Video:Natural Treatments for Menopause

Transcript:Natural Treatments for Menopause

Hi, I am Dr. Hughan Frederick of Isis OB Gyn here for About.com. Here to talk about what are the natural treatments for menopausal symptoms.

Natural Treatments for Menopausal Symptoms

The main concerns patients have during menopause is mainly weight gain and hot flashes and there have been some natural supplements that people have used throughout the years to kind of deal with these.

Mainly, menopause is a state of having low levels of estrogen. And its been found that soy products have a natural estrogen that can be ingested that will replace or supplement one's estrogen. So, soy products are used heavily. For the specific symptoms like hot flashes, people sometimes use black cohosh as a treatment to kind of relieve them of these persistent hot flashes. There are other supplements around by none have really been scientifically proven to work however, anecdotally people say these things work.

Benefits of Using Natural Therapies for Menopause

The benefits of using natural therapies is that one, no prescriptions are needed. Some of these therapies, while they have not been scientifically tested anecdotally have shown some benefit in providing relief for some of the more pesky symptoms of menopause i.e. hot flashes.

Some people use natural supplements to lose weight. There's also been a new development in bioidentical hormones where physicians are testing the salivary gland to check for hormone imbalances and replacing them with compounded supplements. I believe the con, the downside to this is that as I said it before, some of these therapies have not been thoroughly scientifically tested and therefore some of the claims cannot be scientifically proven.

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