118: BONUS SOLO EPISODE: Me and hormone therapy

In this episode, host Ann Marie McQueen tries to explain her long and convoluted relationship to and quest for hormone therapy. 

This is an episode about her experiences, made more complicated by living abroad,  reluctant doctors and by years spent wandering in a wilderness of emotional and physical symptoms no one could explain. 

Until everything blew up. And let's not forget the gut issues.

In it you will see that even with all her resources, and a global platform all about menopause and midlife, Ann Marie is still trying to find the right recipe for her. The search continues. 

Join the Hotflash Inc perimenoposse:

Web: hotflashinc.com
TikTok: @hotflashinc
Instagram: @hotflashinc
X: @hotflashinc

Episode website: Hotflashinc

See hotflashinc.com/privacy-policy for privacy information

Transcript

Ann Marie: 0:00

Hi, I have been wanting to record this podcast forever. I have also recorded it several times in my car and I have another one, but it was all over the place. So I'm, I'm hoping I can do it now

0:14

I'm Anne Marie McQueen, journalist and proud 50 ish woman, and we are here looking for the true truth in perimenopause, menopause, midlife, and beyond. Opening our minds to other possibilities is not always easy. Half I think. You're all woman to me. All right, Anne Marie. Anyone who listens to the hot flashing podcast will know. I've had a hard time finding help with my perimenopause and menopause symptoms, whether it was trouble sleeping or extreme anxiety or vagina stuff. I've encountered roadblock after roadblock in doctors who didn't know anything about taking care of women like me. It made everything harder than it had to be. That's why I'm so happy that there are companies like MidiHealth stepping into the gap and sponsoring podcasts like this one. They're supportive, comprehensive, and holistic approach to the menopause transition will provide you with what we all need. Most a personalized care plan. Their virtual care clinic is easy to use and covered by most insurance plans. You can chat with your specialists during an appointment or message 24 seven. You don't have to deal with this alone. Any longer book your visit today at join midi. com. That's J O I N M I D I. com.

