I Have Terrible Menopause Symptoms: Can You Help?

Perhaps your hot flashes are showing up at the most inopportune times, and night sweats are robbing you of much-needed sleep. Your sex life may have also taken a dive because of vaginal dryness.

For the 1.3 million women who start their transitions through menopause each year in the United States, these symptoms, and many more, are often part of the picture to varying degrees.

If the degree of your menopause symptoms is fairly severe and your life feels upended, the team of women’s health experts here at Bay Area Physicians for Women’s Health can help. We want you to know that there are solutions that can make this transition much smoother, and we look at some of those here.

Menopause — a constellation of potential side effects

On the outside, menopause seems simple enough — your ovaries shut down, putting an end to your reproductive stage. What prompts this transition is a drop in your reproductive hormones, and it’s this loss that can lead to an incredibly wide range of symptoms that include:

• Hot flashes, which affect about 75% of women
• Night sweats, the nighttime cousins of hot flashes
• Vaginal dryness, which affects more than half of postmenopausal women
• Thinning vaginal tissues
• Hair loss
• Weight gain
• Bone loss
• Mood swings
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Forgetfulness
• Lack of focus
• Sleep issues
• Urinary incontinence

As you can see, there’s no bright spot on this list, and some women struggle with severe menopause side effects that last for years.

Relieving menopause symptoms

How we can go about relieving your menopause symptoms depends entirely upon which ones are affecting you most. In some cases, we can target certain symptoms, or we can take a broader, more systemic approach.

For example, if hot flashes and night sweats are your primary complaint, we can prescribe medications that reduce these vasomotor symptoms.

Or, if vaginal dryness and thinning vaginal tissues are your chief issue, we might recommend topical hormone creams or suppositories that target these tissues directly.

If, like many women, your menopause symptoms cast a much wider net, it might be a good idea to consider hormone replacement therapy. Since the loss of hormones is responsible for your menopause symptoms, it makes sense to replace these hormones.

We can deliver estrogen and progesterone hormones back into your body systemically through pills, patches, or pellets. Choosing between these delivery systems often comes down to personal preference.

Aside from hormone replacement therapy and targeted medications for individual symptoms, we can also recommend some lifestyle changes that can take the edge off menopause, such as:

• Relaxation techniques like meditation and deep breathing
• Exercise
• Nutritional improvements

The bottom line is that no two women follow the same menopause journey, so we prefer to tailor your treatment to your precise needs.

To figure out what will work best for helping you navigate a bumpy transition through menopause, we invite you to contact our office in Mobile, Alabama, to schedule an appointment.