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The 'Pause
The menopause podcast with unfiltered conversations about the symptoms you hate, the changes you didn’t see coming, and the hilarious moments midlife can bring. You've got questions and we've got the experts to answer them.
The 'Pause
Is This Perimenopause? The Truth About Symptoms, Hormones & What Your Doctor Isn’t Telling You
Perimenopause begins much earlier than most women realize, typically around age 37, when many are focused on career growth or raising families rather than preparing for hormonal changes.
• Over 400 estrogen receptors exist throughout the body, creating a wide variety of possible symptoms
• Perimenopause can last 2-14 years before reaching menopause (defined as 12 months after final period)
• Women in their 40s are definitely in perimenopause regardless of symptoms
• Hormone testing is often misleading due to natural fluctuations during perimenopause
• Diagnosis should be based on age and symptoms rather than blood work
• Hormone replacement therapy can be beneficial during perimenopause, not just after menopause
• Starting hormone therapy earlier may provide preventative benefits for heart, brain, and bone health
• The link between hormone therapy and breast cancer is much more nuanced than commonly believed
• Insurance companies often arbitrarily cut off hormone therapy at age 65 without medical justification
• Finding menopause-trained providers remains difficult – for every trained physician, 25,000 women need help
Join our Facebook group "The Pause Diaries" to connect with other women, ask questions, and share your menopause journey. Visit menopause.org to find certified menopause practitioners in your area.
Welcome to the Pause the menopause podcast. That's anything but boring. Get ready for unfiltered conversations about the symptoms you hate, the changes you didn't see coming and the hilarious moments only midlife can bring, from the best remedies for hot flashes to tips on beating the menopause belly and answers to your weird symptoms like why do my ears itch, my hips ache, my feet are cramping up and why do I wake up at 3 am every night? I'm your host, val Ago. I'm a health reporter with 25 years experience and I know you are Googling the answers to these symptoms. Why? Because that's exactly what I did. That's why I'm bringing in the experts for the answers. This is your space to laugh, learn and connect with other women who totally get it. I'll be joined by my friend, women's health advocate and clinician, nisha McKenzie, and a lineup of hormone experts from across the country. We'll tackle the good, the bad and the downright awkward sides of perimenopause and menopause. There is no topic that is off-lim limits and there is no symptom that is too small to find the answer to, because, let's face it, menopause is tough, but it is a whole lot easier with friends, laughter and the right advice Together. My hope is that we can rewrite the narrative of menopause, because every woman deserves to feel empowered and informed in this stage of life.
Speaker 1:All right, I want to start things off by talking about probably one of the biggest myths of menopause. Menopause only affects women in their 50s. This is not true. The fact is that perimenopause starts around 37, give or take a few years on either side, and I want you to think about that for a moment 37. What are you doing at 37? You're growing your career, maybe you're getting married, maybe you're starting a family, maybe you're raising your family. I'll tell you what you're not doing, though You're probably not thinking about menopause.
Speaker 1:So I want to bring in my good friend and women's health advocate, nisha McKenzie, to help sort through this myth and many others, because there are a lot of myths that surround menopause. Hi, nisha, hi Val, 37. That is a shocking number to me, that you know. People start to feel different things and write them off as like stress, or they don't really know what the symptoms are and just sort of push them in the back and say, oh, it's because I didn't sleep well last night, or so forth, and so on. What is it about that number? Granted again, give or take a couple years that women should be more tuned into.
Speaker 2:We get pretty focused on numbers, right, and we don't necessarily have to. The average age of menopause is 51 and a half-ish. And then that timeframe around menopause, which around is peri. So perimenopause can be 2 to 12, 2 to 14 years. I always duck when I say that to people because I'm like what do you got that you're going to throw at me?