Ann Marie: 1:32

mixed in with me and hormone therapy is me and a lot of larger health problems. It's important that everyone understands that I am talking about me and the medical advice I've got and the journey that I've been on. This is not medical advice. I am not a doctor and nothing I say or do should be taken as. Confirmation that you should say or do something, if that makes sense. And I was prompted to do this because my lifelong friend, one of my favorite people in the entire world struggled for a year and has just started to try hormone therapy and basically saw miraculous results. I am so happy for her and I don't ever want to deny anything like that. I see and hear this thing, this type of thing. Every single day on the various parts of my platform. And I always want to approach this with the baseline acknowledgement that hormone therapy can be incredibly helpful for us going through perimenopause and menopause at this time. And for whatever reason, we're having such a hard time at this time and it's really hard to compare it to women 10, 20, 30 years ago. Many people are, and I have very good friends, very good friends, like three of my best friends now. This person is the time will tell. Um, but I have two other friends that are just like great test cases. Like one was just suffering so much from hot flashes and night sweats. She was falling apart to hormone therapy. I've never heard her complain again or mentioned it ever again. And another friend who's you know, is doing the work, has done everything to deal with her considerable trauma from the past, but was still struggling with anxiety. And that's just so hard to live like that. And she had a meandering hormone therapy journey as well and, is really being helped by it. And I'm in groups where we're more circumspect about hormone therapy. We're less breathlessly enthusiastic about it. We're not estrogen maxis. We understand there's other Hormones that you can take and and do take. We understand people are prescribing a range of hormones. I mean over at Raena Health Um, I've been dealing with them a little bit, like they're prescribing pregnenolone and progesterone and DHEA, Feminade is another company that I've been working with a little bit. I actually saw one of their doctors and it's a whole different story than what you're hearing on social media, which is really quite frustrating. So it's fraught and it's fraught on the macro level around me. And then there's my own personal, me Ann Marie McQueen story of struggle since my early forties. So just to recap, I didn't know I was in perimenopause till about 47. And then it took a couple more years for the penny to drop that a lot of the problems that I had in my early forties, including the extreme sleeping problems, nightmares. panic attacks, um, just really big anxiety problems were probably due to that recession of progesterone that happens in the early stages of perimenopause. So I always thought there was something dramatically wrong with me. And early on, I had a sort of conjunction of, um, life events. I was in a live in relationship that was falling apart, that I wasn't acknowledging, which is a pattern that I've had, you know, just not acknowledging what's actually happening with me. And a family member, um, was diagnosed with cancer and it was a really hard, terrible time. Our entire family was rocked and has been ever since by this diagnosis. At the time I was very codependent, so I had no ability to not take on that problem as my own, as my very own. And also that's impossible in a family when you love, uh, the people around you, you take on their pain. But those two things converged and I started to have a very, very hard time and I don't even know how I got, kept it together. And then my eyelashes fell out, which was alarming enough that I, I sprung into action and I ended up seeing a naturopathic doctor and a trichologist who uh, is a doctor that specializes in hair loss. He did every test on the, under the sun and couldn't find a reason for the hair loss. He sort of concluded that I needed to break up with my boyfriend, which was funny. He literally said, I've done everything. You're not pulling them out. And I said, no. And he said, um, how's your relationship? And I said, it's not great. And he said, if you need to bin the boyfriend, bin the boyfriend. literally one of the most pivotal times in my life. Like I left there, I went outside. It was like, Oh, I can get out of this. You know? Um, anyway, the doctor that I was seeing at the time, the meanest naturopathic doctor I've ever met. She would make me wait for literally an hour for my appointment. And she gave me a really stern talking to at that time because one of my coping mechanisms in life, and I have had many, but it's over work. And I was in a management role for the first time, and I was working 13 hours a day and thinking about it the rest of the time. And she said, you tell me about your life, I don't see any joy. And then she also said, you have really big stress problems and adrenal fatigue, and look at, look at where your cortisol is, and look at where your melatonin is, and I don't know how you're making it through the afternoon. And how I was making it through was, I, you know, like I always do, coffee and, um, sheer determination. I bring this up because she put me on Vitex, It's also known as chase tree berry. It's an herbal supplement and it's often prescribed in these cases. On another project that has nothing to do with menopause, uh, I'm working on a contract right now and I worked on a list of a hundred plants that grow in the United Arab Emirates where I live and I was just absolutely blown away by the power of plants and the power of our natural world, so I'm not an eye roller when it comes to plants and the reason I believe, um, you know, you have to be careful with supplements, but you know, I heard the other day that there are three times the pharmaceutical industry lobbyists on Capitol Hill in the U. S. as there are legislators, and I was saying to my friend yesterday, you know, they're not just promoting pharmaceuticals, they're squashing competition. So a lot of times when you hear negativity and negative narratives what you're getting is that dribble, dribble down, drip, drip down effect. So there you go. So Vitex is thought to have a dopaminergic effect, meaning it influences dopamine, a transmitter in the brain. Dopamine inhibits the release of prolactin, a hormone produced by the pituitary gland. It has an influence on the hypothalamus, pituitary, ovarian access, and it, it regulates the production of hormones like estrogen and progesterone in a gentle way, and maybe not even so gentle. Vitex indirectly supports luteinizing hormone production and may promote progesterone synthesis during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle. And this can help balance the estrogen to progesterone ratio. So we know in perimenopause, which I was in, but I didn't know, you can have very high estrogen as it's falling over time and low progesterone. But this doctor was a total B otch and didn't ever explain anything. She did say to me, Annemarie, if you don't change your ways, you're going to get an autoimmune disorder or you're going to get cancer. And I was scared straight by that. Did I change my ways? No. Did I get an autoimmune disorder? Yes. Perhaps I already had it, but I digress. I considered that like a huge wake up call and I really incorporated a lot of good things into my life, but I continued to struggle. And I I had a really glamorous French gynecologist for a few years there. Her name was Dr. Annie Rousset and she looked like the fashion designer, Diane von Furstenberg. She had dyed red hair. She was just fabulous. And I asked her about hormone therapy a couple of times. She's the first person that tested my hormones. And I'm using quotes because I just think it's, it's very hard to get a straight answer on this because companies are coming out with. Tests for perimenopause. I'm just not sure you need a test for perimenopause. And when people do tests, you know, my, my friend just said to me, Oh, they tested my hormones and my, and everything's really low. And it's like, well, you're 54. So. But anyway, uh, she, she said, yeah, it looks like you're in the beginning stages of perimenopause. And I feel that I was in the more obvious stages of perimenopause. I said, what about hormone therapy? And she kind of waved her hand and said, I don't like to give it in perimenopause. Uh, she said, if we were in France or something, I would give you, but we don't have that here in the UAE. And so, no. No, I'm not going to give it to you. And I asked again later, same thing. And I didn't ask what it was she would have given to me or what the problem was. But she did say at the time that there were supply issues in the UAE and that situation continues. And I think the supply issues are. Perhaps even more profound than they are in other parts of the world, because as I understand it in a rudimentary way, there are certain depots, if you will, that are in charge of bringing it in. And it sort of depends on how they operate and, um, and a whole system that I don't understand. So that was it for hormone therapy. And, you know, when I, I turned about 50. I started to have huge high estrogen issues. Like my breasts were so sore and I was very aggressive and angry. And this is where I'm glad that she didn't get me estrogen because the last thing I think I wanted or needed at that time was more estrogen. I was also dating, like literally starting in 2020 I look back on this. I was dating like a mental person. I was driving to Dubai for a date. I was dating two people in one day. I was doing things I had never done. I had the time of my life for about two and a half, two years, and it is so clear to me that with the sore breasts, I mean, I had such sore breasts that you couldn't even, I felt like if someone walked past me, I was like, no, and real rage and anger.

