Dr. Tabatha Barber says only 2% of medical students learn menopause care, and many doctors prescribe HRT without checking baseline hormone levels first. She describes a patient given an estrogen patch despite already having dangerously high estrogen at 400 pg/mL, causing breast tenderness, bloating, and emotional problems.
I applaud those providers who are willing to say, "Okay, I'm going to start prescribing this and trying to help women." But again, they haven't been trained. Only, I think it's like 2% of medical school students who've been surveyed have any sort of menopause or post-menopause or perimenopause training, which is insane, right? Like it is not trained on. And so they're doing what they think, like they're just prescribing because that's what we do. And then the rest of the picture is being missed. And so a lot of times I actually get patients patients coming in and they've never even had labs checked. So maybe they're put on an estrogen patch, but we don't even know what their estrogen is. I've had this where there was a woman came in, was put on estrogen, having super high estrogen symptoms, you know, breast tenderness, bloating, super emotional, weepy, and her estrogen was 400. She did not need a patch, right? And so that's what we're seeing now, unfortunately. So, you know, listeners out there, if you're going down the HRT route, it is a really good thing when it's done the right way, but if it's not done the right way, it can cause some, some risks, some harm, and make you feel miserable. And you shouldn't feel miserable.
