When Crystal Burke hit her late 30s, she started noticing strange symptoms. Her psoriasis flared up. She had trouble sleeping.
“I went to see my primary care doctor. I went to see several doctors, a dermatologist for skin changes, a sleep doctor for sleep problems,” Burke said. “I had a problem, and I didn’t know what it was, where to go.”
While most women don’t hit menopause until their late 40s or early 50s, perimenopausal symptoms can start as early as their mid-30s.
Burke, a nurse practitioner, and her partner, Dr. Steven Youngblood, began researching menopause care and hormone replacement therapy. Instead of women having to visit several doctors for their symptoms, they felt there should be a way for them to receive comprehensive care for changes that come with menopause and perimenopause.
That’s how The Menopause Clinic, a telehealth clinic serving patients across Louisiana, was founded. The couple launched the clinic this year, and it currently serves mostly patients from the New Orleans area, where the couple is based, but is accessible to women anywhere in the state.
“When I started seeing multiple doctors for my symptoms, I had to take time off work. I had to wait in traffic, wait in a doctor’s office,” Burke said. “That is our goal: accessibility and convenience.”
Burke and Youngblood also hope to dispel some of the persistent myths around hormone replacement therapy.
A series of clinical studies initiated by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in 1991 under the banner of the Women’s Health Initiative reported an increase in breast cancer risk among women receiving estrogen by way of hormone replacement therapy.
The publication of the study’s results in 2002 had a significant effect: Within months the number of women using HRT dropped by almost half.
In the years to follow, however, the conclusions drawn in the study have been broadly questioned and have since been disproven when it comes to the benefits of HRT for women experiencing menopausal symptoms.
Compounded with a lack of training on menopause-related health issues among general physicians, and a glaring gap in research on the effects of menopause, the widely publicized study helped maintain a medical environment that doesn’t serve menopausal patients well, Youngblood noted.
In his medical training and later conversations with colleagues, menopause rarely came up, Youngblood said. And when it did, he noted, “the way that it was approached and what the data showed were not in alignment.”
The decision to go with a fully telehealth-based approach was born out of an interest in convenience and accessibility for patients, but also to save costs, according to Youngblood. “If you have a brick and mortar building, costs go up,” the physician said. “Costs go up, and the time you can spend with somebody has to go down.”
The couple currently offers its services on a cash basis — hiring staff to deal with processing insurance claims would have added another cost factor to the equation, Youngblood explained. Patients can enroll on a subscription basis. For $85 per month, Youngblood said patients will be able to access the clinic’s services at any time, with full appointments lasting an hour at a time.
“I just wish that there had been something to prepare me, somebody that I could talk to, ask a question,” Burke said of her perimenopausal experience. That’s the gap the couple is hoping to fill.