Are Your Hormones Dragging You Down? | San Antonio Birth, Newborn, and Maternity Photographer | Guest Spotlight-Vital Life Wellness Center

From time to time we like to bring in a guest blogger that we feel has some valuable insight for our clients and fans.  This month we asked Stephanie Flores, a local board certified family nurse practitioner (and one of our favorite people!), to shed some light on how she helps moms get down to the root of the problem when they just can't quite figure out how to get their groove back!  I hope you find the information useful!

Is this it? Is this all there is to adulthood, motherhood, marriage and career? Remember when you were in your teens or twenties and you would imagine how your life would be once you completed all the homework, graduations, job hunting, life-partner picking, home buying, and child bearing tasks leading up to this point? Is this what you imagined? I certainly did not. I did not anticipate the harried rush of life, the lack of sleep, the persistent fatigue, the extra pounds, the loss of hair, the dull complexion of my skin! How did it get here so quickly?

I now know from personal experience that womanhood in your late 30s+ is an awakening! I too have experienced the symptoms that I frequently evaluate my patients for in my profession as a Nurse Practitioner. I often treat women that come to the clinic within months of having a baby stating they don’t feel themselves, have no sex drive, are irritable, cannot lose weight, are exhausted all day and sleepless all night. Many come in years after having a baby stating they could not find the time to care for themselves, as they have been consumed with caring for their family and careers.

Some of these women do head to the doctor only to find that their thyroid panel is “normal” or their hormones are “normal” with no explanation as to what could be causing their symptoms other than “age”. The truth is, there are many things that can lead to fatigue, insomnia, lack of sex drive, heavy periods, mood swings, irritability, and as such there are many things that can be done to help resolve them other than shipping your kids off to boarding school and getting a divorce.

What needs to be investigated is the root cause of the symptoms. Something that traditional medicine strayed away from as it moved towards treating every symptom under the sun with a medication. This has left patients and some medical providers alike with a desire to seek out and remedy the root cause of symptoms instead of use an array of fancy band-aids to merely stifle them.

And so, Functional Medicine was born! This is an approach to health care that focuses on wellness, prevention, and identification of root causes to ameliorate symptoms or prevent the onset of disease. Some qualified medical doctors, nurse practitioners and other health care providers prefer to utilize this approach when caring for their patients; unfortunately those with the extra training in functional medicine are few and far between.

After working for years in traditional medical clinics, and finding that the stress of life was taking a toll on my body, energy, health and energy, I was fortunate to begin my career at Vital Life Wellness Center in San Antonio. Vital Life Wellness Center specializes in searching out the root causes of symptoms and has been doing so for nearly 10 years. We have board certified physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants with additional training in functional medicine and years of hands on experience helping patients feel their best through optimizing nutrients and hormone balance and identifying issues in their health or lifestyle that cause symptoms or disease. No longer do we have to put up with these symptoms that accompany a “normal” lab panel! If you are interested in optimizing your health, reducing symptoms, or just want something other than a prescribed sleeping pill to help you get a restful sleep at night, let’s talk!

Stephanie Thomas, DNP, APRN
Board Certified Family Nurse Practitioner

Vital Life Wellness Center has 2 locations to serve you:
Alamo Heights/Uptown @ 2520 Broadway Suite 100, San Antonio, TX 78215
Ventura Plaza/Stone Oak @ 434 N. Loop, 1604 West Suite 1204, San Antonio, TX 78232
210-595-1019