08/25/2026
People ask me all the time WHY I’m so passionate about hormone therapy.
WHY I built an entire practice around it.
WHY I talk about hormones with the same urgency as other providers reserve for chest pain. Here is my honest answer: It’s my mother…
A few years ago my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
Carrying that diagnosis alongside her, watching her navigate a disease that slowly takes pieces of a person, has been one of the hardest things to watch, both as her daughter and as a clinician.
What makes it even more personal is that I carry the same Alzheimer’s gene as my mother…..
My mother was on HRT for years, it was working for her. Then the WHI came out in 2002, the headlines screamed that hormones cause cancer, and like millions of women, she was taken off hormones almost overnight. She was also started on a statin to lower her cholesterol. Our brains are mostly cholesterol and that cholesterol builds and maintains the membranes around every neuron, it is essential for our brain health.
Two out of three Alzheimers patients are women.
That statistic alone should have researchers and clinicians asking harder questions about what happens to a woman’s brain when estrogen disappears and cholesterol is treated as the enemy. I can’t go back and change what happened to my mother. I can’t undo the years she spent without HRT but
I can make sure this doesn’t happen to the women in front of me now…this is why when a patient sits across from me, worried about brain fog, mood changes or a family history of dementia, I don’t dismiss it as normal aging. My mother carries the gene.
I carry the gene.
And I carry her story into every consult I have.
