Integrative Women's Health
Perimenopause & Menopause
Enter this next phase of your life with vitality and self-acceptance.
An Arrival, Not a Diagnosis
Something in your body is shifting, and if you are honest with yourself, it has been shifting longer than you have given it a name. The cycles are changing. Sleep is different now. Heat arrives at two in the morning without invitation and leaves without explanation. Your feelings carry a new quality: a sharpened edge, a tenderness with no single address, a grief whose origin you cannot always locate.
This is perimenopause. And this is also, if you are willing to receive it, an arrival.
Western medicine calls this a transition. The body calls it something older. In this practice, we call it the sacred ripening — the season in which a woman moves from the exhausting performance of youth into the fullness of who she has actually become. A fullness that is depth, not diminishment. Harvest, not ending.
Stop Performing Wellness. Begin Living It.
Perimenopause has a way of making performance feel costly. The supplements stacked on the counter that were never quite working. The wellness routines maintained more for identity than for the body. The careful management of a self that was always one step ahead of actually arriving in the body you live in.
This season often strips that away. Not cruelly, but honestly. It asks you to stop performing wellness and begin practicing it — in a way that is slower, more specific, more embodied, and more yours.
The body remembers. The body carries intelligence. The body adapts, signals, and attempts to rebalance. Symptoms are not moral failures. They are communication. The body has not stopped knowing what it is doing — it is asking for more skilled support than it needed before, and more honest attention than the culture has encouraged you to give it.
You carry medicine in your blood and in your lineage. And you deserve a clinical relationship worthy of that.
This is not a call to abandon clinical care. It is an invitation to bring your whole self into it. A woman learning to inhabit her changing body consciously — with support, skill, dignity, and care.
This is the season of integration.
There is a particular harm in the way our culture has framed perimenopause. The conversation has centered almost entirely on loss — the loss of fertility, the loss of youth, the loss of a femininity that was always defined by performance rather than truth. Women have been handed prescriptions and pamphlets and sent back out into a world that has not made adequate room for what they are actually experiencing.
What we are building together is a container large enough to hold the full complexity of this transition: the rage that surprises you, the grief that has been waiting patiently, the joy that comes from finally having less to prove, the body that is asking to be fed and moved and honored in new ways.
Let us see how beautiful you are by not shrinking yourself.
What Is Happening in Your Body
Perimenopause is the transitional phase leading into menopause, typically beginning in the early to mid-forties, though it can begin earlier. During this time, the ovaries gradually produce less estrogen and progesterone. Cycles become irregular. The hormonal ratios that have been largely consistent for decades begin to shift. Menopause itself is defined as twelve consecutive months without a menstrual cycle, typically reached in the early to mid-fifties.
These hormonal changes are real, measurable, and significant. Estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone all function far beyond reproduction. They govern bone density, cardiovascular health, cognitive function, mood regulation, skin integrity, bladder and urethral tone, joint lubrication, and sleep architecture.
In TCM, perimenopause is understood as a time of deep transformation within the Kidney system, which governs the vital essence — Jing — that underlies all physiological function. As Jing naturally declines with age, the Kidney's capacity to nourish and anchor both Yin and Yang becomes less stable. This manifests as Kidney Yin deficiency, Kidney Yang deficiency, or a combined pattern, each with its own clinical picture and its own course of herbal and acupuncture treatment. The Heart and Liver systems are frequently involved as well. Liver Qi stagnation drives mood instability, irritability, and menstrual irregularity. Kidney-Heart disharmony underlies the insomnia and anxiety many women experience. These are a coherent pattern asking for coherent care.
Signs and Symptoms
The following symptoms are named plainly because many women have spent years being told these experiences were manageable, minor, or simply the cost of living in a female body. They are physiological, they are clinical, and you deserve genuine medical attention for all of them.
- Irregular cycles
- Heavy or flooding periods
- Missed periods
- Spotting between cycles
- Worsening premenstrual symptoms
- Changes in flow and duration
- Hot flashes
- Night sweats
- Chills
- Temperature dysregulation
- Difficulty falling or staying asleep
- Early morning waking
- Vivid or disturbing dreams
- Fatigue that sleep does not resolve
- Irritability
- Intense or unexpected rage
- New-onset anxiety
- Depression or low mood
- Brain fog
- Word-finding difficulty
- Memory concerns
- Joint pain and stiffness
- Headaches and migraines
- Changes in headache pattern
- Vaginal dryness and discomfort
- Painful intercourse
- Urinary urgency and frequency
- Recurrent urinary tract infections
- Changes in bladder control
- Changes in body composition
- Increased abdominal weight
- Chronic fatigue
- Skin dryness and texture changes
- Hair thinning
- Changes in libido
If you recognize yourself in this list, your body is asking for skilled, integrated clinical care.
through these things.
If you have been carrying these conditions for a decade or two, that is long enough. This practice treats them specifically and seriously, with the full clinical respect they deserve.
How We Work
Care in this practice is integrative, individualized, and relational. There is no single protocol because there is no single woman.
Acupuncture
Acupuncture is a foundational tool in this work. Regular acupuncture treatment has documented effects on vasomotor symptoms, sleep, mood, pain, and hormonal regulation. It functions by restoring the flow and balance of Qi through the meridian system, addressing the root pattern of disharmony rather than suppressing individual symptoms.
TCM Herbal Medicine
Herbal medicine in this practice is clinical-grade and formulated based on your individual diagnosis. Your specific pattern of Kidney deficiency, Liver involvement, and Heart disharmony determines the formula. This is a classical herbal prescription adjusted as your pattern shifts and your body responds — not a generic perimenopause supplement.
