HRT: the best solution to perimenopausal problems?
The main treatment offered for women during perimenopause are artificial hormones. These come most often in the form of Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) or the contraceptive pill.
HRT promises to balance your unruly hormones, and thereby fix all those horrible symptoms: the hot flushes, night sweats, mood swings . . .
You can go here to find more info on the different kinds or HRT: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/hormone-replacement-therapy-hrt/types/.
Nowadays people are also talking about Bioidentical HRT. Bioidentical means that they are chemically and structurally identical to our own hormones.
This may sound like it’s a natural and safe option, but in reality, they are still synthetic hormones.
There is evidence that HRT and the pill have serious side effects: increased risk of breast cancer, stroke, and cardiovascular disease.
These risks are often downplayed and the benefits overstated. (You can see news of a recent study here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-49508671).
But for now I’m not going to go any deeper into the evidence for or against artificial hormones.
I want to explore whether these artificial hormones are the only option, and is it necessarily a good one?*
I also want to look at what these artificial hormones are doing to our physical, emotional and spiritual being.
Transitions, Rhythms and Control
The menopause transition period (including pre-, peri- and post-menopause) is daunting.
Any major transition in life is scary and as humans we don’t like to be out of our comfort zone very much!
Think back to your first period (menarche), and all the changes we had to deal with, both physically and emotionally!
Modern medicine has done a great job in disconnecting us from our natural rhythms. It has even turned normal life transitions into diseases that must be treated with synthetic medicines.
In fact, our whole reproductive cycle has been hijacked by modern medicine. We let artificial hormones control our periods, our fertility, our childbirth, our pelvic health, and the end of our periods!
What this tells most women is that our bodies are not good enough, they need to be fixed.
Messing around with hormones is not a good thing!
Our hormonal system is all interconnected
If you’ve been reading my posts and blogs, you know how the thyroid, adrenal and sex hormones are linked together.
Any changes in them also affect insulin and hunger hormones, our sleep hormones, and many more!
But our hormones are also interconnected with our emotional and spiritual being.
Are artificial hormones disconnecting us from the emotional and spiritual transition we need to make in perimenopause?
Do we want to become wise and powerful women in our post-menopausal years?
If so, then we need to deal with and heal all the emotional and spiritual crap that we have accumulated in our lifetime.
Artificial hormones disconnect us from the physical expression of these emotional issues. If we can’t recognise the problems then we are not going to deal with them!
By letting synthetic hormones control us, they are also disconnecting us from ourselves.
Symptoms are messages
Perimenopausal symptoms are usually messages. Our bodies are telling us that we need to looking inward and start rediscovering our intuition and inner wisdom.
How can we do that when we are disconnected?
This not only happens at perimenopause — it happens all throughout our reproductive years.
PMS, irregular periods, ovarian cysts, postnatal depression – these are all physical signs that something needs to be healed.
If we suppress these symptoms with artificial hormones, it is likely our physical symptoms will be worse when perimenopause comes along.
And if you are taking HRT, once you come off it, these issues will still be there. So many women coming of HRT report that all those horrible symptoms do come back again!
What are the alternatives?
Do you want to truly step into our full power and potential post-menopause? Then you really need to consider whether taking HRT will be of benefit in the long run.
Unfortunately, modern medicine doesn’t give us many alternative options.
But if you look outside the box, into complementary and alternative treatments, there are so many things that you can try.
There are many wonderful herbs out there that have been used for thousands of years to great effect.
There are many foods and supplements you can take to help you balance your hormones.
And of course, homeopathy and flower essences are just amazing because they get to the root of the problems and help us heal our body, mind and spirit.
If you want to now more about how homeopathy can help you to manage and relieve perimenopausal symptoms, please get in touch! I’m here for you. Book a free 15 minute call with me to see how I can help!
* This may not apply to women who are on HRT due to premature or abrupt menopause (due to surgery or illness), and who may need to take these hormones as their bodies cannot produce enough on their own. And I’m not berating anyone who has chosen to take HRT or artificial hormones and done their research and decided that is the best course of action for them. If you are happy with your choice, then that’s absolutely fine, and your right to do so!! My main objective here is to highlight the fact that we are usually not given many other choices when HRT is not suitable or necessary, and the risks and negative aspects of it are downplayed or not even considered at all.
