Dr. Mary Claire Haver

She walks us through her current research to understand how aging and sex hormones change the resilience of our joints, and whether hormone therapy might one day help narrow the arthritis gap between women and men.

And perhaps most important,

She outlines a real-world prevention plan, including what she does to protect her own bones and joints.

This conversation is detailed, hopeful, and incredibly actionable.

If you missed part one, I hope you'll go back and listen.

And if you're ready to rethink how you move and take a 360-degree approach to protecting your bones and joints, then you need to listen to this conversation.

All right, let's move on to pain.

Hormones, pain, and musculoskeletal health.

So you've talked about estrogen and progesterone as pain modulators.

How does that work?

How do you think these hormones actually influence our pain?

Which is a pain reliever.

So some people, Vonda, you know, has stated to me that she wonders how much of fibromyalgia is just musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause.

I mean, it's a clinical definition based on you're having pain in certain areas.

She thinks a lot of it, rather than just being this de novo condition, could just be a symptom of menopause.

When they stopped it.

rate of especially like knee arthritis at age 50 it's just you know there has to be comes out of nowhere yeah so it's a combination you feel of your the tolerance to pain you're saying you know we have less of an analgesic effect right combined with increasing inflammation yeah from estrogen withdrawal yeah does testosterone have a part anywhere in here because there's some we don't tank our testosterone like men do yeah like estrogen progesterone do more gradual it's a more gradual with age yeah

Right.

And only for the presence or absence of hot flashes.

You mentioned that in your previous writings that, and help me say it, EFOPS trial, E-F-O-P-S, which studied the effect of long-term exercise on bone density, fracture risk, and osteopenic women different than the LIF-MORE trial.