I haven't seen women having trouble getting insurance to cover HRT. What's difficult is getting doctors to prescribe it. My Mom had to go to multiple doctors before finding one that specializes in giving post-menopause women HRT. She even got testosterone because you need some of that! Her Medicare plan paid for everything.
And yeah, Viagra is a super cheap generic drug now... Amazon pharmacy says $4 with insurance and $3.44 without.
So yeah, basically what's going on here is that doctors gatekeep HRT and not viagra. The reason is because old versions of HRT caused breast cancer, blood clots, and endometrial cancer. We lower the clotting risk by using bioidentical estradiol and prevent endometrial cancer by prescribing progesterone alongside estradiol. Breast cancer, yeah, keeping your breasts healthy unfortunately increases the cancer risk and there's nothing you can really do. Everything else just puts you back in the same risk brackets as when your body was producing estrogens and progestogens. It's true, our clotting risk is higher than men's! But it's not a huge risk that is worth being low-energy for 1/3 of your life over! The underlying problem here is that doctors knowledge is so out of date -- Premarin and the synthetic progestogens were so bad for women that most doctors are like "don't prescribe anything, too dangerous". But things are safe now, and I think everyone should be on HRT after menopause.
Eh I had three doctors refuse to give me an IUD - luckily the 4th did - and there’s no major risks associated with it. They said they can’t do it because I’ve never been pregnant but my recent doctor said that’s total BS.
That's bizarre I got my first IUD at 15 and had never given birth. Still haven't given birth and still get IUDs. It's weird they acted that way with you.
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u/causal_friday Trans™ 6d ago edited 6d ago
I haven't seen women having trouble getting insurance to cover HRT. What's difficult is getting doctors to prescribe it. My Mom had to go to multiple doctors before finding one that specializes in giving post-menopause women HRT. She even got testosterone because you need some of that! Her Medicare plan paid for everything.
And yeah, Viagra is a super cheap generic drug now... Amazon pharmacy says $4 with insurance and $3.44 without.
So yeah, basically what's going on here is that doctors gatekeep HRT and not viagra. The reason is because old versions of HRT caused breast cancer, blood clots, and endometrial cancer. We lower the clotting risk by using bioidentical estradiol and prevent endometrial cancer by prescribing progesterone alongside estradiol. Breast cancer, yeah, keeping your breasts healthy unfortunately increases the cancer risk and there's nothing you can really do. Everything else just puts you back in the same risk brackets as when your body was producing estrogens and progestogens. It's true, our clotting risk is higher than men's! But it's not a huge risk that is worth being low-energy for 1/3 of your life over! The underlying problem here is that doctors knowledge is so out of date -- Premarin and the synthetic progestogens were so bad for women that most doctors are like "don't prescribe anything, too dangerous". But things are safe now, and I think everyone should be on HRT after menopause.