It’s the one question almost every woman in this stage of life eventually asks out loud: “why don’t I feel like myself anymore?” The energy that used to be reliable isn’t, the body that used to respond to the clean eating and the workouts just stopped, and the desire you used to feel — or the way your body used to respond when you wanted it to — isn’t there anymore. When you finally say it out loud to your doctor, you hear the same answer so many of us have heard: “that’s just a normal part of aging.”
I’ve never been interested in “normal” life. And I don’t feel that we should have to accept when a physician says “that’s just a normal part of aging.” What you’re feeling isn’t a discipline problem, and it deserves a real answer, not a government guideline.
Part of the reason women keep hearing “normal” goes back more than twenty years. In 2002, one study, the Women’s Health Initiative, convinced a generation that hormone therapy was dangerous. What rarely gets mentioned is who was actually in it: women averaging 63 years old, most of them a decade past menopause, more than a third with high blood pressure, about a third with obesity, taking a synthetic hormone pill that looks very little like what’s prescribed today. The timing was wrong, and so was the hormone. An entire generation of women, and their doctors, absorbed the fear anyway. Today, fewer than two out of every hundred women over 40 are on hormone therapy.
Hormone therapy isn’t about turning back the clock. As Stephanie Tippett, MSN, CRNP, FNP-C, CANS, one of the founders of Momentum Integrative Wellness, puts it: “It is about helping women feel like themselves again. When thoughtfully prescribed and individualized, hormone therapy can relieve disruptive menopausal symptoms, support bone health, improve quality of life, and help women move through this stage with greater confidence and vitality.”
This isn’t only a women’s story. Men walk through their own version of this, a slower decline instead of a defined event, but the same loss of drive, the same change in body composition, the same quiet frustration of being told it is just normal aging. The methodology is the same for both.
I spent nearly twenty years inside the pharmaceutical industry, reading and interpreting clinical data for a living. I’m not the one writing your prescription, but I can explain the parts of this world most patients are never told, and this is one of the clearest examples I know of a single flawed study reshaping medicine for twenty years.
Stephanie Robinson, MSN, FNP-C, CEN, one of the nurse practitioners at Momentum Integrative Wellness, says it best: “Why do we normalize replacing every single thing the body needs, unless it comes to hormone health? We optimize cortisol. We manage thyroid and metabolic hormones without blinking. But the moment someone brings up the ovaries, we freeze and wait for permission from an agency instead of listening to our own bodies.”
She’s right, and the timing makes the point for her. On September 17, the FDA held a public workshop on testosterone for women, after the number of women receiving a prescription for it jumped 146 percent since 2023. There is still no testosterone product approved specifically for a woman’s body. If I’m being fully transparent, that’s part of why I think this is finally getting attention: testosterone itself has been off-patent for decades, so the only real money is in patenting a specific formulation or delivery system, and until now nobody’s pushed one through for women. No proprietary product on the market means less financial incentive to move fast, no matter how many women needed this years ago. But that’s my opinion, not a fact I can prove. Every prescription being written right now is off label, dosed by a provider’s judgment, not a manufacturer’s label. And many experts have been pushing for years for real dosing guidelines and parameters.
The gap in guidance doesn’t mean the biology is a mystery. A study of 332 women on testosterone dosed for them individually, published this spring in the Journal of Personalized Medicine, found that 84 percent reported more energy and nearly 90 percent reported a better quality of life. It looked back at women already in treatment rather than testing a new group against a placebo, so it shows a pattern, not proof. But it’s real data on real women, and it echoes precisely what we see in our own patients.
Individualized protocols are the defining factor. At Momentum Integrative Wellness, we start with a full hormone panel alongside a deeper layer of functional medicine biomarkers most providers never even think to run — the kind that shows how your body is actually using its hormones, not just how much of them you have. Then we sit down and talk about your symptoms and the season of life you’re in right now, your goals, and what’s important to you. Your labs can tell one story, and your body can tell a completely different one. Both matter, and they don’t always agree. This has to be a two-way, ongoing, fluid conversation between you and your provider, not a fifteen-minute visit and a prescription that worked three months ago but has already stopped working, because your body has already changed again.
How the therapy is delivered matters as much as the diagnosis. Cream, injection, pill, pellet: the right one depends on you, not on what’s easiest to write a prescription for. Pellets have real advantages for the right person, a set rhythm instead of a daily routine, and they’re popular with women in their 40s and 50s who want exactly that. But they might not be for everyone, and that’s okay. Effective and safe pellet therapy requires a provider who has placed a lot of them and knows how to dose appropriately, most often low and slow, followed by timely labs and a follow-up appointment to check on how you, the patient, are feeling. The same goes for estrogen and progesterone. The right answer changes from woman to woman, based on her health history and how her body processes hormones. A prescription pad doesn’t make someone a hormone expert. Years of doing this, and doing it carefully, does.
Vaginal estrogen deserves its own mention, because it gets lumped in with full-body hormone therapy, and it shouldn’t be. There are no contraindications to vaginal estrogen. Used locally, very little of it reaches the bloodstream, so it carries far fewer precautions, and it’s an option for far more women than most realize, even some with a history of cancer, under the right provider’s guidance. What it does reliably is keep the vaginal wall healthy instead of thin and fragile, and that’s often the real reason behind the UTIs that keep coming back after menopause, not bad luck. A study of nearly two million women with repeat UTIs, published in September, found that only about five percent were prescribed vaginal estrogen within two months of their second infection. The women who were had roughly half the rate of sepsis, hospitalization, and death over the next eight years. That’s a fix hiding in plain sight for a lot of women who’ve been told the burning, and the infections are just something to live with now.
Stephanie Robinson and Stephanie Tippett have been building individualized hormone plans for men and women for years, built with the patient’s needs, appropriate medical oversight, and longevity goals in mind.
At Momentum, normal is never the goal. We move your labs and your life from average to OPTIMIZED.
This month: scan the code and book your seventy-biomarker baseline consult, with your hormone panel front and center, so you know exactly where you stand before you decide what’s next.
“I’ve never been interested in normal.” — DANIELLE LEA (METZ)
Areas of Focus:
• Medical Weight Loss & Metabolic Health
• Peptide & Regenerative Therapies
• Hormone Optimization
About Danielle:
Danielle Lea (Metz), CCMA, CMWC, spent nearly twenty years inside the pharmaceutical industry, translating complex medication science and clinical data for physicians across the country. Today she brings that expertise directly to patients, helping them understand the difference between real medical breakthroughs and the band-aids that keep people cycling through sick care.
She is co-founder of Momentum Integrative Wellness by Bella Rose, where she serves as Health Optimization Strategist and GLP-1 & Peptide Educator, and creator of the #ItDidntCrushMe® movement.
Concierge Longevity & Regenerative Wellness
2440 SE Federal Highway, Suite 600
Stuart, FL 34994
(772) 210-4977
PeptidesStuart.com • @PeptidesStuart
By appointment only • Mon–Sat
Co-founded by Danielle Lea (Metz) & Stephanie Tippett, MSN, CRNP, FNP-C, CANS
SEE WHERE YOU STAND
Average, or optimized?
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