Dr. Mary Claire Haver

So, and looking at markers of, you know, getting cardiac caths.

I mean, that's a better test for a woman.

for her risk of cardiovascular disease than the coronary calcium score calcium score tells you yep you have calcified atherosclerosis but you can't see the soft plaques and for women it seems like for us the way we have heart attacks the way the heart disease progresses in us that doing the cardiac cast to look for the soft plaques may be a better indicator so we don't know

And those are the tests.

Those are the studies I would love to see done.

Persistent symptoms despite HRT.

Guess what?

Y'all aren't going to believe this comes out of my mouth.

Not everything is menopause.

Sometimes you have arthritis unrelated to menopause.

sometimes you will have other disease processes that have nothing to do with menopause.

So if you start hormone therapy in the hopes your arthritis will get better or in the hopes your anxiety or insomnia, you know, or joint pain will get better, and it doesn't, you know, we can do a couple of things.

You know, I am always, when my patients come into clinic,

I am not so interested in what their actual hormone, you know, other than testosterone, you know, and if I can't determine if she's fully menopausal or not yet, you know, we'll check hormone levels, but they're not as important as me ruling out other stuff.

Hypothyroidism.

looking for autoimmune thyroiditis, looking at autoimmune disease markers, looking at inflammation markers, looking at key nutrition labs.

We do all of this for our patients because so much of this is intertwined.

In the columns of hypothyroidism and menopause, so many of the symptoms check off the same.

So I need to rule out these other conditions or rule them in.

All of this can be happening at the same time.