Suzanne Donick Siegel

Dr. Siegel is a board certified emergency physician who spent more than 30 years in busy emergency rooms and now runs a consultative menopause practice inside the Forward Focus Concierge Medicine office in Lake Forest. She writes that she saw what happens when women lose estrogen, including hip fractures, recurrent urinary infections, heart attacks and strokes, and she started this practice to prevent those rather than treat them. First visits run 60 to 90 minutes and patients fill out detailed questionnaires beforehand so the time together goes to history, symptoms and planning instead of paperwork. She prescribes hormone therapy and offers non hormonal options for women who cannot or do not want to take it, and once a plan settles a patient can usually get a full year of refills. She does not order broad hormone panels, since she says symptoms guide menopause care better than levels that swing week to week, and she sticks to screenings such as thyroid, lipid and metabolic panels, vitamin D and a baseline DEXA. She is not a replacement for a primary care doctor or gynecologist and offers to work alongside them, and visits can be in person or by video for patients located in Illinois or Wisconsin.

MD, FACEP, MSCP