Can Bioidentical Hormone Pellet Therapy Change My Menopausal Symptoms?

The journey through menopause is a time of significant change — while you no longer have to deal with your periods, you can be left with some major quality-of-life symptoms, such as poor vaginal health, hot flashes, and bone loss. While the passage out of your reproductive years is inevitable, many of the side effects don’t have to be thanks to hormone replacement therapy. 

At Advanced Aesthetics Lopez Plastic Surgery, with four locations in the San Antonio, Texas, area, Dr. Manuel Lopez and our experienced team offer a form of hormone replacement therapy using bioidentical hormones to greatly reduce some of the common symptoms of menopause. Here’s a look.

Why the changes?

During menopause, your ovaries shrink and stop releasing eggs. Your ovaries also stop producing reproductive hormones, namely estrogen.

While these hormones mainly regulate your reproductive system, they also influence other areas of your health, such as your bones and vascular health.

As a result of the decline in estrogen hormones, many women experience:

• Hot flashes
• Night sweats
• Vaginal dryness
• Vaginal shortening
• Bone loss
• Urinary incontinence

To put some numbers to these symptoms, half of women experience vaginal dryness after menopause, and 36-50% of women in North America experience hot flashes and night sweats.

How hormone replacement therapy can help

To offset many postmenopausal changes in your body, we offer hormone replacement therapy in the form of bioidentical hormones, which are molecularly identical to your body’s natural hormones.

According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, there are many benefits of hormone replacement therapy, including:

• Greatly reducing symptoms, such as hot flashes and night sweats
• Relieving vaginal dryness
• Protecting against bone loss to prevent osteoporosis
• Potential reduction of risk for colon cancer

Hormone replacement therapy can also help restore the health of your vaginal tissues, making them more toned, which can eliminate discomfort during intercourse. Bioidentical hormones can also help to re-establish the support of your bladder to reduce stress urinary incontinence.

How bioidentical hormones work

To deliver the bioidentical hormones, we place slow-release pellets under your skin. These pellets deliver hormones into your system, and many women experience improvements in just 3-10 days.

The pellets last for about 3-4 months, at which point we simply insert another dose.

If you’d like to see for yourself how bioidentical hormones replacement therapy can help improve the symptoms of menopause, contact one of our Texas locations in Stone Oak and Alamo Heights in San Antonio, as well as neighboring Boerne and New Braunfels, to schedule an appointment.