McCall McPherson explains why women in perimenopause need to push for hormone replacement therapy early. She warns that bone loss, metabolic changes, and brain inflammation start silently before hot flashes hit, and urges women to track symptoms and bring lab numbers to appointments.
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Know your labs, know your numbers, advocate for yourself, and start the conversation around hormone replacement therapy earlier than you think. I want to quickly debunk them. I want to debunk two myths. Number one, that once you're out of perimenopause, it's smooth sailing. This is a continuum. Once you're in menopause, you are now in a low hormone state. You know that by the time you get into early menopause, you've lost up to 20% of your bone. You. You've lost well over 10% of your muscle. And you are probably silently struggling with some metabolic issues that you don't know about. A lot of these, you don't feel the blood pressure creeping up. You don't feel the insulin resistance happening. You don't necessarily feel the inflammation per se, especially in the brain, that's leading to dementia and Alzheimer's. Often these are silent shifts. And in terms of the knowledge gap in the healthcare system, so often these early signs and symptoms are brushed away. So if you are not paying attention, who is? If you're not looking at those numbers, who is? And what I can say is that HRT is more of a preventative than it is a reactive solution. Women do not deserve to suffer needlessly in this condition and beyond. And women do not deserve to be given the brush off. You know, so you go to your doctor, you treat that meeting like it is the most important meeting you have that week. You come with a paper, you come with your most disruptive symptoms, you come with your sleep patterns, your mood patterns, your menstrual cycle patterns. You come with the data.
