#215: Why Menopause Gives You the Cold Shoulder

If you’re experiencing frozen shoulder, joint pain, or random muscle spasms, welcome to the menopause club, ladies! Menopause causes more than just those infamous hot flashes! 

In today's episode, we're diving deep into menopause and why it's got your shoulder feeling like an iceberg. You’ll learn why estrogen decline is probably the culprit, and why estrogen is basically your superhero when it comes to fighting menopausal inflammation.

Ever wonder why women over 50 notoriously get hit with osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, muscle loss, and chronic pain? This episode will show you how to avoid the diseases of aging. Learn how to navigate your menopausal years with thriving health!

And if you like what you've been hearing don't forget to click the follow button, drop us a five-star review, and spread the word about the Gutsy Gynecologist podcast to all the women in your circle. 

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Transcript

Dr. Tabatha [00:00:00]:
Hey, welcome back. Okay, I need to talk about estrogen and its powerful anti inflammatory effects. Okay. There's a lot of women out there, myself included, when I was a conventional ob gyn, that didn't realize how protective estrogen really is. It's such a powerful, amazing hormone. And I want to share a scenario to help you better understand how powerful estrogen is. When we become pregnant, if we go on to carrier pregnancy, we get really high levels of estriol starting to be produced, and progesterone. And these hormones keep the pregnancy going, keep the pregnancy safe and healthy.

Dr. Tabatha [00:00:57]:
And part of what happens is that the estrogen down regulates our immune system response to things. And this is really important because your immune system is there to protect you from the outside world, from foreign invaders, right? If you eat a harmful plant, you want your immune system to respond. If you eat poisoned food, like, you know, salmonella, E. Coli, you want your immune system to respond and save you and protect you. It responds to getting colds and flus. So imagine this. When you're pregnant, half of the fetus is foreign DNA. It's from another human being.

Dr. Tabatha [00:01:49]:
Half of that DNA of that baby is from the man. And typically, your immune system would attack and kill that fetus. But because your body has incredible innate intelligence, it says, no, we want this pregnancy to survive. Let's down regulate our immune response and not attack that fetus. Your immune system shifts because of the elevated estrogen. Estrogen modulates the immune response. That's what we call it. We see this all throughout our reproductive years, and it's very common.

Dr. Tabatha [00:02:33]:
Unfortunately, after the pregnancy, when your estrogen levels drop significantly, sometimes down to, like, menopausal levels. If you are breastfeeding continuously because you're not making estrogen, your immune system can become hyper reactive and overreactive and confused. And we see a huge spike in autoimmune diseases erupting during this postpartum time. That is what happened with me when I was 17 years old. After my delivery, I went into a hashimoto's thyroid storm because my immune system was confused and overreactive, and it started attacking my thyroid. We see this surge when our estrogen levels drop after pregnancy. The other time we see a huge autoimmune surge is menopause. So it's really common for women to develop autoimmune conditions at kind of the breaking point where you're going into menopause or after you're in menopause.

Dr. Tabatha [00:03:49]:
The other major time we see autoimmune conditions is in children and that is because they have low estrogen levels as well. Obviously, autoimmune conditions are multifactorial. I talk about this a lot in my other episodes. According to doctor Alessio Fasano, who found zonulin, the protein associated with leaky gut. He has done all this incredible research, but he postulates that you need to have increased intestinal permeability, aka leaky gut. You have to have the genetic propensity for an autoimmune condition, and then you have to have some triggers. So estrogen levels are one of the factors that trigger this immune response or prevent it. So why is this important? Because when you go into menopause or you're in this perimenopausal transition, and your estrogen levels are dropping way lower than they have been since you were a child, your immune system responds, and it also increases your risk of developing aches and pains and other things, because estrogen is just anti inflammatory, and so we feel more inflammation.

Dr. Tabatha [00:05:19]:
So things that used to not cause chronic inflammation, like joint pain, muscle spasms, things like that, they start to show up and really are exacerbated with this lack of estrogen. So we start to see frozen shoulder, that's a really common thing. All kinds of joint and ligament issues, knee pain, back pain, that's a very common issue. And then we also start to see we lose our muscle strength, and then our endurance and our cardiovascular system changes, and so our blood pressure starts to increase. We see this a lot when women are having declining levels of estrogen. So what happens is all of your arteries, they're smooth muscles. So we have different types of muscle in our body. We have skeletal muscle, which are the big muscles that you see, like when you flex your arm and you see that bicep muscle, that's a skeletal muscle, you have to move that muscle by thinking about it, by the action.

