Common Menstrual Concerns

Young Women and Osteoporosis — Good news about treatment and prevention

Osteoporosis and broken bones are an old woman’s disease-right? No, that is not right! Young women do get osteoporosis-although rarely. The sooner we understand that young women can and do fracture bones and develop osteoporosis the better. Also, the sooner we accept that the bone we build in our childhood and teen years provides a…
Ovulatory Disturbances: They Do Matter

For the woman who isn’t trying to get pregnant, does it matter if an ovulatory pattern is normal? Recent studies indicate that it does. One study showed that women with only one nonovulatory cycle a year lost an average of 4% of their spinal bone. Strong evidence suggests that lack of cyclic normal progesterone is…
Very Heavy Menstrual Flow

When periods are very heavy or you are experiencing “flooding” or passing big clots you have what doctors call menorrhagia. The purpose of this article is to define normal and very heavy menstrual bleeding, to explain what causes heavy flow, and to show what you yourself can do in dealing with heavy flow. This, and…
Ovarian Hormone Therapy for Women with Early Menopause

We hear a lot of things about hormone therapy (often wrongly called Hormone Replacement Therapy or HRT) (1). Most of the time when “HRT” is used it is referring to the treatment of women who had natural (not surgical) menopause at a normal age. Before about 1998 we believed that estrogen made everything better, but…
Estrogen’s Storm Season Book

**UPDATE** The 2017 Edition of Estrogen’s Storm Season is now available as an Ebook (in both Amazon Kindle and ePUB formats)! Please see below for purchase details. For those who have purchased or received earlier paperback editions, we have created an insert with updates that relates to CeMCOR’s unique but evidence-based view of the phases…
Help for Anovulatory Androgen Excess (AAE)—Challenge PCOS!

Dr. Jerilynn Prior is a Professor and physician at the University of British Columbia and Celeste Wincapaw is a Vancouver woman and member of the Community Advisory Council for the Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research. Because Celeste is interested for personal reasons and has questions about “polycystic ovary syndrome” (also called PCOS but…
Painful Periods — also called “cramps” or “dysmenorrhea”

What are cramps? Painful periods are known as cramps (or in medical terms as “dysmenorrhea”). This section looks at what causes cramps, and how to control the pain yourself using inexpensive, over-the-counter medicines. They occur for almost all menstruating women at some point in their lives. For a few women, they interfere with work or…
Menstrual Cycle Diary©

CeMCOR’s Menstrual Cycle Diary© is meant for adolescents and premenopausal women. The Diary is available in both print and digital formats, with instructions provided. You will need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to read and print the PDF of the Diary with instructions. We have also developed a version of this Diary with 2 blank…
Perimenopause: The Ovary’s Frustrating Grand Finale

Women in midlife increasingly hear the words “estrogen deficiency” spoken as the ultimate in bad news. Everyone knows that low estrogen levels cause heart disease, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s and frigidity. But as Dr. Susan Love, the influential breast surgeon, feminist advocate and now deceased author of Dr. Susan Love’s Hormone Book asserts, “If estrogen deficiency’s a…
For Healthcare Providers: Managing Menorrhagia Without Surgery

When a woman comes to you saying that her periods are “heavy” she’s “flooding” or she’s passing clots, what do you normally do to assess and treat her? The purpose of this paper is to define normal menstruation and how to clinically assess menstrual flow. In addition, you will learn how to make a diagnosis…