At Regain Functional Medicine + Aesthetics, we celebrate womanhood year round. How could we not when all of the members of our team are women? But in May, we want to give the ladies of Leawood, Lawrence, and beyond even more focus during National Women’s Health Month.
Every May, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services observes a week dedicated to encouraging women of all ages to prioritize their well-being. This year’s theme shines a light on health issues unique to women.
But a week just isn’t enough! That’s why we’ve dedicated the entire month of May to exploring hormone optimization, hormone testing, menopause, and vaginal rejuvenation. We encourage women from all walks of life to visit our office and discuss their health-related concerns.
We especially want to highlight women struggling with menopausal symptoms like hot flashes, sleep problems, vaginal dryness, emotional changes, and urinary urgency, to name a few. You don’t have to just accept these symptoms as just a part of life and womanhood. Instead, you can find relief with our bioidentical hormone replacement therapy in Leawood. To understand how this service works, let’s talk about hormones and their importance to women’s health.
What are hormones?
Hormones are your body’s chemical messengers, relaying information through your bloodstream and controlling bodily processes like the following:
- Metabolism: How your body uses nutrients from food for storage and energy.
- Growth and development: How your body maintains muscle and bone mass.
- Reproduction: Sexual development, weight, energy, and fertility.
- Homeostasis: How your body manages body temperature, blood pressure, sleep/wake cycles, and other bodily regulation.
- Emotions and Mood: Hormones regulate how your body responds to stress, control your mood, and promote emotional well-being.
While science knows of 50+ hormones, we’ll concentrate on 3 key ones for women.
Estrogen
Estrogen, a primary female sex hormone, regulates the menstrual cycle, reproductive tract, urinary tract, blood circulation, skin and hair health, and even your brain function. Your body relies on 3 major forms of estrogen:
- Estrone (E1): Primary form of estrogen made in your body after menopause.
- Estradiol (E2): Primary and most potent form of estrogen during reproductive years.
- Estriol (E3): Primary form of estrogen during pregnancy.
Bioidentical hormone replacement therapy in Leawood helps your body maintain estrogen levels to support your emotional, mental, and physical well-being.
Progesterone
Known as the “relaxation hormone,” progesterone helps alleviate insomnia and regulates mood swings and irritability. Before menopause, this hormone supports menstruation by thickening the uterine lining and supporting the early stages of pregnancy by providing nutrients for the fertilized egg.
Testosterone
Testosterone plays an important role in women’s sexual health, energy levels, muscle mass, fat distribution, and heart health. Although most notably the primary male hormone, women still need a small amount of this hormone for optimal balance and cellular function.
Identifying a Hormonal Imbalance
Women are no strangers to hormonal fluctuations. Throughout life stages like puberty, menstruation, pregnancy, and everything in between, our levels of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone continue to rise and fall, affecting our bodily processes.
When you have too much or too little of a hormone, we recognize that as a hormonal imbalance. For women, we may experience several of the following symptoms:
- Hair loss on the scalp
- Excess hair growth on the body (hirsutism)
- Hot flashes
- Loss of interest in sex
- Vaginal atrophy
- Vaginal dryness
- Night sweats
- Osteoporosis
- Unexplained weight gain or loss
- Fatigue
Bioidentical hormone replacement therapy in Leawood relieves these symptoms, restoring your womanly vitality and improving your quality of life.
Menopause
Let’s take a moment to talk about menopause. Throughout our lives, we’ve watched our mothers, grandmothers, teachers, and other role models transition into this life event. The media often represents it as a difficult and uncomfortable stage in a woman’s life, filled with hot flashes and irritability. It’s no wonder why we worry and maybe even dread reaching the age of 40 or 50.
Menopause doesn’t have to be a scary event, and the accompanied symptoms don’t have to take a toll on your quality of life. During menopause, your ovaries make less estrogen and progesterone. If you remember from our explanations above, these hormones play a role in your mood, hair and skin health, brain function, and sleep cycle. Your body also produces less testosterone—which our bodies already make very little of—and this impacts your sexual health, bone mass, weight, and energy levels.
Related Reading: Time to Pause Menopause: HRT at Regain
Hormone replacement therapy, or HRT, for menopause, replenishes our levels of these 3 significant hormones, restoring our hormonal balance and making you feel like yourself again.
What is bioidentical hormone replacement therapy?
In Leawood, we only use bioidentical hormones for HRT, because they are molecularly identical to the hormones your body makes. Derived from plant sources like wild yams or soy, your body more readily uses these hormones with far fewer side effects than with non-bioidentical pharmaceutical hormone replacement therapy.
For Women’s Health Month and year-round well-being, we encourage you to come to Regain for hormone testing and menopausal support.
The Process of Balancing Hormones at Regain
Balancing your hormones is a process, and at Regain, we walk you through it with our hormone replacement therapy program. Here’s a breakdown of what you can expect.
