Menopause is undoubtedly the most misunderstood health issue that affects all women.  The way in which menopause is typically treated today is rooted far more in misunderstanding, confusion and fear than in science and common sense.  Rx Club America is committed to bringing about a change in the way that menopause is perceived and managed by both women and healthcare practitioners.

Menopause is a Permanent Hormone Deficiency State

Menopause is a permanent hormone deficiency state that, unless treated correctly, undermines a woman’s health, shortens her life span, and erodes her quality of life.  Today, women live 30 to 40% of their lives after the onset of menopause, without the ability to produce meaningful levels of estradiol and progesterone.  Because all hormones interact and are interdependent, this permanent hormone deficiency causes imbalances within the other hormone systems of the body, leading to metabolic imbalance.  Metabolic imbalance promotes innumerable symptoms and medical conditions such as headaches, chronic sleep disruption, allergies, GERD, irritable bowel, constipation, depression, arthritis, anxiety, midsection fat weight gain, and low energy.  These symptoms and conditions are precursors to the degenerative diseases of aging including heart disease (the number one killer of women), cancer, type II diabetes, Alzheimer’s dementia, osteoporosis, and stroke.

The Current Focus on Treating Just the Symptoms of Menopause is Misguided

The medical profession has long acknowledged the undermining, harmful effects of the absence of estradiol and progesterone.  The conduct of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) is testimonial to this fact.  However, because the WHI, among other studies, evidenced the increased health risks of using hormone drugs, specifically, conjugated equine estrogens and medroxyprogesterone acetate over a long period of time, the notion of treating menopause, or more specifically, the hormone deficiency caused by menopause, has been all but abandoned.

Due in large part to the results of the WHI, the current standard of care for the treatment of menopause is to treat its classic symptoms such as hot flashes, night sweats, sleep disruption, vaginal dryness, and lowered sex drive with hormone drugs, using the lowest possible dose for the shortest period of time, and then to treat the “fallout” – elevated cholesterol, bone loss, insomnia, GERD, and mood disorders, to name just a few, with other pharmaceutical therapies.

There Is an Effective and Safe Way to Treat Menopause

Both well-documented science and significant clinical experience support the case for using bioidentical estradiol and bioidentical progesterone, long term, for the treatment of menopause.  Diana Schwarzbein, MD has been doing so for over two decades with thousands of women.  From this experience she has developed a protocol known as Hormone Balancing Therapy or HBTx that relies on hormone restoration using bioidentical hormones in what she terms a “bioequivalent manner,” in combination with attention to nutrition and lifestyle habits.  With HBTx she restores balance to not just the sex hormone system, but all of the hormone systems of the body, enabling the restoration of metabolic balance, and the resolution of the numerous symptoms, syndromes, and conditions that are risk factors for and precursors to the degenerative diseases of aging.

On a Mission to Bring About Change

Dr. Schwarzbein is personally engaged in an initiative to change the perception and treatment of menopause.  She is doing so through educational programs for consumers and healthcare providers. 

Through Menopause Power, https://sipe.infusionsoft.com/go/mpcom/RxClub/, she provides women with a 3.5 hour “crash course” on DVD and an impressive, comprehensive, and very understandable Take Charge Guide that give women the information they need to understand the health implications of menopause, how to treat it effectively and safely, and how to talk with their doctor about what they want and don’t want to do.

For healthcare practitioners, Dr. Schwarzbein has written a compelling, thoughtful, and detailed paper titled Hormone Balancing Therapy (HBTx) – Why & How, which is available at www.hbtxmd.com. 

Rx Club America endorses and supports Dr. Schwarzbein in her efforts to bring about this important change in women’s health.  We hope you will visit https://sipe.infusionsoft.com/go/mpcom/RxClub/ and read what she has to say.