#262 Understanding Menopause: The Symptoms, Science, and Solutions You Need Now

The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions.

Dr. Donnie Wilson struggled for decades to solve her numerous health issues and heal her body. But with focused determination, she healed herself and in doing so, she discovered the Dr. Donnie stress recovery Protocol. On this show, you're going to hear from doctors, nutritionists and Experts along with Dr. Donnie, who will give practical advice and wisdom to help heal your body. This is How Humans Heal the number.

Of women who are postmenopausal is increasing every year.

In 2030, it's estimated that over a billion women around the world will be postmenopausal. And that's exactly why in this video and episode of How Humans Heal, I'm going to be starting to talk about menopause, both perimenopause post menopause, because I believe that this is a topic that deserves way more attention and I want to be part of educating women and being an advocate for women during the menopause transition, helping them to be informed in making decisions for your health now and into the future. I'm Dr. Donny Host of How Humans Heal Women's Health Expertise. I've been helping women with their health, including menopausal symptoms, for over 25 years and I just recently have completed at least two additional trainings in helping women through menopause, including a menopause boot camp taught by my mentor and.

My.

Instructor in Women's Health, Dr. Tori Hudson. And I want to share with all of you information that I feel like should be in your reach, in your hands to help you become better advocates for yourself and for you to be able to make decisions for yourself going forward. In fact, there's so much I want to teach you about menopause. There's more that I'm going to be able to cover in this one video. So today, in this video, I want to talk about the common symptoms and health issues for women to start thinking about and noticing in your bodies so you can start to understand the experience of menopause for yourself. And in subsequent videos, I'm going to go into more detail on additional topics related to testing for hormones, as well as hormone replacement therapy and natural approaches for menopausal symptoms, including how can we help women with symptoms like weight gain in addition to hot flashes and some of the others we'll be going to be talking about today. So I welcome you to join me on this journey and series of interviews and videos related to menopause. And let's get started. So I as I mentioned, menopause is, and women who are in menopause is, the number is increasing as time goes on. So more and more women are in this time of their life. In fact, it's estimated that women spend 40% of of their life in menopause. And sometimes that's surprising when you think about it. If you're under 50 years old, it may seem odd to think about, oh my gosh, I'm going to be spending more than a third, even up to a half of your lifetime in menopause. And that's when it starts to be very eye opening and we realize, wow, this is something we need way more information about. In fact, when women go through menopause, the transition to menopause, they experience as many, if not more hormonal changes in their bodies than they did when they went through puberty. Just take a minute to think about that and to experience validation and acceptance of what you might have been feeling and know noticing in your body as you've been starting to go through and maybe have spent years going through menopausal symptoms.

So I want to start to really focus in and help us understand.

What is it that women are experiencing and what can they do about it. Because unfortunately, menopause has been something that for prior generations of women, they didn't even talk about it. It was something that women didn't talk about or wasn' in society wasn't something we talked about. And oftentimes even you might have even been dismissed by your medical doctor because in most cases medical doctors also haven't been educated about the symptoms of menopause and what women can do about it. So please know that you're not alone if you've been experiencing these symptoms and you're not alone if you've been dismissed by your provider. And I want to be part of changing that. I believe that you, this should be something that we are talking about and women should be getting help with. This is not something where you just have to deal with it or be told it's all in your head or you're just getting old, or it's just menopause. Because those are not.

To me, those are not. That's not enough. We need to notice these symptoms and then help women because there's so much we can do to help women so that you can feel good into this later section of your life.

