If you’ve discussed with your physician which approach you should take for alleviating menopausal symptoms — botanical, bio-identical or hormone replacement – you’ve probably heard him or her refer to research studies that have proven or dis-proven the efficacy of one treatment or another. You might even have been tempted to track down a research study to see for yourself what conclusions were reported, but didn’t know where to start. Now, there’s a new Website, available through the National Library of Medicine (NLM)that offers health research from scientific journals and other peer-reviewed sources.
The site covers a wide range of topics in women’s health and offers links to help you navigate to authoritative resources. There isn’t an overall category for Menopause, but you can search for information related to Bone & Joint Health, Hormone Therapy and Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
If you want to know if homeopathic treatment helps with hot flashes, for example, click on the site’s Complementary & Alternative Medicine link, then ”Reports of Clinical Trials” (under PubMed). Clicking on “Complementary & Alternative Medicine and Menopause,” will take you to a long list of research reports, the first of which focuses on homeopathic treatment. You”ll also see studies such as, “Acupuncture in managing menopausal symptoms: hope or mirage?” and “The Safety and Benefits of Soybean Isoflavones: A Natural Alternative to Conventional Hormone therapy?”
Since research findings are cited selectively to support a particular point-of-view, (as in “you can try Black Cohosh, but the latest research shows that stuff doesn’t work at all”), it’s well worth your time to do your own due diligence so that you can discuss the merits of a particular treatment intelligently and decide for yourself.
If you have found a study that is informative and helpful, please share it with others here.
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