Speaker 1:Exactly, I mean when I was 2 to 14 years and perimenopause. For those who are trying to differentiate themselves between MIM perimenopause or MIM menopause, perimenopause includes still having a period.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it does. It's, you know, the fluctuations that we have once a month that you get a little bit of a dip in the hormone and you get those PMS symptoms or PMDD, and then you get the period and you get those little dips once a month. In theory, right, those are fluctuations in hormones. When we hit perimenopause, those fluctuations just get bigger, they go higher, they go lower, they go sideways, they go upside down, they go behind you, and it's the fluctuations, it's that delta change that we tend to respond to, that we have symptoms with, and, as women, we just are really good at explaining things away, like you said.
Speaker 2:Well, I got teenagers in the house and they're angsty and that's what's making me feel ragey, like I want to slash some tires or something. Right, we can explain almost everything away and we tend to do that and it's unfortunately not, not, not. It's unfortunately corroborated when we go into medical providers that say, well, it's a normal thing, it's a normal part of aging. And while menopause and perimenopause are normal parts of aging, the symptoms that we experience don't have to be, they don't have to stop us in our tracks, like they tend to.
Speaker 1:The best thing that we can do is be informed and be aware and notice those changes and notice the fact that they may be starting earlier than what anybody thinks they are starting Early to mid-30s, even sometimes sometimes. What is it for women in their 30s that you would want them to pay close attention to, for symptoms of perimenopause that they might be writing off Like real detailed things?
Speaker 2:So I explain it as a buffet, not the fun kind of buffet, but if you go up to a buffet-.
Speaker 1:Sure, is it.
Speaker 2:Nope, you've got all. It sounds delicious in perimenopause, doesn't it? You've got all these options. And I could have an identical twin, that we both go up to the perimenopause buffet and we pick 17 different options between the two of us, so we'll manifest it differently. If you're in your forties, no matter what, you're in perimenopause, Don't let anyone tell you you're too young for that right. You are in perimenopause. It just depends on what symptoms your perimenopause picked. So I mean it can range from hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings, mental fog, sleep disturbances.
Speaker 2:Let's see vaginal dryness, hair skin nails, heart palpitations, itchy ears, dry skin, eczema. That was one of the first things I exhibited was I started getting these eczema patches that I'd never had before. How we process food, our gut metabolism can change. There are over 400 different estrogen receptors in our bodies, everywhere. They're in every organ. I actually can't think of an organ system that doesn't have estrogen receptors in our bodies, everywhere. They're in every organ. I actually can't think of an organ system that doesn't have estrogen receptors. So as things start to fluctuate that big, our body starts to respond. Some of those hundreds of things we can feel, some of them we can't.
Speaker 2:They're more of the silent things like cardiovascular health, bone health some of the organs like our pancreas, that kind of thing, we can't feel all of those things. Some of the organs like our pancreas, that kind of thing, we can't feel all of those things. But many of these things we can feel. And the irony is we have told women from the beginning of time don't listen to your body, right.
Speaker 1:That's very true, right? I believe that for sure.
Speaker 2:Right, Like that period that doesn't hurt you don't have cramps.
Speaker 1:It's all in your head, right? They don't feel as bad as you think they do.
Speaker 2:Right, right, or your period's supposed to hurt, untrue, your period's not supposed to hurt. And so when we tell people this over and over and over again and we live, how many decades going? Okay, well, that's I must be crazy, because that's what's supposed to be happening. Anybody else is functioning, so I must have to just function also. So we just start to soldier through and then when you hit perimenopause, now I'm going to come in and say, hey, listen to your body, and it's a huge change. It's hard to do. And then to be able to listen to it, translate what it says, tell your menopause expert, here's what's happening. And then trust that once you make yourself vulnerable enough to tell that, you're going to get an answer that's validating. That's hard to do.
Speaker 1:You know what else is hard to do Find a menopause expert Tricks, because when I searched for some, I'm like I would have to go hours away. You know, we're starting to get a little bit more. More people are getting into it. There's some virtual ones that you can tap into and have, you know, conversations over Zoom or what have you. But it's amazing to me the number of women that have elected to have men as their, you know, obgyns, men who don't have their organs, that they have that are going to, you know, listen to them, but are they going to be able to do what it is that they need them to do?
