While some women coast through menopause with relative ease, most experience some degree of side effects that signal the end of their reproductive years. Among the more common are hot flashes, which can plague women before, during, and after menopause.
At Cosmetic Surgery Center, Dr. Trent Fogleman and our team want women to look great on the outside and feel great on the inside. As part of our comprehensive range of cosmetic services, we offer hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for women who are struggling with ongoing hot flashes that disrupt their lives.
Here’s a look at why you develop hot flashes and how we can help turn down the heat.
The transition through menopause is precipitated by the shutting down of your ovaries, which also means that they cease to produce your reproductive hormones, including estrogen and progesterone.
While these tiny chemical messengers are well-known for controlling your ovulation, they also affect many other areas of your health.
To give you a better idea, here’s a list of some of the more common side effects of menopause:
Of this list, hot flashes and night sweats, which are really the same thing, are far and away the most common. In fact, 75% of women who transition through menopause experience these sudden heat-ups.
Medical researchers are still unclear as to the exact mechanism behind your hot flashes, which seem to come out of nowhere, but they do understand that the problem is linked to lower levels of estrogen.
If hot flashes are disrupting your life in meaningful ways, such as losing sleep, hormone replacement therapy can greatly minimize the problem. To give you an idea of its widespread acceptance as a viable treatment option, the North American Menopause Society, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, and The Endocrine Society have all come out in support of HRT, especially when it comes to addressing hot flashes and vaginal dryness.
While there are many ways that we can deliver hormones back into your system, we prefer implantation pellets. With this treatment, we insert a pellet under your skin that slowly releases hormones into your system. The hormones this pellet delivers are called bioidentical hormones, which are derived from plants, but are molecularly identical to your natural hormones.
The implants typically last for 3-5 months, at which time we can implant a new pellet. Rest assured, we can make any adjustment in the hormone levels to ensure that we’re meeting your goals of reducing hot flashes.
If you want to avoid disruptive hot flashes, contact our office in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to learn more about hormone replacement therapy.