So one thing to really keep in mind, and I want you're going to hear me acknowledging and repeating throughout this information is to say that it's very individualized as just as we are each individuals, the experience of peri and postmenopause is very individual. So each woman is going to have different symptoms and different sexual sequences and different time periods. And I've observed this through 25 years of helping women with menopause and also now experiencing menopause for myself, I see how varied the experience is. And so to know that it's not one size fits all, and it. You might. It might not even help to compare yourself to another person because you just have to know that it's going to be very different. And we have to then, I think, use it as a chance to connect with yourself and the unique. This uniqueness that is your own body and your own experience and to not be hard on yourself or criticize yourself or judge yourself for what your experience looks like. It simply is your unique experience with your unique genetics. Right. Anything we experience in our bodies is based on our genetics as well as based on our stress exposure in the past and the present and all other variables that then become unique based on your genetics and your stress as well as toxin exposure. So these are the. This is how we're going to constantly come back to when we're looking to help you solve menopausal symptoms. We're going to come back to your genetics and your stress and toxin exposure. And by helping to solve it for. From those perspectives, that's how we can help you to then feel better and prevent health issues going forward. So what are some of the common symptoms? And I want to also emphasize that it can vary based on your race and your location. So many things can affect your experience of menopause. So what does this mean? Menopause? Menopause is when it's been 12 months or essentially one year since your last period. So if it's only been two months, that's not considered menopause. If it's been 10 months and then you have another period, that's still not menopause. So officially, we call it menopause when it's been 12 months of no period, no period, and not even any spotting. Okay. So you want to kind of notice what's happening with your menstrual cycle, because during perimenopause, which is up until the point of menopause, we call it perimenopause. And during that time, there can be a lot of irregular menstrual cycles. So that really is the top symptom. That's the first thing women start noticing is that their period starts going into different patterns than it ever has. So that could mean that your period is coming more often. And sometimes women experience that, you know, at, for a period of time, it could be for six months or it could be for a couple years where your period is coming more often than every 28 days. It could be coming every 25 days, every 23 days. It could vary between 23 days and sometimes it's coming less often. Some women, it starts happening every 30 days, every 35 days, every two months, it starts becoming, and that's what we mean by irregular is that it's not on a consistent 28 day cycle. It starts to come earlier or later or for a period of time later and then earlier. And this can really vary from person to person. It also could change in terms of how heavy the flow is. Some women it starts to become heavier because some women experience a spike in estrogen levels before they go into menopause. Some women, it's not becoming heavier. Some women, it just becomes lighter, lighter, lighter, lighter, and then goes away. So I just want you to know that it can really vary and you just want to be noticing for your body what's coming up and track it and notice, you know, is it becoming more often heavier? Because then based on what's happening with your menstrual cycle, that helps us to know what your body needs in order to help you through it. If you're, especially if you're having heavier bleeding, we want to make sure that you're not becoming anemic. We can help decrease the bleeding and help your cycle to become, you know, to be as consistent as possible for as long as possible. That's one of my goals as a provider, as a practitioner. When I hear that the cycle's all over the place and it's very unpredictable and the bleeding's unpredictable or it's heavy, that's where I want to come in and help. Because there's things we can do perimenopausal before your ovaries stop ovulating and stop producing as many hormones, there's different things we do during that time period to help keep the cycle more regular and prevent heavy bleeding. And then as the cycle becomes more and more irregular to the point where you're having a year without a period, then there's different things we can do to help with the symptoms. Now, along with his irregular cycles, there can be other symptoms, so we're going to talk about that. Also, I want to emphasize that this can happen at different ages for different women. So if it happens before age 40, that's considered what's considered like an insufficiency. Usually we start to look for, is there some reason why your ovaries are decreasing their functioning even before age 40? And that can involve additional testing, including ultrasounds, blood work to identify why is it that your period is stopping before age 40. Now, if it happens between age 40 to 45, that's considered early menopause. And there again, we may need to do some other testing to find out, hey, is there something else going on? Is there another reason why your period is stopping? Or is this really that your ovaries are decreasing in function? And we can look at that in blood testing as well as sometimes your doctor may want to do a pelvic ultrasound. Then if it happens after age 54, that's considered a late menopause. So the average age of menopause one year without a period is 51. So that means really age 50 is the average for the last period to happen. Interestingly. Right. And so if you're start and that can even happen start to happen even four to eight years before that, you could start having symptoms. In fact, some places even say that women could be experiencing symptoms of perimenopause as early as age 35. So just noticing that if you're noticing changes in your body, it could be related to your ovaries starting to go through this transition. And going through menopause is not a pathological, it's a normal human experience. Right. So to understand and the, oh, this is a normal thing that happens to women's bodies. Now, some women go through surgical menopause where the ovaries are removed for one reason or another, in which case they go through more of an abrupt change in hormones. And that's also something that we need to do more to help women with, because sometimes women go through a surgical menopause or maybe they go through menopause because of a cancer treatment, for example. And sometimes they're not getting enough support either to help them through the changes they're experiencing. And so this is also something that we want to be aware of and be helping women more with. There's other things that it can affect men age of menopause as well, including if you have a history of smoking, drinking, alcohol, toxin exposure, as I mentioned, sometimes medications or cancer treatments, as well as.

