Women's health concerns

The core of women's health has never been the anti-aging remedies and Internet celebrity skin care products spread online, but the dynamic balance of hormones throughout the entire life cycle, the disease screening rhythm adapted to individual circumstances, and the easily ignored emotional somatization signals - everything else can be pushed to the back. These three points have the highest probability of being pitted and have the greatest impact.

I just got married to a 27-year-old Internet operator girl a while ago. I bought imported soy isoflavones and royal jelly oral liquid in order to fight aging and follow the trend. I took it every day according to the instructions. After three months, I checked for breast nodules. It increased from category 2 last year to category 4a. She came to me crying with the report and asked me if it was going to be cancerous.

In fact, the controversy over exogenous hormone supplementation has been raging in the industry for almost ten years. One group of people believes that estrogen levels decline year by year after the age of 30, and appropriate supplementation can delay aging and improve menstrual discomfort. The other group is firmly opposed, believing that unindicated supplementation of exogenous hormones is equivalent to "sending nutrients" to abnormal cells in the breast and ovaries, which will greatly increase the risk of cancer. My own clinical experience is that there has never been a unified standard for whether to take supplements or not: if you have regular menstruation and no abnormalities such as nodules and cysts in your breasts and ovaries, drinking more soy milk and eating soy products is enough, and there is no need to take high-concentration supplements. ； If you do have scanty menstruation and obvious menopausal symptoms, you must first check the six sex hormones and take the report to the doctor to adjust the dosage. It is really easy to cause problems if you eat blindly.

Oh, by the way, there are also many young girls who take emetics and illegal weight-loss drugs in order to lose weight. They are essentially torturing hormones. The most exaggerated case I have seen is a 19-year-old girl who took diet pills for half a year and went into amenorrhea. It took almost two years for her to slowly recover.

Speaking of messing around, the trap of over-screening is actually more common than indiscriminate supplementation of skin care products. A 32-year-old girl came to me two weeks ago and said that she had tested positive for HPV for three consecutive years. This year, the physical examination agency asked her to take a test, so she went. As a result, the nurse who took the sample was too heavy-handed and ruptured the cervical mucosa, causing bleeding for three days and causing inflammation. She was extremely aggrieved.

There is now a lot of controversy about the frequency of screening. The general standard in the public system is to start cervical cancer screening after the age of 21 and having sex. If HPV+TCT is combined with a full negative test, once every 3-5 years is enough.； However, for the sake of revenue, many private institutions will create anxiety by saying that they need to check once every six months, and also add various unnecessary tumor marker screenings. My general advice to patients is: if there is no family history (for example, immediate family members have a history of ovarian cancer or cervical cancer), the public standards are completely sufficient. If they belong to a high-risk group, the interval can be appropriately shortened to 2 years. There is no need for frequent sampling, which will damage the barrier of the cervix. There are also breast B-ultrasound, thyroid B-ultrasound, etc. Normal healthy people only need to check once a year. If you have nodules, once every six months is enough, and you don’t need to go to the hospital every month.

Many people think that health means normal indicators, but this is not the case. In the outpatient clinics I have attended in the past six months, almost half of the girls who complained about irregular menstruation, chest pain, and migraines found no problems after checking all the indicators. The last question was that either they had just had a fight with their partner and had been in a cold war for almost a month, or they had been keeping up with their KPIs for two or three months in a row until two or three in the morning.

There is also a huge cognitive gap in the industry today. The traditional clinical thinking is that "abnormal indicators are a disease." However, now the school of mind-body medicine has mentioned that women's neurological sensitivity is about 30% higher than men's on average. Mood fluctuations are first reflected in the endocrine and reproductive systems. When indicators go wrong, it will be too late to intervene. A young nurse who just joined our department last year spent more than half a month catching up on quarterly medical records last month. Her menstruation was delayed for 20 days, and everything she checked was normal. I gave her three days of leave to stop working and go to the surrounding area to play around. Her period came the next day after she came back, and she didn't prescribe any medicine.

There are also many girls who come to me and ask me why they have chest pain and stomach pain every time they are angry. In fact, it is the projection of emotions on the body. Don't always think that you are "hypocritical". You should rest and vent. It is much more effective than taking Xiaoyao Pills.

Oh, by the way, there is another question that has been asked eight hundred times: Can I eat ice during menstruation?

This is even more controversial. The point of view of Western medicine is that as long as you don’t feel uncomfortable after eating it, you can eat it. Ice will heat up the stomach and will not affect the uterus.； The view of traditional Chinese medicine is that ice can cause vasoconstriction and aggravate dysmenorrhea. My own experience is that it all depends on the individual: if you have been eating ice since you were a child, it will be fine. If you are craving for ice cream during your menstrual period, it will not affect you at all. If you feel pain and break out in cold sweats when you eat ice, then you should definitely not touch it. There is no rigid rule that "women must avoid cold weather during menstruation".

In fact, after all, there is no standard answer to women's health that is universally applicable. Your own body feelings are always much more reliable than online standards and other people's experiences. Don’t be bound by the rhetoric of “X number of skin care things that girls must do” and “X number of health products that 30-year-old women must take”. Make time for a routine physical examination every year. If you feel uncomfortable, go to a doctor at a regular hospital and ask. A registration fee of more than ten yuan is more effective than buying skin care products that cost 10,000 yuan.

By the way, don’t panic if you find some minor problems, such as type 2 breast nodules and type 3 thyroid nodules. Most of them are benign and you just need to check them regularly. Don’t search Baidu to scare yourself. The problems that scare you will have a greater impact than the nodules themselves.