11:27

Did you know I also have a sub stack? That's just a fancy way of saying I have a newsletter, but listen, it's not like every other newsletter. I am the only journalist in the world who's made menopause my beat. And each week I share research, news, products, tips, and tricks from the world of menopause and midlife. Sometimes I even write an essay. Hot Flash Inc on Substack is where I pull together everything that's here and in the menosphere and I break it down just for you so that we can try and make sense of it all and figure out what to do together in real time. Join more than 5, 000 women practitioners, CEOs, and more, and become a subscriber today. You can get my podcast as well as special video and audio drops you can't get anywhere else. Sign up today at hotflashinc. substack. com.

Ann Marie: 12:19

And it doesn't come across how you think, right? Like it seems real. So looking through all that and I've now been through menopause, I can see that that was going on and I'm glad someone didn't give me estrogen. I really am. I don't. Um, you know, personally with my own risk and benefit calculus, I don't believe that you should, I should be taking, I don't believe that I would take estrogen on top of already high estrogen and low progesterone. I believe I could have benefited from some progesterone at that point in time. I had terrible sleep issues in my late forties. Like I was waking up at, Um, like three, four in the morning, I was also working like an absolute mental person. At one point for five months, I had two jobs, I had two jobs, I had a full time job and another full time job, but I only had to be in an office for one of them. This is the kind of thing that I've continued to do through my life. So those sleeping problems. I think dovetailed with what has been an ongoing problem in my life ever since about 30 when I got my journalism career ramped up into true stress and I went off the birth control pill. These two things happened around the same time and my mother died. I started my journalism career. I broke up with my long term boyfriend. I was going to marry. I went off the pill and my mom died. These things all happened in a in a period of a little cocoon of a couple of years. And I had, I had IBS symptoms for the rest of my life. Diarrhea was like an ongoing situation in my life. And I fueled myself with coffee, which I always do. And I often would, looking back, I notice that on vacation, I would be exhausted. And it got so that I would think, Oh, I'm going on vacation. How will I have the energy to be on vacation? And I believe that this is similar to the situation where, you know, I trained for a marathon once and then I tapered, you know, I did my long run and I tapered. I got bronchitis. When you go on vacation, you get sick. I believe that this exhaustion, like I remember being in Egypt and just trudging around the pyramids, literally dying. I remember being again in Egypt a couple of years later and going through some museums and like, I just couldn't even function. I just was like, I coffee. I need a coffee. I need a coffee. I need a coffee. I remember that in Jordan and Petra, when can we have a coffee? I'm so tired. And so that was all brewing and it was, uh, when I look back on pictures of myself, I was really struggling. I was very chubby. I was inflamed. I was puffy. I was overweight, but I wasn't eating. I've always eaten really well. So all this was happening. And, I got a new gynecologist cause my fabulous French gynecologist has left the country. She's from India and she's delivers babies. She knows very little about women my age, she has very few, uh, customers my age, she knows nothing. And, she's not, it's not that she knows nothing, she's been a good doctor. I had reoccurring bacterial vaginosis. And she's the first person who said, you know, that's often due to, gut issues and blood sugars. And I was like, huh, you know, you're kind of putting this all together like a sleuth, but also someone who's doing a bunch of other things who has time for any of this. In my late forties, right before COVID, I started noticing I was loving F 45 and I started noticing that when I did the hour class, that was, it's normally 45 minutes, obviously. And, um, when I did the hour class that was, you know, HIIT and that some days, some day I would do this on a Friday. Cause that was the hall. That was the holiday here then. And some days it would lay me out for the entire rest of the day that workout. And I started just wondering what's going on and worrying and. I started skipping a few of the exercises in it so that that wouldn't happen and that helped. in 2021, I found out I had SIBO and that was causing a lot of the problems If you've ever had SIBO or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, you know that that you feel terrible. And it's many of the same symptoms. Perimenopause and this whole time I had incredible brain fog, couldn't concentrate, couldn't organize myself. I don't know how I operated. Meanwhile, I did. And so I healed SIBO and I felt tremendously better. After a couple of months of feeling great, I went to Nashville with my brother for the weekend, ate, drank. After that, I felt just awful, God awful for forevermore kind of. But, um, around 2022, 2023, as these things happen, I just, I fell apart. I was so tired. I could barely