Speaker 1:A lot of times, what they immediately say and this is another big myth that we're going to move on to is like let me measure your hormones, let me do a test to see where your hormones are at. What I like two things is. What I like is that you said every woman in their 40s is in perimenopause, and I think women as we age are like oh, you know, I don't want to say that I'm in that because there's that stigma of now you're old, your eggs are drying up, you can't do anything else. Look at the women who have babies in their 40s. I mean, it's still possible, but now you're balancing two different types of hormones, right. But recognize that if you are in your 40s and you're listening to this like you are in perimenopause Now, if you go into your provider and say, hey, I'm experiencing some symptoms, first thing they're going to do is let's test your hormone levels and you say what?
Speaker 2:Why they possibly will. Sometimes women will go in and say test my levels, and they may get a little kickback from that. The issue is remember those fluctuations. If we test your levels we get a blip in time. If you're having a bleed periodically, we'll say sometimes they're not just once a month during perimenopause. Right, the frequency can change, either shorter, closer together or farther apart. But if you're bleeding, you've got estrogen. Estrogen normal range, depending on your lab, can range from 20 to 400 or 500. It's a huge range. So if you're bleeding, you're probably going to fall within that range.
Speaker 2:And if we check a moment in time on Tuesday at 3 pm, your estrogen is going to be between 20 and 500, and then what's going to happen? It doesn't show up as red for your provider, who's probably not a menopause expert, and they're going to look at it and they're going to say your levels are normal, you're fine, those symptoms you're having, they're just normal. And then you're going to leave feeling crazy Because you go no, but this isn't normal, this isn't me, I don't feel like myself. So we tend not to check levels because they're invalidating. Now there are some cases where we will check levels if something just isn't adding up if it doesn't make sense. But for the most part, we don't diagnose perimenopause with blood levels. We diagnose perimenopause by saying how old are you and what are your symptoms. Well then, yeah, you're probably seeing some bigger fluctuations than what your body saw before.
Speaker 2:And if that's the case, what are you interested in addressing? Which parts of these are you interested in addressing? Here are your options. There's hormonal, there's non-hormonal. Here's the risks and benefits. What makes sense for you, what feels appropriate for you?
Speaker 1:And so we're talking about, you know, the hormonal levels. Is perimenopause too soon to explore hormone replacement therapy?
Speaker 2:Absolutely not, and that's been. The hard part is, honestly, after menopause, which is defined as 12 months after your final menstrual period. After that it's almost easier. Your hormones are where they're going to be, your ovaries aren't coming in and kicking up some storms and having like I'm going to go to sleep, peace out and then back we're back to party and causing those big fluctuations again. We seldom again respond to an absolute level of a hormone. We respond more to those fluctuations. So when it's an absolute level postmenopausal I can give you an absolute level of either hormone or something else that can treat your symptoms and we stay there. Perimenopause it can get a little trickier because the ovaries are playing games, they're having moments, they're getting a little tired and then they get a second wind. So we can start hormones then and there is actually a fair amount of data that shows that there may be some additional benefit to starting earlier during perimenopause, not only in quality of life but also quantity, longevity and disease prevention. So we absolutely should. It's often overlooked, unfortunately.
Speaker 1:And that was one of my questions how often are you going to go into your provider in perimenopause? Say, you're 41 years old and you're starting to feel just a little bit off, not like yourself, you know. You may be writing it off to being stressed or tired or whatever. All of these are largely due to hormone fluctuations and you maybe suggest, hey, I'd like to try hormone replacement therapy. What really? I mean, what is going to be the reaction? I don't feel like most providers are going to go towards hormone replacement therapy, because I think we've been trained oh, you have to be postmenopausal almost to be able to get hormone therapy, because now you don't have the hormones, so you need them. You know which. There's some truth to that, but we need to start thinking more about, like, let's start this earlier. And what are the? Are there pros and cons to that?