Dr. Tabatha [00:06:32]:
Smooth muscles, they're controlled by the autonomic nervous system, the automatic part that you don't think about. So there is smooth muscle in our stomach, our intestines, our ureters, which take our urine from the kidneys to the bladder. There's smooth muscle in the bladder. There is smooth muscle all over our body doing autonomic automatic jobs. They're contracting without us having to think about it or make it happen. So our arteries are smooth muscles. They constrict and pump the blood from our heart out to the rest of our body without us having to think about it. Thank goodness, right? But these smooth muscles are responding to estrogen.

Dr. Tabatha [00:07:22]:
And when estrogen declines, those arteries become stiffer. They lose that ability to become elastic and mobile and squeeze appropriately. They become stiff, like a pipe, almost. And so your heart has to rely on the main pump of the heart more than the arteries to get the blood all the way out to your body, all the way to your fingertips, to all the tiny little capillaries in your brain, to all the places, the vaginal tissue. And so the heart has to pump harder, push more pressure to go through those stiffer arteries. So, by and large, the majority of women who transition into menopause have elevated blood pressure. Their blood pressure increases by 510, sometimes 15 points. This might not be a bad thing.

Dr. Tabatha [00:08:21]:
This is a response of your body to keep circulating your blood and doing what it needs to do. But we all panic as conventional doctors and go, oh, gosh, her blood pressure went up. We better prevent that by giving her a blood pressure medication. And then a lot of women are left with the side effects of feeling exhausted, having no endurance, no ability to continue exercising. A lot of women give up exercising because of this. The other response that can happen is that your heart will start to pump faster so that it gets the same amount of blood out with less pressure. So if you decrease the pressure from a medication, then your heart has to pump faster to get that blood out. So your body's always trying to do what it needs to do to stay in homeostasis and stay balanced.

Dr. Tabatha [00:09:21]:
And a lot of times we're interfering and thinking that we're doing a good job with this band aid medicine, but we're actually causing new problems. So some women can get tachycardia or fast heart rate because they needed that elevation in their blood pressure to continue having the proper circulation after menopause. But we've blocked it. So now they have elevated heart rate to keep their circulation up. And then sometimes we give them medications for that as well. And you get into this vicious cycle of being put on medications that cause new problems. So I invite you to take a step back and think about maybe your body is actually trying to help you. Maybe your body is actually trying to be in balance and the responses it's having toward your activities, toward your environment, toward the medications you're being put on, maybe it's an appropriate response, and the body is trying desperately to stay in balance.

Dr. Tabatha [00:10:33]:
So I would invite you to maybe just love your body and believe in your body's ability, that God created it to heal, God created it to function until its last day and maybe think twice or at least have a more in depth conversation about the medications you're using, not just blood pressure medications, statin medications for elevated cholesterol, things like that. Why is your blood sugar going up? Why are you getting frozen? Shoulder. Why are your knees falling apart and in so much pain? It might be an estrogen deficiency. You might want to talk to somebody about some bio identical hormone replacement therapy that you can give your body back what it's deficient in, what it's stressed out about. Okay? So I hope this was a little bit eye opening. I promise you, we have estrogen receptors all throughout our body. I've talked to you in depth about how it affects our gallbladder, our liver, our vagina, our bladder. I mean, the list goes on and on, our brain, our bones.

Dr. Tabatha [00:11:53]:
So keep consuming these videos, these podcasts. Get educated on actually what is happening in your body and why it's doing the things that it's doing. There are answers out there. You might not find them in the conventional space. I know I didn't, and I was trained there. I had to go on to study functional medicine, anti aging medicine, menopause based medicine. I had to do a ton of extra training because I didn't learn it as a traditional oBGyn. So I hope this was helpful.

Dr. Tabatha [00:12:31]:
Please keep sending me your questions. You don't have to suffer if you have all these things I'm listing, like seek out some help from a hormone expert, a menopause expert. All right, let me know what else you need. I'm here for you. And also, if you find this to be valuable, I would please ask that you hit the subscribe button so that other women can find this. We want to support each other as women and keep these conversations going. I don't want anybody to struggle, and I know you don't either. So let's become a sisterhood of women, lifting each other up, helping each other understand what's going on.

Dr. Tabatha [00:13:18]:
Okay? So hit the subscribe button, leave me a five star review. Do all the things, use your voice, be heard. All right, I'll see you next week. Love.