work. I was always working on the weekend I worked for, you know, I was freelancing. So I would be laying around on a Wednesday, just barely able to find the energy to do anything. I remember a Sunday where I had to do my newsletter for hot flash. I hadn't left the house and at four o'clock I dragged myself to this little Lebanese restaurant downstairs to have a breakfast, to like treat myself into some energy. Do you know what I mean? And I remember sitting there just being exhausted and just barely able to keep my eyes open. I remember doing my hair, barely able to keep my eyes open, in the meantime, so I started going to doctors. I started going to doctors and I was diagnosed with fatty liver by this pretty good gastroenterologist, but he told me I needed to stop eating fast food, which I never eat. and start doing HIIT six days a week for an hour a day. I had to lose weight and I just looked at him and no matter what I said, like I had, I knew that would be literally impossible. That's when I got my gynecologist, I asked her about hormone therapy. She said, not, well, you're in perimenopause. Um, I saw a thyroid specialist. I found out I had thyroid nodules. I found out I had Low thyroid, and then later at the urging of a doctor I know behind the scenes got tested and found out I had Hashimoto's. Not terribly, but I found out I, I had um, so in 2022, 2023, the SIBOs healed, but I'm just feeling horrible again. And sometime in the winter of 2023, I was laying on my bed in despair. And this woman who I don't really know that well, you know, she's someone I've met through the course of my work as a journalist in the UAE, her daughter, Ruby has autism and down syndrome. And Stephanie is just a warrior, has just like, Blaze trails in Dubai for her to stay in school and be in school because they don't really have the mechanisms that they have and the infrastructure that they have elsewhere. And it's not never easy for anyone. And she didn't know that she was autistic as well. And that was something she found it. I met them when I did a piece of the special Olympics here and just stayed in touch, but I didn't know Stephanie well enough for her to be phoning me. You know what I mean? Like now, and then we would exchange WhatsApps. So she said to me, I just felt called to call you. She's kind of a woo woo person, but I love those people. And she's a really genuine soul. And then she just started saying how she'd gone off her thyroid medication after 22 years. And she felt great. She found this great doctor who was a homeopathic physician and GP general practitioner as a double specialty, which is very rare. And I just thought I've been, I need this doctor. So I found this doctor, Dr Sofie Skogen I'm going to have her on the podcast. She basically. She all, she has those specialties. She's from Norway. She also has got health specialty and counseling. So my first hour with her was unbelievable. I just felt like a weight was lifted off and I took a picture of myself that day and my face is puffy. My ankles were swollen. I had edema. I was in, I was a real mess. And she said, look, Emery, you've got leaky gut, you've got fatty liver, you've got prediabetes and insulin resistance, you've got Hashimoto's, you've got low thyroid, but we're going to fix it. And I can. Do that in three months. Well, it took a little closer to six months and I was much, much, much better. And, you know, in her awesome book, metabolism repair, Lara Briden talks about the gut being like, you should treat your gut like a pet or, a plant. You know, you don't just water them once, you don't feed them once you tend to them every day. And so that has been a challenge for me because even though I don't, you know, I quit drinking to make this change and it was, Tremendous for me, tremendous, but I, um, you know, I, I started drinking again. My, my father died in February. I had a few drinks. It was very, very stressful international travel. Things just sort of started, getting loose again. Do you know what I mean? So I have been struggling with that a little bit. And in the meantime, I have felt as I passed through menopause, I, my last period was in August. 22nd 2022 so I'm about a year out a year later 12 months with no periods and it's about 12 months from that. So I'm about a year out from menopause. I during my last stages of perimenopause when I was talking to my gynecologist and she said I think this could be it. I remember I was there about six months no period and I started talking to her about hormone therapy. I wanted progesterone. I wanted vaginal estrogen. She's very, very, very, very, very, very conservative. Like, I have to have a vaginal ultrasound to get the vaginal estrogen. She only gave me one tube. She would not prescribe an ongoing prescription. She gave me one box of progesterone and wasn't happy about it. And she sort of made it seem like when I went through menopause, then I could come back and get hormone therapy. And I'm curious about hormone therapy for optimization. I want to try estradiol and I want to see, you know, how that makes me feel. I went to her last December and that's when I found out that I'm never getting hormone therapy from her. She refuses to prescribe it. She refuses to prescribe testosterone. She refuses to off label. She refuses estrogen. She gave me one box of progesterone and