Learning to Love Your Hot Flashes?

This article appears in the Advice for Women from Women Carnival.


Just as sure as young mothers sit around talking about soccer practice, car pools and summer camp, middle-aged women are talking about menopause. To be more exact, we’re talking about the symptoms of menopause and how we are dealing with them. Hot flashes rank pretty high up the list of popular topics. We all get them and we all hate them. Personally I’ve always felt that if we have to suffer through them coming upon us at random, we should also be able to summon them up at will. Standing on a blustery street corner on a cold, wet day, waiting for a bus, I’d welcome a hot flash.

All of the warnings about links between higher incidences of breast cancer and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) lead many women to question when, or if, to go off HRT. Many of my friends play with their hormone dosage in an effort to wean themselves off. They employ several different methods. A popular one involves taking your pill every other day, gradually stretching to every third day, etc., until you are no longer taking your pill at all. Another common method is to take a pill every day but cut it in half. Most of my friends combine these methods with taking over-the-counter menopause supplements and herbal remedies like Estroven, black cohosh and/or St. John’s wort. Several of my friends have managed to wean themselves completely off their hormones using these techniques.

Research indicates that the efficacy of the various over-the-counter supplements has not been proven and possible long term side effects are unknown. At best, many of the most popular supplements seem to remain effective for six months to two years, at which point, I suppose, your body adjusts and they no longer help. I’ve taken them from time to time and they do seem to work for awhile. Most say they take at least six weeks to build up in your system enough to have any effect.

Thanks to a radical hysterectomy at the age of 35, I have been on HRT for a long time. Although I like the idea of giving up my daily pill, I’ve not yet decided to take the plunge. I do miss a pill from time to time, generally through carelessness, and I always have a bad reaction. In doing a little research for this article, I came across several conflicting reports of the dangers of HRT and its link to breast cancer. When querying Google for “HRT and breast cancer”, three of the first four returns were, “Estrogen HRT: No Breast Cancer Risk”, “HRT increases breast cancer risk” and “some types of HRT are associated with an increased risk of breast cancer”. Not too helpful. My doctor told me that, having had a radical hysterectomy I did not need to be considering going off my HRT. She told me that was a decision for women who naturally went into menopause or those who had retained their ovaries after hysterectomy and were on Premarin or Prempro. I have no interest in putting myself through the misery of giving up my hormones so, for now, I choose to keep taking them.

What about you? Are you struggling with the decision to go off your HRT? What has that experience been like for you?