Is Hormone Therapy Right For You?

Hello and welcome to Longevity Wellness Clinic. I’m Dr. Denise Baker. I’m a board certified surgeon and have been in practice in this area for over 30 years. For about 35 years though, I have been a specialist in hormone therapy. I work with hormones both with men and women for a number of years, so I want to talk to you about the rich life of a healthy hormone symphony.

What do I mean by that? You can remember perhaps before puberty, if you went through your day in and day, things just seem, for the most part, seem good. Well, controlled by your parents or your teachers. And then you became a social being. And if you can remember back to when your heart would be crushed or your feelings would be hurt, that was the time when your hormones and hormones of emotion really started to rise up.

But what is a hormone? To make things simple, hormones are chemical messengers. Remember that our entire body communicates by chemistry. Chemical messengers are made in one part of the body, go through the bloodstream or the systems, and communicate to another organ or another part of the body. In simplistic terms, think of a hormone simply as an email, made in one place, send in a message someplace else.

But there are intense numbers of hormones that are regulating our entire body systems our whole life. So, they are our communicators and they are responsible for how many of our endocrine organs act, how our brain, how our heart, our GI system, even our nerves, our muscles, and our bones respond. Remember that very tiny amounts of hormones can create a very large change and too much of a hormone or too little of a hormone can have a very profound effect on the body.

So in general, we are talking about the endocrine organs that produce the hormones. We are talking about the adrenal glands, the thyroid gland, the sex hormone-producing glands. And what it does is it is responsible for how we communicate, how we grow, how we don’t grow, how we repair, how we communicate with the brain, and the brain has its own system of brain hormones or neurotransmitters that are responsible for communicating to other parts of the brain and some of them will actually cause the blood brain barrier.

Recently in the last 20 years, there has been a very big surge in the interest in gut hormones and how much the gut hormones will affect our whole body. But what is it we do with hormone therapy? We come in and we spend a good amount of time talking with you. No, we aren’t limited to that 7-minute or that 8-minute appointment. We do take our time, allow you to fill up questionnaires, and some of them can be rather in-depth.

But our goal is to find out what is working with you and what isn’t working with you, which systems are working well, which symptoms need to be amped up, which systems are a little sluggish, which systems have worked better in the past, which systems are working really well. And then we will order the appropriate tests. They can be saliva, blood, urine, and behavioral tests. And the purpose of those tests is to find out where you are right now. It would not tell us where you were last week or the week before or it would not tell us where you will be in the future but where are you right now and correlate that with your symptoms.

Luckily at Longevity Wellness Clinic, we have the ability to have an appointment time that’s longer than 10 or 15 minutes. We have some clients that will come in and will have an appointment for an hour or an hour and a half. Because we are doing personalized medical care, we have the ability to do that just for you. Spend the time that you need to look at what your issues are, what your goals are, where your body is right now, which systems are working well, which hormones are working well, and then what do we do to correct that. I have been working with hormones for a number of years and have been placing even pellets in patients for over 35 years.

But what other forms of hormone therapy do we have? When we work with hormones, they can be injectable hormones, they can be IV hormones, intramuscular hormones, they can be topical, they can be intravaginal, intraoral, and we actually do pellets as well. But we work with a whole variety. Rarely do we use oral hormones. And why is that? Well, it has to go through the bloodstream. It has to go through the first-pass liver effect and it is changed.

So we prefer to use bioidentical hormones and say what is the effect on the body. We make sure we are very cautious. We reduce the risk or minimize the risk. If we know you are a candidate for it, if there’s a family history of hyperthrombosis, we make sure we’ve identified what that is. If there are history of malignancies, we identify what those are and what type of hormones you are eligible to be able to participate.