Denver clinic owner spreads the word on hormone replacement therapy
Women in their 40's, 50's and 60's are juggling a lot. Often they are not only caregiving for their children but also for their parents. They are sometimes stuck in their careers or find themselves unmarketable for a new job. They are all going through changes in their body that are often not talked about. These are the women for which BizLife Con is curated. Barbara Brooks organizes the conference as part of her business Second Act Women. BizLife Con hosts workshops and panel discussion about career advancement, entrepreneurship, mental health and physical health.
"I decided women over 40...we need to know more about our bodies...and we simply don't," Brooks explained.
As part of that mission, Brooks asked her own health care provider, Kimberly Cunningham of the Cunningham Clinic, be a presenter at BizLife Con.
"It was when my mother had her stroke that i was motivated to do something better so I became a client last year," Brooks said.
She's lost 57 pounds through medical weight loss. She's also doing hormone replacement therapy which she says gives her more energy. The Cunningham Clinic offers a healthier way to age.
"We take a functional medicine lens looking at what's working, what's not working in the body and then we use different tools to make things better," Cunningham told CBS News Colorado.
Cunningham's toolbox includes medical weigh loss, a thyroid clinic, micronutrients and hormone replacement.
"When women lose testosterone, they can't build bone. They can't build muscle. They have all this inflammation. They have all this joint laxity and pain, and they can't recover from a catastrophic injury," Cunningham explained.
That is exactly what happened to Cunningham. She had a catastrophic injury that left her in a wheelchair for almost four years. She still has the hardware that held her together.
"That was a series of 10 surgeries over 2 years, lost of hardware in, hardware out, hardware in," she said.
From there she learned about the importance of balancing her hormones. For decades, women have been told that hormone replacement therapy would cause breast cancer in women. That information was based on a National Institutes of Health study that was stopped when several women developed breast cancer.
"The study group was flawed. The study statistics were flawed. The evaluation was flawed. The entire study has been retracted, and there has been many data sets since then and published since then both in the United States and European data sets showing that women who do hormone replacement therapy actually have a reduced risk of breast cancer," Cunningham explained.
During BizLife Con, Cunningham will be doing two session to talk about healthy aging. Her clinic will also be doing free blood panels so participants can do a deep dive into their health.
"Women need this. We've been understudied, under treated, not treated. We are caregivers, and Western medicine doesn't do a very good job of taking care of us," Cunningham said.
LINK: BizLife Con
BizLife Con runs Friday, April 25 and Saturday, April 26, 2025 at the Comedy Works Landmark in Denver.
