Women's services
Women’s Health at SocolMD is as much about the health of your unborn child and the challenges of motherhood as it is about optimizing body composition and exploring opportunities during the menopausal transition and beyond.
Our first patients at SocolMD were women who were interested in navigating the hormonal, physical and emotional changes associated with the menopausal transition and menopause. Their interest gave the practice an opportunity to develop a solid women’s health program that integrates the risks to a woman’s long-term health, quality of life ideas, personal value maps and the medical literature into a proactive and comprehensive platform that optimizes long-term health, potentially restores balance, and helps a woman to thrive.
The practice also works with women of childbearing age and young families. Our core expertise in comprehensive prevention extends seamlessly into pre-pregnancy planning, pregnancy and early family life.
the language of menopause and the menopausal transition
Life cycle changes
Menopause is the “change of life” in some circles, and the “climacteric” in others.
Regardless of what you call it, for a woman to be menopausal means that she is no longer fertile and that her last menstrual period was at least 12 months ago.
A woman’s body reaches menopause when her ovaries have stopped producing the hormone estrogen. This typically happens around the age of 52, but it can happen earlier or later too. If menopause happens much earlier, say in the 40’s, a woman may hear it referred to as “premature ovarian insufficiency.” If a woman’s doctor has to remove her ovaries for medical reasons, then she enters a “surgical menopause.” In all of these situations, the loss of ovarian estrogen production and the absence of a period are the hallmarks of menopause.
Menopausal women may experience numerous physical and emotional symptoms, including hot flashes, vaginal dryness, night sweats, sleep disturbances, weight gain, thinning hair, dry skin, loss of breast fullness, breast tenderness, moodiness, poor motivation, feeling not quite themselves, an increase in urinary tract infections and painful intercourse.
The 3-to-7-year window leading up to menopause is called the menopausal transition, or the peri-menopause. Women in the menopausal transition may experience a different mixture of symptoms, including breast tenderness, increases in monthly vaginal flow, with clots or clumping, irregular menstrual cycles, escalation of symptoms associated with PMS, or premenstrual syndrome, sleep disturbances, weight gain and moodiness.
for valuable consideration
Testosterone
For some women, adding testosterone to their hormone replacement prescription promotes improvements in body composition, energy, drive and athletic performance that are not otherwise achieved with estrogen and progesterone alone.
Testosterone therapy may also alleviate Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder and low libido.
Although it’s rarely discussed, testosterone concentrations in young women dwarf circulating levels of estrogen and progesterone. It’s also the first hormone in a woman to decrease with age as of the mid-30s, followed by progesterone in the early-to-mid 40s, and finally estrogen at the menopause.