Speaker 2:There are To starting earlier. Yeah, there are, there's, there's, there are a lot of data that says that the earlier we start, the better we can do with prevention for cardiac heart disease, which is the number one killer in women. We want to prevent that for brain health, cognition. So the earlier we can start, the better we can do with prevention. You are probably going to get some kickback from providers who are not trained Since 2002, I know we're going to talk about the Women's Health Initiative either in this episode or later, but when that study came out back in 2002, since then we have not been training providers. I heard a statistic recently I wish I could remember where that said that for every one woman going through menopause sorry, for every one physician who's trained in menopause, there are 25,000 women who need their help.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh that number is shocking yeah.
Speaker 2:So now, not to be a womp, womp right, there are plenty of providers who are getting trained, and when I first started doing this work 20 years ago, I think there were three in West Michigan, three of us that were working within the menopause sphere. When you know, over the past years, every year at our menopause society conferences we would have a few hundred people. Last year we had over a thousand people and then this past year we had to cap it off. We had to stop registration early because at 1500 people. So what's driving it is the women. I had a wake up call. I kept thinking all these years I just need to go train more providers and I would go and I would speak at conferences or I would teach in medical schools or residencies or PA schools and I don't know. I hoped the needle was budging, but what I realize now is it wasn't. It's the women that is driving this. They're going into their providers and they're demanding better and the providers feel uncomfortable. And then those clinicians go well, shit, I better go learn something.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and there's, you know, they're coming together in groups, they're listening to podcasts like this, they're starting Facebook groups, they're talking with their girlfriends on wine night and realizing that this is a conversation we're going to have. You know, one of the things that I heard that really made me go wow, even though it's a no-brainer. You know, every single woman is going to go through menopause, perimenopause, menopause, postmenopause Every single woman. And in the next 10 years, how many women is that? So we really have a power in being able to change that healthcare system, and this is a topic for another podcast that we can get very passionate about. But we did promise to cover those myths, so we're going to move on to another one. So when we talk about the hormone therapy what it does in regulating your hormones, it also does some things that help with. Like I had hip pain.
Speaker 1:I would wake up in the middle of the night and have to take an ibuprofen. I had no idea where that was coming from or why. I like to think I took care of myself. I exercise, you know. I try to watch what I ate as much as I could, but for the most part I wasn't really changing my diet or exercise at all. And then all of a sudden, this horrible. It felt like my body was sucking the calcium out of my bones. It hurts so bad and I would have to get up and go get ibuprofen. And in the middle of the night, and then, of course, now I'm awake, yeah right, and hot and sweaty, I can't go back to sleep and your mind's racing Right you know, for another two or four hours. And then packages show up at my door the next day and I'm like, oh, what did I order while I was awake during that?
Speaker 1:But anyways, so I feel like there's just a lot of symptoms that were happening to me. Like one day I got up to go get the ibuprofen and my feet I was walking like I was 90. All of a sudden they were cramped up and shuffling and I'm like, what in the world? It took probably a good 20 steps before I felt like I could walk like normal, and this went on for at least a month. So everybody's symptoms are going to be different. Everybody's symptoms are going to be a little bit sometimes strange, and if you notice something all of a sudden is very off the charts for you, I mean that's a time to go in and explore that hormone therapy, how soon when you're on the hormone therapy, you know, can you get relief from these symptoms and is it hard to try and find those? You know the levels Like how do you get?
Speaker 1:those levels?
Speaker 2:Oh, that's a really good question. Know the levels like? How do you get those levels? Oh, that's a really good question. How soon can we get relief? Pretty soon, usually within. Certainly, people will start feeling better within, I'd say, four weeks, some within a week. Poco, holy cow, that was life changing.
Speaker 2:You know, if you're not seeing any change within the first couple of months, then we probably need to make sure we did uncover all other potential causes for your symptoms. But, like to your story with your hip pain, estrogen is a really powerful anti-inflammatory. So when that starts to diminish, inflammation goes up and so as we start to notice more joint pain frozen shoulder is a really common thing people will start to experience in menopause. Joint pain frozen shoulder is a really common thing people will start to experience in menopause. All of these things should be worked up. I mentioned earlier palpitations, heart palpitations. Right, if you're having heart palpitations, yes, that is a typical or a common thing that we see in perimenopause. However, we shouldn't just blame it on perimenopause and not work it up right, we have to make sure we're not missing something else. Same if your hips hurt, we should have whatever your orthopedic doctor or your family doctor will prescribe or will work up for you. So do you need an x-ray? Do you need some other blood work?
