Dr. Robin Austin

But I think it's just it might help you through a specific transition.

So looking at it from a hormonal perspective, non hormonal perspective, there are antidepressant medications that might be helpful through this potential to help some of the mood swings or if there's an onset of a newer diagnosis of anxiety, depression or ADHD, what have you.

I think it's worth the conversation to have.

I would say one of the most recent breakthroughs just this past – timing, I might get it wrong – summer, I believe, is they took the black box warning off of vaginal estrogen.

And that is a big breakthrough only because we know of the urinary tract infection, the genital – I'm going to – GSM, which is the genital symptom of menopause.

Um, around your, your, your health.

And so being able to use vaginal estrogen without that black box warning and get a prescription, it's a very low risk way of using estrogen, but it can have tremendous impact specifically when we're thinking of urinary tract health for women and also your, um,

your genital urinary system being that it's UTIs or the urinary tract infections as we get older get very, very serious.

So the fact that we could use potentially estrogen to keep our urinary tract infections healthy, filled with estrogen can potentially have some impact being able to not go down the path of having chronic urinary tract infections.

So that was a major breakthrough to take off that warning that it is a safe, it can be very, very effectively used

i think it's also again making sure you're having conversations with your provider what that means for you and your health and your health history but um exciting things i think that are happening and us again i think it's normalizing the conversation um i know i i have every time i get together with any women around my age or other other friends of mine this is a topic that comes up around what do i need to do what are you taking i tried this it didn't work i need to try something else

But it's it's again, it's so different what what might work for someone and also what might work for you.

Like I said earlier, for a year, maybe needing to be adjusted later on as well.

So keeping a really close eye.

And I think this is a huge important point for women to really be an advocate for yourself and that uses as an opportunity to.

empower yourself around your own health and be an advocate and helping your friends and families to do the same, I think is a really, hopefully another message we can take away from this as well.

Because a long time we've been very, very silent, I would say.

I say we, I say midlife women.

Yeah, there are pockets of, I think, groups kind of forming around this topic.

But I would say that the group visits or group therapy around this have just started to kind of emerge.