Whole-Person Care for Perimenopause Symptoms - The Institute for Functional Medicine Podcast
Carrie Levine, CNM, IFMCP discusses whole-person care for perimenopause and personalized approaches for assessing and treating fluctuating hormonal patterns.
Transcript:
Kalea Wattles, ND, IFMCP:
Perimenopause is a critical time in a woman’s life and sets the stage for health and wellness in the later years. During perimenopause, the production of estrogen and progesterone begins to decrease overall. But daily hormone levels are less predictable, with major hormone fluctuations potentially leading to symptoms. Within this complex hormone environment, understanding an individual patient’s complete health story is a vital step for wellness and balance.
Carrie Levine, CNM, IFMCP
There’s no aspect that isn’t touched by this change. And so really, setting up for it optimally means looking at sort of our lifestyle and our current health habits and the current state of our health and addressing it sooner as opposed to later. Some things, many things are likely to snowball even in a more accelerated way during perimenopause and menopause because of the often anti-inflammatory benefit of estrogen. So if you already have some joint and muscle pain and you’re perimenopausal, you might pay attention to it now because chances are reasonable that it’s going to be worse as you move through the process.
Kalea Wattles
On this episode of Pathways to Well-Being, we welcome women’s health expert Carrie Levine to discuss whole-person care for perimenopause and personalized approaches for assessing and treating dysfunctional hormone patterns. Welcome to the show, Carrie.
Carrie Levine
Thanks for having me, Kalea.
Kalea Wattles
Well, I’ve been following your teachings on functional medicine for women for a long time, and we know that these hormonally mediated conditions can be somewhat challenging to address because they touch on so many other body systems. There are so many complexities here around the female reproductive system. I wanted to start today’s episode by talking about your practice of functional medicine for women’s health and hear from you, what is it do you think about the functional medicine model and approach to hormonal conditions that sets this type of model apart from anything else someone has probably ever experienced?
Carrie Levine
I don’t know how you take care of women without functional medicine. It’s like, I don’t know how you can take care of a human for that matter without looking at the whole person and all of the variables that affect their health and wellness. And to me, it’s like I can’t really make sense of someone’s symptoms if I don’t understand the context of her life. I need to know, what is her stress like, what is her sleep like, what is her movement like, what is her nutrition like, what are her relationships like? Because we know, functional medicine practitioners know, that those aspects have a profound effect on our physiology, and that effect is really just amplified during perimenopause and menopause. It’s like just all of that on steroids.
Kalea Wattles
Yes, I think that makes good sense. And one thing I really appreciate about your approach to menopause and perimenopause is that you’re honoring that it’s not just a change in someone’s reproductive function, but there’s all these implications in terms of their risk for chronic disease and even their quality of life and their lived experience. And menopause, we see it’s regarded as this significant biological change, and the focus is often just addressing the symptoms once they’ve already occurred rather than taking this proactive approach during perimenopause. Will you talk to us about what a healthy or an ideal perimenopausal timeframe might look like so that we know what we can expect or how we can support women during this phase?
Carrie Levine
You know, I think we can anticipate the change in physiology and the sort of ripple effect that that has on every aspect of our life. There’s something about the ovarian hormone production starting to slow down that triggers not only the physical symptoms but also the psychospiritual symptoms as well. That whole, quote, unquote, midlife crisis, which doesn’t have to be a crisis if it’s managed well, right? It becomes a crisis when it goes off the rails because people don’t know what’s happening, the why and what to do about it. So anticipating that ovarian hormone production is going to slow down, anticipating that our ideal exercise is going to change from what it was when we were in our 20s, what optimal nutrition is, is going to change from what it was in our 20s because our metabolism is gonna change. Our resilience, our ability to rebound from stress changes because of the HPATG axis. Like there’s no aspect that isn’t touched by this change. And so really setting up for it optimally means looking at sort of our lifestyle and our current health habits and the current state of our health and addressing it sooner as opposed to later.
Some things, many things are likely to snowball even in a more accelerated way during perimenopause and menopause because of the often anti-inflammatory benefit of estrogen. So if you already have some joint and muscle pain and you’re perimenopausal, you might pay attention to it now because chances are reasonable that it’s going to be worse as you move through the process. That kind of thing. You know, if there are weight issues, if there are cholesterol issues, if there are hormone imbalances, addressing them sooner as opposed to later, not waiting until things feel desperate would be ideal.