Your socioeconomic status, the age your mother went through menopause and ethnicity, as well as many other including the age of your first period will affect the age of your last period. Having optimal cortisol and adrenaline levels is essential for health and longevity and yet the stress in the present and in the past can affect our cortisol and adrenaline levels, causing them to be too high or too low. The thing is that we're not all affected by stress in the same way. So over the past two decades, I've been researching and discovering how to help my patients recover from stress. And I've identified the five stress types, which are the five common patterns of disruption in cortisol and adrenaline levels. The reason why this is so important is because the treatment is different. When cortisol is too high, we use different herbs, nutrients and other modalities to bring levels back to optimal than if the levels are too low. So that's why I, through research, developed the stress type quiz, which allows you in under two minutes to to discover what likely your cortisol and adrenaline levels are. So then you can make decisions about which herbs, nutrients and other healing activities to choose to help optimize your cortisol and adrenaline again and improve your health now and into the future. Just go to stresstypequiz.com where you can take the quiz and take it from there. So just know that it's very individualized and so it's less about what's happening for anyone else and it's more about what's happening for you and just noticing for your body, what does that look like and what are you experiencing? And to know that we're not going to be able to anticipate the exact date of your menopause until it happens, then we know when it's going to be. Right? So we just have to know, okay, this is something where we're going to be discovering and learning along the way. And so noticing this gives us even more importance to taking nice breaths and noticing what's coming up in your body, which is we're not used to that. We're used to paying attention to everything else and everyone else and paying attention to only blood tests when with menopause, it makes us bring our attention back to our bodies. What is your body trying to tell you? And that even starts with changes in your menstrual cycle. So noticing that, noticing what your body's trying to tell you there and supporting your body through it, learning how we can use nutrients, herbs, and natural approaches, including natural hormones to support you through it, and then also noticing other symptoms that you might be experiencing. Now a lot of times we, we think about hot flashes, but I also want to talk about the other symptoms I wanted before I do that, I want to emphasize, as I mentioned before, but I really want to emphasize when we talk about what affects the variations of menopause. One of the things is exposure to stress and trauma. In fact, what they've shown even is that when women have experienced trauma from childhood, it can also affect their symptoms of menopause, including if you have a history of sexual abuse in childhood, that can absolutely affect your experience of menopause. And any kind of stress in. In life and adulthood could affect your menopause symptoms. But I want to emphasize that there's actually studies that show a real direct connection between childhood sexual abuse and experience of menopause, including likelihood of an earlier age of menopause. So women with a history of sexual abuse, increased risk of early menopause. Okay, so let's go into talking about some of the other symptoms you might be experiencing. Again, the most common that we think about is hot flashes and night sweats, which are called vasomotor symptoms. But vasomotor symptoms means the heat, the heat fluctuations that can cause you to sweat, whether that's during the day or at night. That's one that we most often think about it. And it's because of the fluctuations in estrogen levels and then the drop in estrogen levels. I call it turbulent estrogen. So when the estrogen is turbulent, it's more likely to affect our signaling in our body that tells our body what the temperature is and so makes us feel hot, makes us feel cold. When we feel hot, we start sweating, we turn red. This is part of those vasomotor symptoms because of the change in estrogen. Now, we can also very commonly experience joint and muscle pain. And I think it's very interesting, the studies that show that many women in menopause with menopausal symptoms experience shoulder pain. So if you've noticed more shoulder pain or neck pain, that's often a symptom associated with peri and postmenopause. So I wanted you to notice that. That it couldn't be joint pain. It can show up as joint pain. Very often. I hear patients talk about that. It can also show up as mood changes. Now, a lot of times we think about it as feeling irritable, right? Women feeling irritable during peri and post menopause. But I want to really point out that there's a very high association. A lot of women, more than 50%, experience symptoms of depression. And this is really important because a lot of times women are experiencing depression and they don't realize why they're experiencing depression. And they might be questioning themselves and. And not realizing that it's related to menopause, and then.

