Tulsa Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy – Dr. Melita Tate

Any doctor can prescribe BHRT, but I don’t think every doctor is always open to or well-educated about bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. So you really have to find one who knows about it. One of my favorite OBGYNs here in Tulsa offers bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. I would have no problem sending my patients to him. I also have patients who I’ve sent to other OBGYNs who have been a little behind the times on their bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, not really up on the studies. You have to understand that it isn’t something that is promoted by a drug company because it’s made from natural ingredients by the compounding pharmacy. So it’s a very individualized approach to medicine, and I believe that it’s very cutting edge. There are a lot of studies supporting it, but I don’t think everybody’s aware of that because if you can’t patent something and make it into a pharmaceutical product and market it, a lot of times the continuing education doesn’t cover it. We go every year and study bioidentical hormone replacement therapy; we go to seminars. I’m taking my functional medicine boards right now, so we pursue the education in that arena, and we feel like we have a good handle on it because we study it every year. There are plenty of doctors here in Tulsa who do it, and I encourage you to seek out one for bioidentical hormone replacement therapy if you’re having issues and someone who can individualize treatment for you.

That’s a myth, and let me tell you why. BHRT is hormonal therapy; it’s bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. Anytime you start putting hormones into a woman’s body, we’re going to see changes. Our own bodies change all the time. If you have cells that have been dormant for a long time because your progesterone has been low, you’re going to have some side effects when you go from 0 to 60 when you start bringing that progesterone back in. Some women experience some facial acne, and that’s usually just for a temporary time while your hormones are going from 0 to 60. It’s very much like going through puberty. You may have breast tenderness if we get your hormones too high and have to back off. You can have side effects like menopausal hot flashes because we’re going from too high of a level down to too low. So we go at a very slow pace here, and that’s why we do that because we don’t ever want to get a woman’s hormones to be in a supraphysiologic level because they won’t feel good, and then they’ll feel worse when we try to take them back down off of it. So we start low and go slow. That’s our motto here, and we just work with women to get them their optimal health, their optimal skin condition, beauty, optimal weight, where they can feel their best, but we do that over a process. It’s very individualized.

That’s a fact. So here at Grassroots Healthcare, we are always testing hormones at intervals to make sure that we are getting as close to those natural levels as possible, keeping it in a safe range so we’re not going outside of parameters but still making you feel great through the process. We try to get your hormones to the level that they would have been when you were feeling at your optimal health, at your optimal weight. We want to make sure that we’re not treating women to a supraphysiologic level. You don’t want your hormones to be higher than they would naturally be; that’s where you get into the danger zones. So we’re trying to mimic your body’s natural hormonal symphony, and you know, it’s really difficult for a woman because her hormones are all over the place during the course of a month. We try to test on certain days; it gets a little more complicated for female hormone replacement than it is for male, but either way, we are trying to keep your body at its best and at its peak performance, and we do that by trying to mimic where it would be at its best when it was at its very, very best performance. That’s where we’re trying to get your hormone back to.

That’s a fact. We can help with many symptoms, including sleep deprivation, hot flashes, those are just a few of the many symptoms that women have. We have you fill out a questionnaire because sometimes you may not even realize that some of the symptoms that you’re experiencing are related to hormones. So that’s really an enlightening time for women when they come in and fill out that questionnaire and think, “Oh my goodness, not only am I having these hormone symptoms that are showing up on this questionnaire, but I had several others that I never realized were part of that. Maybe they had explained it away with something else.” So it’s really an enlightening time to figure out which symptoms can be related to your hormones, which symptoms improve. Sometimes we’ll see things that we weren’t expecting improve because the inflammation levels go down. Progesterone is a natural anti-inflammatory, and so when you’re in an estrogen-dominant state, you might feel a lot more inflammation in your joints, or you may have trouble with your shoulder or something. Once we start treating with the hormonal, whatever your hormonal cocktail would look like, each woman’s is different, then they can see resolution of some symptoms that we weren’t sure were related to them. So it’s a really rewarding field to be in.

That’s a fact. So bioidentical hormone replacement therapy comes in several different ways. It’s very individualized, like we have talked about numerous times when it comes to hormones. Depending on what you are needing as an individual will depend on what we can offer you for hormone replacement therapy. So what might work well for you might not work well for your neighbor. However, there’s a few things that we think about when we’re choosing what works best for you. So we have oral options, we have creams, we have injections; there are many different methods to choose from. Whatever works best for your lifestyle and what’s going to be able to be something that you can use easily for yourself or something you can be consistent in because that’s important. And there are certain hormones that we don’t want to be oral. For instance, your estradiol or your testosterone, having to pass through the liver isn’t a great option. So we try to find a different way to get that to your system. If you’re paying cash, it can make a big difference than if you want insurance to cover it. There are bioidentical hormone replacement therapy options for you to use that your insurance may cover, and it doesn’t always have to be compounded. So we try to find alternate ways for our patients to help you depending on where you’re at in your payment situation, whether it’s insured, uninsured, whether your insurance covers it or not. Some of these things aren’t covered by insurance, but we can always try to help you find ways around it and make it more affordable. I believe wellness should be affordable and accessible to everyone, and unfortunately, over the past several years, it’s become very expensive to some degree to find your optimal wellness. But we’re trying our very best here to work with you to find the best way that you can get well and healthy on the least amount of money because affordable health care is something that we’re very passionate about here at Grassroots Healthcare. It’s not just about what always works best for your body, but also what you can get access to because if you can’t get it, then it’s not going to work. There’s so many different ways. You mentioned palettes; there’s also the oral or a troy where it dissolves underneath your gum. There’s the creams that we put on, and then even estradiol patches are considered bioidentical and are paid for by the insurance company. We will work with you to find what works best for you.