Shellie Braxton opened the Modern Women’s Wellness Center in Verona for perimenopausal and menopausal women who might have left a doctor’s office feeling unheard. Maybe it was because it was only a seven-minute appointment, or maybe it was because they were prescribed one of the synthetic hormone replacement medications that didn’t address their unique symptoms. Maybe they were denied a hormone replacement therapy, or HRT, all together.
It’s not just a select few women who have had those kinds of experiences — a recent FemTech World survey shows that 93% of women feel dismissed when seeking medical help.
“My vision for the wellness center is to create this safe space where you can come in and talk to anybody here like you would talk to your best friend,” Braxton says.
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Modern Women’s Wellness Center (1029 N. Edge Trail in Verona) opened on Oct. 1 in the Prairie Oaks Retail Center to provide personalized hormone treatment plans for women.Â
Pictured is the waiting area at Modern Women’s Wellness Center (1029 N. Edge Trail in Verona), which opened on Oct. 1 to provide personalized hormone treatment plans for women.Â
Pictured is the supplements sales display at Modern Women’s Wellness Center (1029 N. Edge Trail in Verona), which opened on Oct. 1 to provide personalized hormone treatment plans for women.Â
Modern Women’s Wellness Center (1029 N. Edge Trail in Verona) opened on Oct. 1 in the Prairie Oaks Retail Center to provide personalized hormone treatment plans for women.Â
Pictured is the waiting area at Modern Women’s Wellness Center (1029 N. Edge Trail in Verona), which opened on Oct. 1 to provide personalized hormone treatment plans for women.Â
Pictured is the supplements sales display at Modern Women’s Wellness Center (1029 N. Edge Trail in Verona), which opened on Oct. 1 to provide personalized hormone treatment plans for women.Â
A gap in women’s health care has always existed, and it’s why Braxton’s parents founded the Modern Health Pharmacy (2809 Fish Hatchery Road) in the late 1980s. The pharmacy, which is now owned by Braxton, regularly filled prescriptions for HRT (estrogen was in the top three highest prescribed medications back then). Then a series of studies in the 1990s and early 2000s famously, but perhaps erroneously, linked HRT to breast cancer, and women stopped being prescribed HRT almost across the board.Â
“Women have literally been suffering for 20 years because the medical industry has had us believing that supplementing with hormones causes cancer,” she says.Â
HRT’s reputation has only recently recovered as a treatment option and is now the FDA-approved way to treat menopause for most women, but obstacles remain. A generation of health care providers have not received training on hormone therapy or menopause in general. Braxton says some women still struggle to find a doctor who specializes in menopause treatment, let alone ones who are willing or able to prescribe personalized hormones.
“Earlier this year, I just got fed up,” Braxton says. “I decided to take matters into my own hands and open a wellness center that is specific for women.”Â
Braxton herself isn’t a health care provider — she’s an accountant, like her parents were. Modern Women’s Wellness Center (1029 N. Edge Trail, Verona) employs one physician’s assistant and two registered nurses who take a root-cause approach to treat perimenopause and menopause with optimized hormones and bioidentical HRT.
Shellie Braxton (pictured middle) is the owner of Modern Health Pharmacy (2809 Fish Hatchery Road) and Modern Women’s Wellness Center (pictured) at 1029 N. Edge Trail in Verona. She employs one physician’s assistant (Jen Terasa, pictured left) and two registered nurses (one nurse, Jennifer Ravenscroft, pictured right) to provide personalized hormone treatment plans for women.Â
Photo by Andrea Behling
“Bioidentical” means that the HRT is formulated to closely resemble what your body would naturally produce. The customized prescriptions are filled through Modern Health Pharmacy, which is a compounding pharmacy that’s able to create custom medications.Â
Consultation meetings start at 45 minutes with a focus on evidence-based care and individualized treatment that goes beyond just an HRT prescription to also include IV therapy, nutrition or supplement guidance, body composition analysis and ongoing support. “It’s all connected,” Braxton says. And everyone needs specialized treatment based on their symptoms.
“There is no box that we should all be in,” Braxton says.
Modern Women’s Wellness Center — which doesn’t have a traditional exam room, but instead a consultation room — doesn’t replace a woman’s full health care needs. Meeting with a regular health care practitioner, gynecologist, etc. is still needed. This wellness center exists because a gap remains — Braxton remembers the period of time when she realized a center like this was needed when Modern Health Pharmacy was getting phone calls from women who were having issues finding the care they needed.
“Women, unfortunately, are just a very underserved part of our population, which is very unfortunate because there are a lot of us, and we are all going to go through [menopause] at one point in our lives,” Braxton says.
Andrea Behling is editor-in-chief at Madison Magazine.
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