Welcome to OBGYN Champs, the show where no question is off limits. Join host Morgan Allen and board-certified OB/GYN Dr. Suny Caminero, MD, as they tackle the topics women are often too embarrassed, afraid, or unsure to ask about. From hormones, menopause, and sexual wellness to pregnancy, pelvic health, cosmetic gynecology, and everything in between, each episode delivers honest conversations, expert advice, and practical insights to help women take control of their health with confidence.
Whether you’re in your 20s, navigating motherhood, approaching menopause, or simply looking for trustworthy answers, OBGYN Champs is your place for real talk, myth-busting, and empowering education. Tune in, ask your questions, and join the conversation because your health deserves to be talked about.
On this special edition of OBGYN Champs, Dr. Suny and Morgan are joined by Janine Hogan.
Dr. Suny Caminero, MD, OB/GYN
Founder of Cosmetic Gynecology Florida
Website Address: https://cosmeticgynecologyfl.com/
Janine Hogan
Senior Vice President of Branding for Client Focused Media
Website Address: https://cfmedia.com/
When did your hormones start changing, and what has your process looked like with Dr. Suny?
Janine Hogan:
I had my daughter later, so I didn’t really know a lot was going on until postpartum, and it was a very rough journey,. For me, I feel like that was kind of the first clue that something wasn’t really kind of firing the way it was supposed to. It took a really long time, and I was starting to see things change slowly. It would be one thing after another, it wasn’t just everything happened all at once.
Something in me was like, “oh, “It’s my hormones.” I actually thought that there were very serious things wrong with me, or starting to be wrong with me, because my body just felt out of whack. I had lots of brain fog. I could walk into a room and not even remember why I stepped into the room. Not remember a conversation I had five minutes ago. Just things that you start to feel like, “This isn’t me. What’s going on?”
I remember looking in the mirror a couple of times in the bathroom and just being like, “I don’t recognize this person.” There were a lot of emotional things. I felt like a roller coaster all the time, little tiny things would set me off. I was very irritable, and that’s just not my personality. I’m usually very fluid and easygoing, and I like to bring some light and fun to things. And that just wasn’t happening.
Then my body physically started to do things. I was skipping a lot of periods. I took more pregnancy tests going through this than I did my entire life because I was like, “What is happening?” I would skip periods like crazy, or they would be really long or really short. I was going to acupuncture. I tried supplements. I went through functional medical doctors, and all I got back was, “Bloodwork looks fine. Bloodwork’s good. You’re fine.” And like, okay, like what? I’m not fine.
So it got to the point where I just started searching for answers. I went to lots of different doctors. I was, you know, doing virtual calls with doctors out of state because I thought that they had the answer. And quite honestly, nobody was really spending the time with me at all. So they didn’t listen enough, and I wasn’t being educated at all on what was happening and maybe giving me a reason why.
Until I found [Dr. Suny]. And that took six years. She was the first person that actually gave me reasons as to why. I learned more in one hour with her about what was happening to my body than I have my entire life. I really thank her for that because it really, you know, knowing and having the information helps to connect the dots and then made the recovery of this and getting back on track so much easier.
How did hormone therapy help you?
Janine Hogan:
One of the things I think is important to talk about is the six-year time that I was adjusting to the changes. Every time I had a visit, it was like adjust, adjust, adjust, adjust, come off, come off. My body just could not figure itself out.
What’s really helped me is [Dr. Suny] has a very keen approach, and your process and your way of thinking about it is more detailed than what I was experiencing before. Within the first three months, it only took three or four weeks, and I was back, and it was a noticeable difference. The hot flashes went away, I was sleeping through the night, I didn’t have the night sweats, I wasn’t irritable. Things started to get back to normal, and I was able to notice it.
For me, the combination of things that [Dr. Suny] did was really important because the type of progesterone she put me on, the compounded mechanized, I think, that was very different from the other progesterone.
The other progesterone made me feel crazy, and they tried all different types. There was one I had to put under my tongue that tasted disgusting. There was another one, but it was a generic oral. It really made a difference where those medications were coming from.
The testosterone worked for me, and I wasn’t on it before. My energy is a lot better. My stamina is a lot better. My sex drive was coming back. I had no libido at all. My poor husband was probably like, “What’s going on with my wife?” I wanted it to be there, butI felt like I was forcing myself to try and, like, conjure something up. And it was very frustrating.
Once the testosterone started to kick in, I was starting to feel interested again, and feel healthy. And it wasn’t me just trying to appease my husband or trying to make my body do something it wasn’t wanting to do.
It was a total body change, too. I do a lot of CrossFit workouts, and I wasn’t able to kind of cross over into different plateaus. I wasn’t getting stronger, and I wasn’t really seeing the results I wanted. After the hormones, that changed.
What is your approach to finding and balancing the right hormone cocktail?
Dr. Suny Caminero:
There’s so many options when it comes to providing you the hormones that you need, whether it’s testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, so it depends on the labs and the symptoms that we’re trying to fix. But your symptoms matter so much more to me than anything. Your symptoms will tell me exactly how high to go on the medicine, what to start the medicine, how low to start on the medicine. If you have a medical history that predisposes you to certain conditions, then I have to pay attention to that as well.
