Alternative Therapies for Menopausal Symptoms
There are many approaches to menopause that can help aid and treat the conditions that you feel, but these approaches can be lumped into two main categories: conventional and alternative.
Alternative methods are those that don’t involve pills or direct hormone therapy. While some researchers are skeptical about the effectiveness of alternative treatments, the truth is that many women feel symptom relief from these therapies and solutions.
Dietary Changes

Chinese soy milk soup with wonton
One of the best things that you can do is change your diet to improve your estrogen levels. To do this, you need to consume more phytoestrogens.
Phytoestrogens are plant-based compounds that mimic estrogen in the body, thus they are able to increase your level of natural estrogen.
Most fruits and vegetables have this compound, but the two best foods are soy and flaxseeds. Flaxseeds have the most phytoestrogens (about three times more than soy), but soy is easier to incorporate into your diet due to the vast number of products, such as soy milk and cheeses.
Yoga
Most people associate yoga simply with the art of stretching and bending, but there is more to it than that. Aside from stretching the body to improve flexibility, yoga also involves controlled breathing and intense meditation to improve your body. Many research studies have found that practitioners of yoga feel less menopausal symptoms, and it can decrease the number of hot flashes.
Acupuncture

Many women who go for acupuncture have reduced hot flashes and many of the other symptoms are reduced or alleviated
Though science doesn’t entirely understand why, acupuncture has been proven to help with many different diseases and conditions, and it’s slowly being regarded as an effective treatment in the scientific community.
Among the many conditions that acupuncture can help fix and regulate, menopause is one of them.
Some people think that the increase in adrenaline from the pins going into you can improve menopausal symptoms, while others believe that the pins are able to interact with your body to help regulate the hormones.
Regardless of the reason, many women who go for acupuncture have reduced hot flashes and many of the other symptoms are reduced or alleviated, such as the fatigue, insomnia and depression that is usually coupled with menopause.
Just like with yoga, many women are scared of acupuncture because they think it will hurt. The truth is that the needles used in acupuncture are about as thin as a hair, and they are quite short. While you might feel a little bit of pain the first time, many people just feel a bit of a tugging that slowly goes away as the pins work their magic.
Ayurveda
Ayurveda is another alternative therapy for menopausal symptoms that is based on Indian medicine. In India, Ayurvedic medicine is commonly used to treat all sorts of issues.

Many women find that an Ayurvedic diet is beneficial for menopause
It is based on three principles:
- vata (space and air)
- pitta (fire and water)
- kapha (water and earth)
There are herbs, spices and foods that represent each principle, and an Ayurvedic doctor will tell you what to eat to fix your menopausal symptoms.
You will need to see an expert so that he or she can determine what principles are out of balance, and what you can eat to make yourself feel right again. Many women find that eating an Ayurvedic diet is very beneficial for menopause.
Conclusion
There are many treatments and therapies for menopause, and these four alternative therapies have been shown to help improve menopausal symptoms in most women.
While you might need to go the conventional route depending on how you react to these treatment methods, you should try these therapies first to see how well they work for you.