Speaker 2:What used to happen is women would go in with this myriad of symptoms and they'd see eight different specialists and all of them would complete a workup and they'd probably all say you're fine, it's normal, nothing's wrong, and then we end up leaving feeling crazy right, Because something's different. Then that's the time that these women can go to their menopause expert and say I've worked it all up, it's not that right. It's not a heart problem, it's not arthritis, it's not frozen shoulder or it is. I've worked it all up and I'm having all these constellations, symptoms. Could this also be due to perimenopause? So we do have to do workups for other organ systems, but we should see improvements. Even if we're using a non-hormonal method. We should see improvements within. Even if we're using a non-hormonal method, we should see improvements within the first month or two.
Speaker 1:Is there an expiration date on hormonal therapy? I mean, is there a time when you have to stop it?
Speaker 2:for any reason Depends on who you ask. If you ask me, let me say no. If you ask your insurance provider, they're going to say 65. Tell me the data. Show me the data, insurance providers. That says that we have to stop hormones at age 65. You're going to get a letter. The patient's going to get a letter. I'm going to get a letter that says, hey, you shouldn't be on this anymore and it's arbitrary. There is no data to suggest we should stop. We just outlive our ovaries, right. Like you said, every woman, if we're blessed to live long enough, we're going to live 40% of our lives in menopause.
Speaker 1:Wow, I didn't even think of it that way, nisha. That's a really impactful way to think of it. It's almost 50% of your life in menopause and the rest of it, you know, having kids and going through the hormones on the other side, right, and the shtick of this is, we are also 50% of the population.
Speaker 2:We're not a rare disease, right? So why 50% of the population lives 40% of their lives in a state of hormone depletion and we know so little about it will still and forever astound me.
Speaker 1:So stopping at 65 is just something that insurances have decided. This is it Like? There's, there's, there's, it's not like. Oh, if you're, if you stay on it, you're going to increase your risk for X, y or Z condition.
Speaker 2:I mean, if you want my cynical opinion of course I do.
Speaker 1:I love your cynical opinion.
Speaker 2:My cynical opinion is they know that if they take, if they scare you off hormones, what better way to control people than to put in stuff and still fear into them? And if they scare you off hormones, what better way to control people than to put instill fear into them? And if they scare you off hormones, you're going to die of something else and they don't have to keep paying for you, right? They know I mean, they've got to know this. They know that their decisions are based in money and if they can stop paying for what is actually, many hormones are too expensive. There are plenty that are generic and bioidentical and safe, but there are many that are too expensive. If they can stop paying for those, they know that you're going to have higher rates of cardiovascular disease, higher rates of breast cancer, higher rates of dementia, osteoporosis, the morbidity and the mortality, the death and disease that comes from those disease states.
Speaker 1:They're like sweet.
Speaker 2:That's cynical, sorry.
Speaker 1:No, but I love the honesty and these are all things that I hadn't explored beyond just the okay, you should really stop your hormones and you can't be on them forever. You trust your doctor, you trust who's telling you that and you're just like okay, well, they should know.
Speaker 2:Well, many medical providers are getting that information from the insurances, right, because they're not learning it in school, and so they see this come through and they go. Well, I guess we better stop. But tell me, does anyone know a man who's on testosterone? And does anyone know if their insurance is telling them, at the age of 65, they have to stop it?
Speaker 1:No, I feel like that's when they go on it, yeah yeah, their gonads right, their testes stop producing hormone.
Speaker 2:They get replenished their hormone and people aren't taking them off of that. Our gonads, our ovaries stop producing hormone and for some reason, at an arbitrary age, we say you should stop it.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think Hugh Hefner was still taking his testosterone right, Because he had a baby when he was like 78 or something like that.