one, the second tube she ever gave me of vaginal estrogen. Now, you could scream and shout about this woman, but I respect her because she's like, this is outside my realm. And I said, I'm going to have to get a different doctor. And she said, well, I don't want you to, but, If that's what you need to do. And so since then, I just basically I don't have great insurance. I don't have very much time. I lost my job and took a contract in February. My father died. I was due to start a new job I ended up starting the job five weeks later. I have a full time job and hot flashing is like a lot of work and I'm trying to grieve and I'm trying to get through my life. So I haven't. had time to find another gynecologist. I've made a couple of appointments, I've cancelled them, because in the back of my mind, it's like, how do I know if this gynecologist is good? I knew how I would like to see if my insurance covered it, but they don't. And so, in the meantime, my doctor that I see now is Dr Sofie Skogen. I pay out of pocket for her, but she's such a treasured resource to me. And she doesn't believe in hormone therapy. She believes in the body's ability to balance itself. So I said, Oh, I'm going to have to sneak behind your back to get hormone therapy. And she's like, no, no, no, it's just for me. Um, I just see such tremendous changes and there's usually always imbalances that are causing worst. menopause symptoms or even menopause symptoms. She said, look at you, look at what was going on. And even if I say to her, you know, I have friends who don't have that going on. She'll still say that there are imbalances in the body that need to be addressed. And to be honest, I have felt so, so, so much better. Like I said, my gut's a little wonky right now because I think I'm coming six months out of losing my father. It's been hard. It's been a UAE summer and those things are all really hard on your stomach. So, I still want to try hormone therapy and I had a consult with a doctor from Feminad, which is a company I'm thinking about working with a little bit. And they prescribed me DHEA for which there's really not good evidence. But um, you know, there's no evidence for it. And to me, that's just sort of weird, but also I understand it. DHEA is what we call a precursor hormone. It's a hormone produced by the adrenal glands. And as we go through menopause, You know, you hear all the time, you don't have any more estrogen. It's not true. Your adrenal glands and your adipose tissue, your fat tissue, are supposed to take up the production of the hormones that we do need to run our body because if we had no hormones, we wouldn't run. So dehydroepiandrostone, dehydroepiandrosterone, dehydroepiandrosterone, DHEA, it's a hormone produced by the adrenal glands, gonads, the ovaries, and testes. And the brain, it's the most abundant circulating steroid hormone in humans and serves as a precursor to other important hormones, including estrogens and androgens like testosterone. DHEA plays a role in a wide range of physiological processes, including immune function, metabolism and sexual development. I have felt a lot better when I've taken DHEA. And one of the things that happened when I went through menopause and a friend told me this happened to her, I lost all. libido and sexual desire. Zero. I had zero, zero interest. And I would say that went on for a good like eight, nine, 10 months. And if I was in a a serious relationship, then that would have probably been a big concern to me. But for me, after my dating tear from 2020 through to whatever, 2022 and a half, Uh, it was a bit of a respite, you know, and I've been single my whole life. So to not have that drive was relaxing. So I've been taking DHEA, I've been taking some wild yam extract. I actually started getting hot flashes from that. And again, I would encourage you, hormone therapy is made from yams. The commercially produced FDA approved estradiol patches, those are made from wild yams. So when you take wild yams. We're always told it's not safe. It's not proven. I mean, I just feel like there's a bit of extrapolation here and everyone has to make their own value judgments on this. I am only talking about myself. This is not medical advice. I'm not a doctor. I am a journalist. But I'm at a position now where I actually like my gynecologist. She fits the bill. Maybe I can convince her to give me vaginal estrogen every month because I do think that's an important thing that we need to keep that vaginal, and vulva like more healthy. I've heard that over and over. Everyone's pretty much unanimous about that. And I was prescribed DHEA prasterone for that area, but you have to do it every day, which is like. It's not ideal. So where am I at on this? I don't know that I'm going to go chasing commercially produced hormone therapy. There are supply chain issues. I hear it over and over and over in the UAE. People can't get their patches. Listen, want you Hotflash inc woman to understand something. No matter what I'm going through, if I go on something that I need to take every day to, to feel a certain way, and I have to worry that that thing will run out and I won't be able to access it, that is not a road I want to go down. As a person who's had anxiety and obsessive tendencies, I already worry constantly about things running out, things being charged, things being