This week we heard from a client who was having problems with her digestion.  She was suffering terrible bouts of nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.

This had been going on for a number of weeks, and she was scheduled for some pretty expensive and unpleasant tests with her GI doctor.

She had heard that gall bladder disease is really common among woman who are in menopause and are post-menopausal, and wrote in asking if menopause actually causes gall bladder disease.

The answer is, not directly.  We’ll get to that in a bit.

Symptoms of gall bladder problems are basically exactly what she described:

Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and right upper quadrant pain that are not due to bacterial or viral infection are most likely to be caused by a gall bladder that is not doing its job properly.

She explained that she could eat crackers, gelatin, bananas, and broth, but nothing more substantial than that.

Anytime she tried to eat meat, cheese, fruit, vegetables…basically all the healthy foods…and anything with a high fat content, she would have horrible pain within 30 minutes to 2 hours of the meal.  She’d then spend the next 6-12 hours running to the toilet with diarrhea.

If she stuck to the clear liquid diet, she was without pain and other symptoms, but she was rapidly losing weight, had no energy, and was becoming dehydrated.

Her HIDA scan was problematic because she had become dehydrated enough that the tech had a hard time getting the needle in her arm.

But how did she get to this place?  One thing she mentioned really stuck out to me because she said she had been using a prescription hormone replacement gel since she exited peri-menopause and was fully in ‘the change,’ or in menopause.

She had been using it a little over a year to stave off the hot flashes, weight gain, mood swings and night sweats that had made her pretty miserable.

This is where we come back to the part about how menopause doesn’t directly cause gall bladder disease.

As a natural health researcher, I have studied the different forms of menopause hormone treatments and their benefits. I have also learned quite a lot about their drawbacks.

The most concerning risk to me is the fact that HRT more than doubles a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer.

But a quieter, less publicized adverse effect from using hormone replacement therapy is gall bladder disease.

Because the toxic effects take a little while to accumulate, the problem kind of sneaks up on a person.  Our client said she had about 14 months of relatively happy, asymptomatic living before she got sick, and then it was like the bottom had fallen out of her happy living…not sure if the pun was intended.

Her doctor had apparently confirmed to her that indeed, menopausal women do develop gall bladder disease more frequently than their non-menopausal counterparts, but I guess left out that little bit regarding HRT and its directly causative effects of gall bladder disease.

My advice to her was basically to call the doctor right away to discuss a safe way of getting off the HRT.

I left mine cold turkey and I don’t advise that at all.  It’s not safe and the very symptoms I was taking HRT to prevent came back with such a fury that I was just beside myself with misery.

What I advised her to do is what I should have done in the first place: explain to my doctor that medicines that make me sick are not going to be tolerated, and only natural methods for eliminating menopause symptoms are what I am comfortable with.

The unfortunate thing is that once the gall bladder has decided it’s done behaving, there is no magical fix.  She’ll likely have to have surgery, as the nuclear medicine scan indicated some problems.

Lesson learned, I guess you could say, but I hate that for her.  But, now that she is on her way to enjoying menopause in a prescription-free way, that will go a long way to making her next 30 or so years a lot more pleasant.

For more information on how to enjoy menopause symptom-free and naturally, get a copy of The Natural Menopause Solution today.

To Your Very Best Health,

Julissa Clay

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