Cape Town - Women’s Month has ended and a new spring season awaits us, but there's still a host of special treats for the women of Cape Town.
On September 28, the beautiful President Hotel will be filled with woman as the much anticipated Weekend Argus Women's Wellness Experience takes place.
Leading women from health and wellness sectors in the Mother City will get together to share a wealth of knowledge – among them a dietitian, psychologist, sexologist, dermatologist, gynecologist and Dr Simone Silver.
Dr Silver is a medical doctor and functional medicine specialist. She will dive into the various options and benefits of functional medicine.
She told Weekend Argus: “Functional medicine is essentially an approach or a new thinking system around how we approach wellness and chronic disease. Instead of merely focusing on symptoms and treating the disease when it occurs, it is an approach that attempts to understand more about the patient, the root causes of illness and picking up ‘warning signs’ of imbalances in the body like chronic inflammation long before these imbalances culminate into a specific disease.
“This approach creates an opportunity for prevention of disease in the long-term. In the short-term, because it also focuses on the unique biochemistry, genetics and socio-psychology of each individual, it helps patients to gain deeper insights in to their experience of life, health and indeed, lack of wellness even in the absence of disease.
“I love that it embraces the concept and science of connectedness between all the systems within the body; think gut-brain-immune connections for example, and the influences of the mind and greater context of society on health, giving us that ‘holistic’ glimpse into what health means to each person.
“Treatment approaches are personalised and multi-faceted using a combination of lifestyle, pharmacological, hormonal and judicious and appropriate supplements where needed.”
While menopause is a hot topic among women, some fear the journey while others embrace the ride, Dr Silver explains how personalised medicine would accommodate the condition experienced by different women.
“For most women, the experience of any major hormone transition, like menopause takes us on journey – that journey can look entirely different from woman to woman depending on what symptoms she is experiencing, how her life looks, how resilient or stressed she feels and certainly how empowered or not she feels in terms of how to navigate it.
“The information and weighing in on pharmacological and hormonal therapies should be discussed with each women, delivering the best of science-based care but in addition to this, women should be engaged in discussion around a myriad other aspects of their wellbeing including mental and sexual vitality, for example and other areas of health that menopause may affect like bone health and metabolic health/weight issues and links to some chronic diseases like heart disease.
“I love the embracing approach of personalised medicine. It should be guided by the responsibility and robustness of science and yet is an art in how that science is applied to the individual.
From a biological perspective - because our major female hormones, estrogen and progesterone have actions in every tissue in the body, we may as women, experience a number of symptoms that we not initially or directly link to hormone imbalance for example a change in sleep, weight gain, hair loss, heart palpitations for example and so we need to be mindful of the concept of holism within the body itself - different body systems impact other systems and we need to be aware of ‘connecting the dots’ so to speak.”
Tickets are available via Quicket at R350. Tickets are selling fast so make sure you’re got your seat booked for an afternoon of informative engagement.