And the lifestyle matters. In the sense that there are creams, there’s gels, there’s troches, there is pellets, there are patches, there’s pills, there’s so many ways of doing hormones. The choice depends on medical condition, what we’re trying to treat, and then lifestyle.
One example is called a trocar, it’s kind of like a Halloween needle, a large Halloween needle. You know, they don’t feel it because we numb it, but that’s just an easy in and out. I’m not a fan of that in the long term because in the long term, you keep putting things in there, you’re going to get scar tissue. But I’m a fan of it for a specific population that, that is, this is like life right now for them, essentially.
The cream depends on whether you absorb it well. If you don’t absorb it well, there’s patches. There’s just so many, so many ways of doing hormones. Sometimes I get lucky and I find the right, exactly, you know, recipe for you. Other times, we gotta tweak it a little bit.
[Janine] responded a little bit faster than for most women, actually. For many women, the response, it takes them three months to feel like they’re really getting somewhere. I think that in six months, she’s going to be even better.
But we also looked at not just hormones, but lifestyle. We look at vitamin levels, insulin levels, healthy eating, exercising. All of that also plays a role. Janine was already doing that. She was exercising and eating healthy, so doing all of that, you know, and it wasn’t working.
Can women have hormonal changes before perimenopause?
Dr. Suny Caminero:
You certainly can. Your lifestyle has a lot to do with hormone imbalances. If you eat healthy, non-toxic as much as you possibly can, you can’t control everything, right? But as much as you possibly can, and exercise, you can keep your hormones really, really optimized.
If you’re not on birth control and you’re having a period every single month, that is a good sign that your hormones are good. If you’re missing a period, that’s a good sign that there is a hormonal imbalance there.
Does sex feel better when your homones are balanced?
Everything feels better because you don’t have the dryness that comes from not having your hormones. When you have your hormones, your nerves, it’s almost like they try to go away. You just don’t have the sensation that you had before. It’s like the clitoris died, the G-spot died, you have zero interest in anything. She doesn’t even talk to you.
When you’re young and you’re 18, 20, 25, you can walk around and go, “Oh, I’m horny.” And then that completely goes away when your hormones are low. That comes back when you get your hormones back.
Many women, when they don’t have hormones, they avoid their husbands, and they do certain things like, “Oh, please don’t touch me today. Don’t touch me today because you’re going to want to have sex today. Please don’t touch me like that. I’m going to fall asleep right now.” And you realize, “Okay, if I don’t want my husband to touch my butt today, I need to get that checked out.”
Once you have hormones that are back to normal, you feel back in your 30s, where that wasn’t the case, the hormones are not going to make you want to have sex as much as men do. Our levels are totally different than men. But it can be normal for women when we actually want it.
This happens to men, too. Men’s hormone levels decrease as well, particularly testosterone. They start to feel like their erection isn’t as strong as it used to be, or that they can’t keep the erection as long as they used to have either. I have patients that send me their husbands.
Can the clitoris have erections if people have too much testosterone?
Dr. Suny Caminero:
It is a real thing. Hormones have to be in the normal balanced level. Not too high, just like with anything, too much Tylenol is not good. Too much testosterone, estrogen, all of it is the same.
There are people who are on high levels of testosterone that shouldn’t be, particularly injectable testosterone for women is not really, that’s not my favorite. It really is not natural for women to have. Those are when I see the most issues and high levels of testosterone for women. When women have too much testosterone, their clitoris keeps getting larger and the head of the clitoris also gets bigger. And it looks like a micro penis. And it does have erections.
That is a permanent issue. That is not something that gets resolved. That is not something that goes away when you stop your hormones. It stays that way for a while. I’m doing a lot of surgeries to fix that for women because so many women are on testosterone not the right way. They’re having this issue across the country.
And the other issue that changes is the voices. Women start to speak as if they’re more raspy or almost like if they’re smokers, or as if more manly kind of voice. The voice change also doesn’t go away. I have had patients that come to me, singers, who notice that they’re really starting to change. Thankfully they stopped it soon enough that it wasn’t a permanent thing, but that can happen.
Tt’s not necessarily something that people think about when they are starting therapy, so that’s very important to become aware of if you’re, especially if you’re self-treating. They’re going out to find out who can help them and nobody’s helping, so then they go through black market or whatever the case may be to get it, or they get their husband’s testosterone. But they’re injecting themselves with super high doses because they don’t know, right? They just want to.
And then they feel better. They put it on and say, “This is the best thing ever. I have all this energy. I want to have sex all the time. We’re having a great relationship.” And then over and over and over and over a period of time, and then you start having the side effects of it. And then boom, micro penis. And hair loss.
I don’t want people to be scared of testosterone therapy because for us women, it’s extremely important. That clarity is huge. With testosterone, it actually decreases your risk of breast cancer. Normal, good vitamin D level also decreases your risk of breast cancer and decreases risk of dementia. Testosterone is also for skin, for muscle, for bone.
You know, women who end up with osteoporosis or osteopenia, the first thing we go to is giving them something, a medicine, a pharmacologic agent, as opposed to giving them their hormone.
For a long time, we thought hormones are bad. Well, it doesn’t make sense evolutionarily that your ovaries will start to make a hormone to kill you. It doesn’t make sense. Normal hormones that your body produces are good hormones. It doesn’t have to be a synthetic hormone anymore.
