By Maria Jauhar, M.D.
So many of us these days see aging as a time of growing freedom. We’ve “tested out” of many of life’s most difficult courses. Our families depend less on us – or at best depend on us for different things. Now we have the time. Do we still have the ability?
This beautiful opportunity calls for a type of planning we might not have needed until now – a strategy for well-being that makes the most of our gifts and manages the aging factors that might restrain us.
Enlisting a physician in your anti-aging strategies makes sense for a host of reasons. A doctor’s knowledge can clear up the fuzzy boundaries between a lifetime of living and a pre-existing condition. Those are assessments best left to a professional.
Uniquely Qualified to Help
Understandably, specialists view you from the perspective of their unique vantage point. Orthopedists, rheumatologists, cardiologists may be just the persons you need when a certain issue reaches the horizon. But a family physician could be your best anti-aging consultant because she is not focused on one solution.
Family medicine can take a whole-body approach that includes preventive elements like diet, stress management, exercise, and other lifestyle-based strategies .
An Especially Efficient Approach
Hormones are part of the body’s own anti-aging process, and as they decline the effects of age show up. Deficiencies can undermine overall health too, impacting sleep, digestion, outlook and even mental processes.
Since hormones signal and regulate many of the body’s essential activities, and since they decline with age in both women and men, hormone replacement has been an effective approach to address the effects of deficiencies and imbalances.
In particular, bio-identical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT) has become an important part of anti-aging programs that are unique to each patient. Supplementing and monitoring hormone levels can restore lost energy, impart renewed confidence and improved outlook, and ease the physical impact of growing older.
Hormones That the Body Can Believe
Synthetic hormones have molecular differences the body can sense, and it responds with some of the drawbacks of a foreign substance. That’s why the advance of bio-identical hormone replacement therapy is so important. Bio-identical hormones are derived from natural sources like yams and soy, and they have the same chemical structure as those produced naturally by our bodies.
They fit perfectly into the hormone receptors of your body, so you absorb them more easily, and your body responds without many of the drawbacks that earlier forms of hormone replacement could bring.
These bio-identical hormones can be compounded into forms your body can absorb more easily, too, like creams, gels, pellets and pills.
A talk with your family physician could be the beginning of an anti-aging strategy tailored especially for you. And if that family physician is also a qualified hormone therapist, that talk could put the most effective tools in your hands.
