ARTICLES

Category: Women’s Health

Hormones
Staff

Go With The Flow: Embracing The Follicular Phase

Have you ever made the connection between different times of your menstrual cycle and how you’re feeling physically, mentally, and emotionally? You may experience fluctuations in things like energy, creativity, motivation, cognitive clarity, mood, and physical endurance during different times of the month. If we’re not paying close enough attention, it can sometimes feel like an unexplained rollercoaster. Rest assured there is a rhyme and reason!  In this article, we will be discussing the intimate details of the follicular phase.

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Hormones
Staff

Natural Tips for PMS and Period Cramps

It’s a Wednesday morning during a normal work or school week. You roll out of bed more tired than normal, put the coffee pot on, and start getting ready. As you get dressed, you notice you have a slight headache, your pants feel tighter than yesterday, and your breasts are a little tender as you snap your bra on. As you rush to get out of the house, you knock your coffee cup on the counter, and it spills everywhere.

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Hormones
Dr. Russell

Are hysterectomies the only option for fibroids?

Bleeding heavily is a common concern for women of pre- and peri-menopause age. While there can be different reasons for heavy bleeding, a frequent cause are fibroids. Fibroids (leiomyoma) are benign tumors that grow in the smooth muscle of the uterus. It’s believed that by age 50, 70% of women have fibroids, though most will not know it. About 30% of women with fibroids are symptomatic. Unfortunately, that number disproportionately affects Black women and there is not a good explanation

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Hormones
Dr. Russell

Flow No More: Our Top 4 Tips For Fibroids

As women, we spend a lot of time learning about what it’s like when your period starts, but we rarely spend time discussing what it’s like when it ends. When your period starts, it’s like flipping on a light switch. One day, it’s off, then the next day, it’s there. When it ends, it is not like the “on” switch just turns “off”. It’s more like a dimmer switch on your ovaries. For one or two months, it may be

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Hormones
Dr. Russell

Geriatric Pregnancy: Is It A Real Concern Or Just An Antiquated Idea?

As I have honed my practice over the years to focus on women’s health and hormone balance, naturally, infertility has been a growing part of my practice. However, fertility is also of personal interest to me. I am a few months away from officially being in my mid-thirties and want to have children of my own someday. While this was not part of my plan to wait this long, completing medical school and growing my practice were goals I wanted

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Women's Health
Dr. Russell

Women, Beware Of Your Doctors

It saddens me that the majority of my practice are patients that have come to me as a last resort. While I would love to promote overall wellness and prevention of disease, the reality is, most people come in after they’ve seen multiple specialists and still don’t have the answers they are looking for.   The longer I’ve been in practice, the more certain I am of the existence of a deadly gender bias against women in medicine. The countless

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Digestive Health
Dr. Russell

The Hidden Effects Of Stress

Now that we understand the role hormones play in the stress response and their general impacts on different parts of our body, it’s important to understand the sneaky ways stress can manifest. Since hormones, by their definition, travel throughout the blood, they can reach every organ, tissue, or system. In fact, almost every cell in your body is only six cells away or less from a supply of blood. In other words, that’s like having a Starbucks every six houses. Because of

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Nutrition
Dr. Russell

What Do Hormones Have To Do With Diabetes?

Our country has a major problem with sugar. In fact, the average American eats the body weight of an adult (~150 pounds) in sugar per year. Compare that to 1890, where we consumed only five pounds of sugar per year, a 3000% increase! The emergence of sugar in our culture has a convoluted and political history (check out Sugar Coated if you want to learn more) but that doesn’t change the fact that blood sugar issues and their subsequent consequences

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Environmental Health
Dr. Russell

Should I Take A Break From Coffee?

The strong reactions I get when I ask someone to give up coffee continues to amaze me. Not give up indefinitely. Not abstain for a year. But for thirty days. A blink of the eye when compared to the length of a lifetime. So it may be hard to imagine that I like to subject myself to this torture at least once a year. Actually, like might be a bit of a stretch, but I do think it’s a good

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