Can’t Find Your Estrogen Patch? What You Need to Know

Transcript:

Jamie Forward: What can we do about the estrogen patch shortages? Do you know if this will keep happening, or will production catch up?

Dr. Nina Ali: Well, it has been such, such a beast to navigate with the shortages, as you can imagine, running a menopause clinic. But, I mean, we don’t know. As far as, like, updates on how long this is going to go on, I really have not heard anything definitive about when to expect relief here. But in my practice, we have been sort of switching to different modalities, which is not ideal, but we’ve had women on goose chases all over the city trying to get to one pharmacy or the other and getting one box here and one manufacturer there.

So, I’ve been kind of favoring new starts with the daily gel to try to help them avoid that situation, which also is a transdermal form, it comes in several dosing options. So, hopefully there are not going to be shortages on that as well, but it’s a blessing we have so many different ways to prescribe your hormone therapy.

So, for me, that’s kind of what has been working, is either switching over to the once weekly patches if the twice weekly have been more hard to get filled or switching to a gel. There’s also a vaginal ring that is amazing, but it’s harder to get it covered by insurance for many women. So, that one I haven’t been utilizing as much. And there’s also a spray, which is great, but from the beginning, for years, that one’s been a little bit harder to get filled. So, it is a challenge, but I think for most people we’re able to at least figure out some way to navigate.

Jamie Forward: That’s great advice.

Dr. Jackie Piasta: I’d also like to add, if I could take the liberty to add –

Jamie Forward: Sure.

Dr. Jackie Piasta: I also want people to understand too, especially if you’re an otherwise very good candidate for hormone therapy, you’re well within that window, you don’t have any excessive risk of blood clot or cardiovascular disease, that the oral estradiol can be a really good option particularly if you’re somebody where your gynecologist has said, “Oh, birth control pills are a great option for your perimenopause.”

The ethanol estradiol, or the estrogen in a birth control pill is a lot more potent than our menopausal hormone therapy estrogen form. So, don’t automatically rule that out as an option. It’s very inexpensive, very easy to take. And again, it’s not just a patch shortage, the patch is hard because some people really can only tolerate one brand of patch. So, it can be very tedious. It’s not as easy as saying, “Oh, well I can get this brand.” So, as Dr. Ali said, it’s really challenging, but I always put a plug in for, particularly my really, really excellent candidates for hormone therapy, don’t automatically rule out oral estrogen either.

Jamie Forward: Yeah. I think that’s a great point. And it’s really, as we’ve been talking about this whole time, it’s really about having a discussion with your doctor about what’s right for you. I think that that’s what we can all take away from today.