Week 1: Complimentary Consultation
Every new patient receives a complimentary consultation to speak privately with a provider about their concerns. At Regain, we understand the symptoms of hormonal imbalance; many women arrive with various concerns, and some members of our team have experienced a hormonal imbalance themselves. During this 45-minute consultation, we will draw your blood to send to a lab for hormone testing.
Week 2: Lab Review & Prescription Decisions
The second week involves a 35-minute session where we review the lab work with you and discuss your HRT options. Bioidentical hormone replacement therapy in Leawood is customizable, so we tailor your dosage based on the results we receive from your hormone test.
We have different administration options for hormone replacement, including the following:
- Weekly Injections: Injections are our preferred method because they allow for weekly monitoring and dosage adjustments based on your current situation.
- Pellet Therapy: We place small hormone pellets discreetly in your hip or upper buttock region through an incision. This administration choice requires some downtime so the pellets don’t become dislodged. For women, pellets last 3 to 6 months; they gradually dissolve, and the hormones taper off before your next insertion appointment.
Week 3: Symptom Review
When receiving your first injections, we take the time to review your symptoms, answer any questions, and teach you to self-inject.
Week 4: Practice With a Provider
During this 20-minute session, we discuss your symptoms, answer any more questions, and have you place your injection yourself. After this, we only ask that you schedule monthly visits with us to discuss how you’re feeling about bioidentical hormone replacement therapy in Leawood. We make our care as accessible as possible, and offer telehealth in Lawrence and telehealth in Leawood so you can reach us from (almost) anywhere.
Benefits of BHRT
With restored hormones, you look and feel better. Some might even say you feel like yourself again. Many people notice the following improvements on BHRT:
- Enhanced energy
- Better sleep
- Improved bone health
- Improved cognitive function
- Reduced body hair
- Increased scalp hair
- Improved cardiovascular health
You may notice results starting several weeks after your first injection. For most patients, it takes 8 weeks to function at optimal health levels. The duration of your results lasts as long as you continue taking BHRT. Fortunately, this therapy is designed for lifelong use, so the benefits never have to end, unless you want them to.
Other Hormone Treatments
At Regain, we offer spironolactone and thyroid hormones to women for additional benefits and prevention of various symptoms.
Spironolactone blocks the body’s conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone, (DHT). This testosterone byproduct contributes to acne, oily skin, increased facial hair, and thinning scalp hair. Spironolactone is an oral potassium-sparing diuretic that you take daily to prevent the mentioned side effects.
Your thyroid plays a major role in energy levels, mood, internal temperature, hair, skin, weight, and much more. When your metabolic hormones (T3 and T4) are low, you can notice symptoms affecting your:
- Nervous system: resulting in tingling or burning sensations
- Cardiovascular system: causing an increased heart rate
- Digestive system: manifesting as gastrointestinal discomfort and concerns
- Reproductive system: causing issues with fertility
We offer oral medication to treat symptoms of low thyroid hormones.
Age Gracefully With Regain
At Regain, bioidentical hormone replacement therapy in Leawood helps you age gracefully. You’ll notice increased energy, improved hair and skin health, and more restful sleep. And when you feel and function better, you can look better; however, we also offer a range of aesthetic treatments to further restore your natural beauty.
Hair Restoration
If you’ve noticed a wider center part and thinning hair, we recognize this as androgenic alopecia. Most people are familiar with male pattern baldness, but female pattern baldness is also a common concern. Aging, genetics, and hormones contribute to this specific type of hair loss.
At Regain, we understand how traumatic losing your hair can be. That’s why we offer hair restoration treatments through a comprehensive GetHairMD program. You’ll receive in-office treatments, personalized prescriptions, and at-home care instructions.
Skin Care Products & Supplements
Your skin care should evolve with each life stage. Through our medical-grade skin care and thorough skin assessments, we customize and craft a personalized skin care routine tailored to your needs. We also recommend additional supplements to support your skin from within.
Related Reading: Take the Guesswork Out of Your Skincare Routine
Body Sculpting & Contouring
BHRT helps your body restore hormones, maintain a healthy weight, and build lean muscle. To support this, we offer a PHYSIQ + Virtue RF Microneedling body sculpting and contouring service. PHYSIQ destroys fat cells, builds muscles, and sculpts the body while radiofrequency (RF) microneedling tightens loose skin and reduces scarring. Because you’re building muscle, this treatment’s benefits extend far beyond just aesthetic results.
Follow Your HRT for Better Balance
With bioidentical hormone replacement therapy in Leawood, we are encouraging women to put their health first and set a good example for all the women looking up to them. To start, you can request a consultation to discuss your concerns with someone in person.
You can also try our treatment planning tool to streamline the process.