Circling into the effects of depression and including effects on appetite, effects on relationships, going straight to the psychiatrist and potentially using medications which may be necessary or maybe helpful. And at the same time, the psychiatrist may not realize that it's related to menopausal symptoms, and a gynecologist may not realize that you're experiencing depression. So it's really important for you to know that if you are experiencing depression and or anxiety, that it may be related to these hormone changes and that by helping with the hormone changes, we may actually be able to help your mood. So I really want you to know that mood changes, including low mood as well as anxiety, are very often reported for women, including they found 56% of women experiencing symptoms of depression. There's also a high amount of women who experience effects on their sleep, including waking up with a night sweat. But sometimes women are waking up even without a night sweat, just more wakefulness in your sleep, getting less sleep. And that of course leads to more fatigue. So women can also report a lot of fatigue during peri and postmenopause, as well as genital urinary symptoms. Now, this is going to be along the lines of increased risk of bladder infections and any kind of bladder symptoms, urinary frequency, waking up to pee, along those lines, as well as vaginal symptoms, vaginal yeast, BV as well as HPV and vaginal pain, pain with sex, pain, discomfort, itching, burning. All these kinds of vaginal symptoms as well as urinary symptoms can start to happen because estrogen, one of the main locations that it affects is the vagina as well as the bladder and urinary area. So as estrogen comes down, right, what's happening is ovaries are gradually producing less estrogen. As I mentioned at first, the sometimes during perimenopause, there can be spikes in estrogen up and down the turbulent estrogen, then gradually the estrogen drops and postmenopausally, then the estrogen is low. And when there's low estrogen vaginally, that's when women tend to have more of these vaginal symptoms of vaginal pain, vaginal infections, or urinary infections because of the low estrogen. And not only that, but this also leads women to have more estrogen symptoms related to sex, meaning pain with sex, not wanting to have sex, and even decreased libido, less interest in sex, less orgasms. All of this can happen for women. And it's again something that oftentimes women don't talk about. But is very, very common. So these are all things we can help with. We can help with the vaginal symptoms, we can help prevent urinary infections, bladder infections, and we can also help with the libido. There's a lot we can do. And so in the subsequent videos, I'm going to be talking more and more about. So I encourage you, if this is something you're dealing with, to please join me here at How Humans Heal so that I can teach you more about what's possible. So there can also be vision changes women experience, if it changes in their vision, changes in your skin. Sometimes women feel more dry skin gradually over time, especially as dry hair or hair changes, hair loss, as well as sometimes hearing changes. Bloating is also very common, digestive changes and brain fog. But many women I hear talking about these menopause moments where you feel like you can't remember what you were going to just say, or maybe you're not remembering things as much as you used to. And this can actually be the beginning of cognitive change for women. And this is something that I want to bring a lot of attention to and we'll be talking more about is the importance of helping women to prevent cognitive decline. Starting now, starting as soon as you're aware of it. The earlier the better. Because actually women make up more than two thirds of cases of Alzheimer's disease. So that means that this is something that women really need to be paying attention to. And there's so much we can do to prevent dementia, including Alzheimer's disease, especially when we're starting in our 40s and 50s and 60s. The sooner we can start, the sooner we can prevent cognitive decline. So while when you're having a menopausal moment in your 50s, let's say that doesn't mean that you're becoming. You're getting dementia, but it is to me, a reminder that let's take action to prevent dementia because cognitive issues are a very common symptom of menopause. And it's a good reminder to help protect your brain. The other thing we want to start protecting is we want to be protecting your heart because heart disease is still top, top cause of death for women. Now, most times women start are thinking about breast cancer. And yes, we want to be preventing breast cancer. Absolutely. It's just that I think sometimes we're putting more focus on breast cancer and not being aware that women also need to be preventing heart disease, which is very, very common in women, including, including over age 65, women have the same risk of a heart attack. As men do. So we need to be preventing heart attacks, preventing strokes, and we need to be watching your blood pressure, because this is when women's blood pressure tends to go higher. And there's a lot we can do to help with that. We also need to be protecting your bones, because when women go through menopause is when they start also tending to lose bone density. And so this is a very important time to protect your bones. So we start thinking about, how do we protect your brain, how