yadda yadda. I can't live like that. I won't live like that. So I will not go on something unless I know that I can get a steady supply of it. So I am completely open to all of this. I just, you can see. It's complicated. And if you've listened to this, thank you. I hope you can understand that me with all my resources, and yes, I do have access, you know, I wouldn't be dealing with Feminad unless they had reached out to me. But I still, me with all my resources can't get this completely sorted the way I want, the way I desired. And it reminds me of what Alicia Jackson told me on the podcast. She's the CEO of Evernow. Now that's one of the leading telehealth companies. Dealing in hormone therapy in the U S and they had investment, a 25 million round of investment and Gwyneth Paltrow and Cameron Diaz were among the investors and I was asking her about it and she said, well, they, you know, they have problems too. And it should, it should be noted for all, you know, civilians that if these women with all their resources and all their access can't have been struggling and in the wilderness like we have, then what is going on? And. Recently, one of my favorite voices in the menopause space is Halle Berry because I feel like she's like me. She said, I could talk about this all day long. She's obsessed in a great way. She had such a hard time getting a diagnosis. And that's what fuels her is that she said, would me with everything I have access to couldn't sort this out. And it's what fueled me because I'm a health and wellness, I've covered health and wellness. For so long, I've been so interested. I have so much information. I have access to these people and I still can't sort it out. So this is where we're at. We are in a very big gray area. I just watched Emily in Paris last night, an episode about a hair care product for women, uh, with gray hair. And that, that was the focus of the marketing was we're in a gray area and, you know, we're in a gray area in this manner. Unfortunately, we're going through this. When things are pretty confusing and we're hearing a lot of jockeying, one thing that I know that I'm not going to do, I may take hormone therapy for optimization of myself. And I think that really we're having three conversations about hormone therapy. One we're having a conversation about help for symptoms to, we're having a conversation about protection of the brain and heart and prevention. To prevent bone loss, the third thing I think we're talking about here is something someone wrote on my Instagram, a couple of, Transcribed Weeks ago, and I can't find it. She was a genius. She said, I think we should call it hormone optimization therapy. Hot. And I am interested in that. And I think that's a little bit of what I'm doing now. And I am open to that. But, you know, I'm not, this is so complicated that I have a hard time talking about it on social media. There are women who've gone on hormone therapy and had their lives changed overnight, and I am so happy for them. I am not one of those women. It's a lot more complicated, and the journey continues. I'm going to have some of the doctors I worked with on, I'm gonna have Dr Sofie Skogen on, I'm gonna have another doctor help me clear, um, Heal Sibo, and he, he's, I think, very much on the optimization. He's a functional medicine specialist in Dubai and he jokes that he was juicing with testosterone for a little bit. And so I'm going to have those people on to talk about it and I'm going to talk about mine a bit more, but this is sort of the grand, I hope it wasn't too confusing, what the F has been going on with me and where I stand. I fully support the use of hormone therapy to feel better. That's not something that any woman should have to feel terrible to go on. You shouldn't wait and feel like it gets, it got really bad before you broke down and went on it. Modern medicine has great tools for us and we should avail ourselves of them. So thank you very much for listening. I'd love to hear comments. There's a text option on this podcast now, and please send me a text or you can always send me an email at amcqueen@hotflashinc.com. That's amcqueen@hotflashinc.Com. I would love to hear where you're at and what you're doing. And I would love you to amble on over to my Substack because that's where I discuss a lot of things in detail. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great week.

32:05

Hot Flash Inc. was created and is hosted by Anne Marie McQueen, produced and edited by Sonia Mack. The information contained in this podcast is intended for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purpose of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your health care provider, read all labels, and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a health care provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem, i. e. menopause or anything else, or any healthcare questions, please promptly see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Anne Marie McQueen and any producers or editors, disclaim any responsibility from any possible adverse effects from the use of any information contained herein. Opinions of guests on this podcast are their own, and the podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about a guest's qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Hot Flash Inc Media.