Unbreakable Episode 5: The Hormone Shift

Renowned orthopedic surgeon, aging and longevity expert, and accomplished author Dr. Vonda Wright shares why perimenopause and menopause are pivotal stages in a woman’s life.

Transcript

00:00

Whether you have 62 symptoms, or whether you feel fine, everyone, if you live long enough, will experience this.

00:09

[MUSIC PLAYING] The female body is miraculous.

00:18

It is complex. And our complexity has a lot to do with our hormones. Remember when we were almost teenagers,

00:26

and we were going through adolescence? What a cataclysmic event that was. When we reach perimenopause, and our eggs decrease

00:34

to about 1% to 3% of the 2 million we were born with, we hit another cataclysmic stage that I call the menolescence.

00:45

It is a transformation that happens, frankly, as estrogen walks out the door. Every single body part have estrogen receptors.

00:56

And when estrogen is not sitting in those receptors, we begin to age differently. And all the symptoms that women feel

01:04

reflect the lack of estrogen in those receptors. So that's what we start in perimenopause

01:13

and complete on the day of our menopause and continue the rest of our lives

01:20

without making endogenous estrogen. [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:31

I am leading the way through the menopause maze with my vitamins, my melatonin sleep patches, my bioidentical estrogen

01:38

cream, progesterone cream, a touch of testosterone. This sweating is killing me, Ruby. [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:48

Menopause is a dark hole. OK, that's what menopause is. And that's where I'm at right now. JIMMY KIMMEL: Oh.

01:55

So I either will love my husband today or kill him today. JIMMY KIMMEL: Oh, no. Only we women can destigmatize this-- GALYE KING: Yes.

02:01

--by talking about it. 45 to 55-year-old is the most common time for women to commit suicide.

02:07

Menopausal women. We're struggling. [MUSIC PLAYING] You don't need to suffer.

02:14

And you suddenly-- certainly don't need to suffer in silence. [MUSIC PLAYING]

02:23

As a double board-certified orthopedic surgeon with 22 years of formal education under my belt,

02:30

you would have thought that I would have known everything about perimenopause and menopause before it hit me.

02:37

Despite the fact that all of my research has been in musculoskeletal aging, maybe I never thought it was going to happen to me.

02:45

As I became more educated myself, I started listening in a different way to my patients.

02:51

They would say, you know, I don't know what's going on, but I think I'm falling apart because everything hurts.

02:59

And after woman after woman after woman said the exact same things to me,

03:06

it showed me that everyone born with XX chromosomes and ovaries were having this common experience.

03:14

And yet very few women had the resources or the knowledge to even know what was going on.

03:21

And that's what fuels my passion because I don't want women in my generation to have to experience what I did.

03:29

So as we're reaching midlife, I think it's critical that we do a few things. Number one, we have to learn about this phase of life.

03:36

Talk to other women about what they're experiencing, and you may, for the first time in your lives, talk to your mothers or grandmothers

03:42

about what they experienced. Number two, we need to make our menopause hormone therapy decision.

03:49

We actually like to call this now PET hormones, progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone hormones,

03:57

because the reality is, these hormones do so much more than just determine our fertility or our menopause.

04:06

Number three, knowledge and hormones are never going to be enough. It takes a lifestyle of consistent anti-inflammatory

04:14

eating, lifting weights, cardiovascular, retraining our balance to avoid frailty and falls, which can be devastating.

04:24

Next, social interaction is so critical in this time of life because it can feel really isolating and like you're alone.

04:32

So I always encourage women to find five friends who can support you in not only your menopause hormone decision making,

04:40

but in building your lifestyle. [MUSIC PLAYING]

05:18

I believe that every woman is a sentient being and has agency to decide whether she

05:26

is going to replace her estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone in a preventative way.

05:32

We can decrease our all-cause morbidity by 30% to 40%, our cardiac disease by 30%, our risk of fracture by 30% to 50%,

05:43

and so many other health problems that occur as estrogen walks out the door.