Speaker 1:So there you go. Probably Nothing wrong with that right Lots of things to you know, to unpack and think. You know. When I talked to my husband about starting this menopause podcast, he was excited for me, but his first question was Paws podcast. He was excited for me, but his first question was are you going to have enough subject matter to talk about? Because I feel like right now we could go off in nine different directions, but we have to stay focused on the myths.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to reign it in.
Speaker 1:Right, but we've got plenty more topics that we're going to be exploring. I do want to talk a little bit about the correlation between breast cancer and hormone replacement therapy. About 20 years ago it was like, oh no, never go on hormone replacement therapy because everybody's going to have breast cancer. And then you have women who have breast cancer and have been cleared and, you know, in remission and declared cancer free. You know that. Feel that they can't explore the hormone therapy, declared cancer-free. You know that feel that they can't explore the hormone therapy. It's starting to change tiny, tiny little bit. But, boy, anybody who's gone through breast cancer and has gotten the all clear has a lot of hoops to jump through if they want that hormone therapy, because they're still going to go through perimenopause and menopause and they're still going to have those symptoms. So let's talk a little bit about how that's. We're starting to change the narrative around hormone replacement therapy and its link to breast cancer.
Speaker 2:Slowly, slowly. We are that initially. That study that came out in July 2002, you know all the hormone experts, we all know where we were when that dropped right. It's like that was such a traumatic moment in everyone's lives that we, you know, now look back at and go, wow, this was single-handedly the study did the most damage to women's health of any study in medical history. We can use another episode to kind of go through all the nuances of that study.
Speaker 2:But there were so many things that were wrong with it and one in particular was the breast cancer data. First of all, the study wasn't powered to evaluate for breast cancer. It was a primary prevention study. It was looking for things like cardiovascular disease and diabetes all-cause mortality. So the breast cancer data was a secondary finding and it was also the average age of the person in the study was in the early 60s, which is 10 plus years beyond the average age of menopause. At that age we also have higher rates of heart disease and breast cancer and those things. So we have a lot. We have 20 plus years of data since then and even going back with a fine-tooth comb and going through that study, what we saw in that study was there were two arms in the study a progestogen or a progestin, a synthetic progestin and estrogen arm for those people who had a uterus and we need the progestin part to protect the uterus and then an estrogen-only arm for those people who do not have a uterus.
Speaker 2:The progestin, the combination arm, had showed a. What did I say? Let's do it back. The progestin-only arm showed a. Three additional women per 1,000, per five years of use, developed a breast cancer. So statistically significant. I don't want anyone to develop breast cancer. However, they did not show increase in death from breast cancer. These women didn't die from their breast cancer.
Speaker 2:What we do know is more women did develop cardiovascular disease from being torn off or ripped off of their hormones. Right, we tend to do this in medicine. We go, hey, you've got endometriosis, let me fix your endometriosis, and then we wash our hands of it and go, you're fine, and we don't pay attention to the whole human that was attached to that endometriosis and the relationships that were affected. Right, there is a whole human attached to those breasts, right With a heart, with a brain, with a pancreas, with bones, with a colon, right With a relationship with a vagina. All of these things can be negatively affected with a lack of estrogen. So we have to take that whole picture. I'm not saying that hormones are perfect or a great fit for everybody, but I promise that they're a better fit for more people than what we think they are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think so too. I'm happy to see the change, as slow as it is, the more people going on. But I know, even like when I talk about it for my girlfriends, like they're very concerned, they're very like, oh, you go first, you know, and I'm like, fine, I'll go first. And so then I'm like you know what happened to me? I actually sleep through the night. I sleep through the night and I'm not sweating anymore and my anxiety level is like, first of all, I look at it and I think to myself I should have done this 10 years ago. Like, first of all, I look at it and I think to myself I should have done this 10 years ago, because my anxiety level is like amazing, as in like it's very low and so many other things.
Speaker 1:The longer I was on it, the more I was like, wow, that was a symptom too, and oh, and that was a symptom too. Oh, so I feel like there are many more benefits to trying it. I mean, you can always try it and go off of it if you don't feel like it was the thing for you. But I just would like more women to not be so scared about it and I feel like the scare tactic, whether they know it or not, might have come from this study and people saying they're bad. All they know is really all the things that people want to hear about, like a third of what you tell them anyways. So all they're taking from that is that like no, it's not a good thing, Don't do it. It's going to do terrible things to your body.
