old inaccurate data. The landscape
has changed dramatically with new studies, so it’s not fair to their patients who
need to have their symptoms managed,
especially when they will probably spend
a third of their lives post-menopausal.
An article in the British Journal of
General Practice, a publication of the
Royal College of General Practitioners,
describes the landscape. “Around 75%
of menopausal women experience symptoms, with around one-third of these
experiencing severe symptoms, which
Menopause, continued on page 24