do we protect your heart? How do we protect your bones? Bones, and how do we protect you overall? Right. How do we help planning now, starting now, to help prevent all different causes of death and causes of aging and causes of health issues going forward, including all types of cancer and. And other causes of death, including infections. So this is why it's so important to pay attention, to recognize, to acknowledge that menopause is happening, to give yourself that compassion and care and start to learn what it is that you can do to not only support yourself through the symptoms of menopause now, but also prevent health issues later. It turns out that a lot of things we can do to help ourselves through menopause actually end up helping us prevent health issues later in life. So that's the good news is that starting now, if we can start with helping you with stress, and you know how I love to research and pay attention to stress, because there's so much we can do to help ourselves, even to recover from trauma and stress from childhood, we can start now. We can start anytime. And by helping ourselves through stress, to recover from stress, to optimize our cortisol adrenaline levels, to optimize our neurotransmitter levels, to help our bodies recover from stress. Because we know stress disrupts our digestion, disrupts our microbiome, disrupts our hormones, disrupts our nutrient levels, disrupts our nervous system, our neurotransmitters, our immune system, and so much more. So if we can start to help our bodies to recover from stress, we're going to be helping ourselves through menopause, have less symptoms during menopause, and prevent health issues later in life. So, absolutely, Focusing on what you can do to help your body recover from stress and optimize your stress hormones is an absolutely perfect place to begin. And then from there, we can look at genetics. Yes, we can. And we can help your body, too. If we see that you have higher risk based on your genetics, then we can do something about that. We can do testing. We can find out what nutrients your body needs in order to protect you against your genetic susceptibilities. We can also then take all this information to help protect you from other things, health issues going forward. So I encourage you, based on this video, to take note, to really check in with your body, take a few breaths, ask your body what has it been trying to tell you? What are the symptoms that are showing up for you at this point? And even if you've been experiencing perimenopausal symptoms for a number of years, journal about that. What have you been experiencing? What have you noticed with your menstrual cycle? What have you noticed with any other changes in your body? And what have you tried? Maybe there's some things you've already tried to help yourself with these symptoms and what are you curious about and what testing have you done or what testing might you want to do? And this way, as you listen to the subsequent videos from me, you're going to be able to learn more and discover more. And as I walk you through this path of learning about Peri and post menopause, what that looks like for you and how to support yourself through this. Because again, it's such an important time of your life, it's a long part of your life and there's so much we can do that you might not hear about, you're probably not going to hear about in your standard doctor's appointment. So that's why I feel like it's so important for you to learn about. Take it into your own hands and find practitioners who can help guide you along the way. Really? Then you're working with a practitioner as a partner in your house. And again, this is something that I help my patients with. And as a naturopathic doctor, I'm licensed in Connecticut as well as California, Arizona and Washington State. Helping women to navigate. And really I can help women in all locations. It's just that those are the locations where I'm especially California, Arizona and Washington state where I can help with bioidentical hormone replacement. So if you would like more information, please don't hesitate to reach out sooner. You can always contact my office through my website at doctordonni.com, dash O C T-O R-O-N-I.com and make sure to follow and subscribe so that you don't miss the next episode of How Humans Heal. You can watch it on YouTube, you can watch it in at Apple Podcasts or listen at Apple Podcasts or wherever you prefer to watch your podcast. You can also watch at Dr.donnie com so I look forward to connecting with you on this journey of learning about menopause. I would love to hear from you your questions so I can address them in subsequent episodes. And until then, I encourage you to connect with yourself, listen to your body and notice what it is that your body's been trying to tell you and notice what your questions are so that we can start answering those questions and helping you to create a plan for helping you with your health starting now and into the future. I can't wait to share with you everything that I've discovered from years of helping women through menopause and and now patients who've been patients throughout that process and what I've learned through reviewing the research and connecting with researchers and colleagues so that you have the best information at your fingertips to make decisions. All right, I look forward to connecting with you all very soon.

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