Speaker 2:The scare tactic worked. What I always tell people is estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, any of them. They're neither good nor bad. I'm just going to say we're not going to say our ages.
Speaker 2:Good I don't care if you say my age but, but well, obviously my age. So 48 year old Nisha has a different set of risks. When, if I go on estrogen today, I'm already on estrogen, we'll just, we'll disclose that. But if I were to go on estrogen today, then 58 year old Nisha, it's not about estrogen, it's about the whole picture of what am I adding estrogen to? What environment am I adding estrogen to? That's what helps paint our risk.
Speaker 2:The FDA hasn't figured this out yet. Sorry, fda, but figure your shit out. So what happens is on estrogen. They have a black box warning that says estrogen causes probable dementia, stroke, heart attacks, cancer. I can't remember exactly all the other things, but it's on estrogen. That's in birth control pills, which is a much higher potency synthetic ethanol, estradiol and it's on estrogen that we put in our vagina, which is fractions of a level of an estrogen in a bioidentical, topical form. Their risks are completely different. That's like comparing apples and oranges. It's like comparing apples and puppy dogs. It's not even apples and they're not even the same fruit.
Speaker 1:They're not even a fruit.
Speaker 2:We can't blanket statement these, no.
Speaker 1:And when you think about like some of the things where they're saying these are all the risks that you're going to have. Now there's studies coming out that saying that you know the earlier you might get on hormone therapy, the better protected you'll be against getting dementia, which you look back and you think, ok, look at the statistics about that surround dementia. Why do more women have it? I don't know no-transcript study.
Speaker 2:You know it, it is. I agree with you and I hear this and there's a little bit of data that shows this. We need so much more data with cognition, dementia, Alzheimer's than what we have in this relation to hormones. But at this point it is tough to know what's correlated, what's causative, because we don't have the data. What data we do have does say that it's not likely to be helpful for treatment, right? So once we already have that cognitive decline and once we already have that cognitive decline and once we already have heart disease, we're not likely to to have much benefit for those particular things.
Speaker 1:If we start hormones, then lots of things to unpack, lots of things to talk about, I know, but, um, so I just want to thank everybody for listening. This is our first one out of the gate. Uh, nisha and I will be doing this together, but we, as promised, are going to be bringing in experts based on your symptoms, your information that you want to have. We're going to be talking about all kinds of topics around this endless, endless topics when it comes to menopause, but just what? Our real goal is? To try to get more people talking, more people interested and engaged in making changes and having better health.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and send us your questions. We like the validation, right Of knowing I'm not the only one going through this. I'm not crazy, I'm not broken. I am a human who's lived long enough to experience the lack of my hormones, right? So, yay, and there are providers out there. Can we drop a resource for people? We sure can. Okay, so if you go to your internet and go to menopauseorg this is the Menopause Society you can type in the find a provider type in your zip code. You'll find providers who have been listed on their website as people who have attended their meetings, people who are members of their society, and then you'll also find providers who are certified, and the certification for this is not just paying money, like maybe a lot of different societies. You just pay the money and you get a title or something right. This one you do have to study. It's pretty rigorous. You take an exam, you sit for an exam and then you can have certification, and so you do have to prove your knowledge beyond just general knowledge.
Speaker 1:And so we are going to have a Facebook group. It's called the Paws Diaries. So, until next time, stop over, join that Facebook group. That's where we're going to have the links to the menopauseorg. That's where we're going to have the links to anything that we talk about on the podcast, and we're going to reshare the podcast there as well, if you, in case, you haven't downloaded it. And we want you to share your pause journey with us, and we want you to share your pause journey with the other women in the Facebook group. Again, it's called the pause diaries. On Facebook, it is a closed group, so you'll have to ask to be invited into it, but we really want to talk with you. We want to know what's going on. We want to know what you want to know. So remember, this is not the end of anything. It is the beginning of the rest of your life.