Functional Medicine & Hormone Testing
Comprehensive functional medicine consultation is offered in collaboration with your primary care or gynecological provider, or as part of your care in this practice. Sex hormone panels, thyroid assessment, adrenal function, and relevant metabolic markers give us a precise picture of your hormonal terrain so that treatment is targeted and measurable.
Tending to the Inner Garden
This is the philosophical and somatic framework underlying all care here. The body is a garden. It requires specific conditions to flourish — the right soil, the right tending, the right season-specific care. In perimenopause, those conditions shift. We learn what this garden needs now and we tend accordingly.
The Support Is Layered
Care in this practice meets you wherever you are and goes as deep as you are ready to go.
If you are starting with telemedicine and herbs, we begin there. If you are coming into the office for acupuncture alongside your herbal protocol, we build from there. If you are ready to go deeper — to work with how grief and trauma live in the body, to regulate the nervous system, to integrate what this season is asking of you emotionally — that layer is available too.
The same patient can move through all of these over time. One woman currently receives acupuncture, takes a clinical herbal formula, and works with me in regular Zoom sessions to co-regulate her nervous system and integrate the emotional weight of grief. She recently began trauma-informed grief therapy after losing two people close to her. The work is layered because the woman is layered. And the body does not heal in pieces.
I always recommend building a care team. Work with your gynecologist and your medical doctor. Get your bloodwork through them so your insurance covers it, and bring me copies. We will read them together and build from there. Integration is not competition. The more held you are, the better the medicine works.
Most of us have been taught to think of healing as going backwards — returning to who we were before the harm, before the loss, before the body started changing. But healing is not a return address. It is a direction. Forward, with acceptance. Present in the body you have now, moving into the timeline ahead as the fullest version of yourself.
Onward.
Hi. I'm Vie.
I am going through perimenopause right along with you.
I have been preparing for this professionally since my twenties. I trained as a licensed Acupuncture Physician and board-certified Oriental Medicine practitioner, and long before any of this became part of mainstream conversation, I was deep inside the world of hormone physiology at the Life Extension Foundation, one of the pioneers in natural hormone balancing and bioidentical hormone therapy — the clinical forerunners of what is now widely known as hormone replacement therapy (HRT). I was reviewing hundreds of blood tests every month, tracking estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, thyroid, and cortisol, learning what happens when the body's hormonal intelligence begins to shift.
What most people do not know is that in the state of Florida, Acupuncture Physicians are licensed as primary care providers. I can order bloodwork directly through LabCorp or Quest, look at your labs, design your herbal formula, and treat the root pattern alongside the symptoms. I have spent twenty years helping women through PCOS, fertility challenges, menstrual pain, migraines, and every stage of the menopausal transition.
None of it fully prepared me for what this actually feels like from the inside.
About three cycles ago I had my first hot flush, the day before my period. My immediate experience was that of being in a very good sauna. There was something intelligent about it. Perspiration is one of the ways the body clears metabolic waste, and this felt like what happens when a fever finally breaks — the body doing exactly what it knows how to do. My friends who have been through this looked at me like I had taken leave of my senses. But I started taking herbal formulas immediately, had acupuncture within two days, and have not had one since.
The body is always moving toward balance. When it cannot, it is because a pathway is obstructed. Acupuncture opens those pathways. Herbs support the terrain. And the body, when it is held well, does what it has always known how to do.
Both of my parents are 88 years old. One lives with me. The other is ten minutes away at a nursing facility. In the last six months I have also been holding grief alongside my own: a friend's mother, a cousin I called uncle, the patriarch of our family generation, a long-time family friend who was like a father, and one of my mother's closest friends since they were teenagers. I have been holding space for other people's grief while processing my own, while caregiving, while building this practice, while life keeps moving the way life does. And in the middle of all of it, my body is changing.
Every month now, in the days before my period, I write something. I want to be able to look back at the end of this year and know that at least twelve things were born from this shedding. I am determined to be present for every cycle until the last one. Not as performance, but because I refuse to sleepwalk through the most significant transition of my adult life.
I know there is a whole generation of women doing the same. Come find us here.
What This Work Looks Like in Practice
Patient details are shared with consent and identifying information has been omitted to protect privacy.
A 45-year-old woman presented for treatment in the spring of 2026 with a full clinical picture: hot flashes arriving before her period, night sweats disrupting her sleep, anxiety that had become a daily companion, migraines timed to her cycle, severe menstrual cramping, fibroids, emotional overwhelm, and unprocessed grief. She was functioning, but she was not resting. She was managing, but her body was asking for something more than management.
From a Traditional Chinese Medicine perspective, her presentation reflected a convergence of patterns: Kidney Yin deficiency at the root, driving the heat and hormonal instability; Liver Qi stagnation contributing to the cramping and migraines; Blood stasis in the lower abdomen accounting for the fibroids and irregular flow; and a Heart-Spleen disharmony disrupting sleep, memory, and the capacity to feel settled. Grief was also present, adding a layer of depletion that would need to be held alongside the clinical work.
Treatment began with weekly acupuncture and an individualized herbal protocol. Each formula was selected with a specific clinical function: replenishing Kidney Yin, calming the Shen and supporting sleep, moving Blood stasis and reducing pelvic congestion, clearing Liver Qi stagnation, and supporting the broader hormonal transition.
Within the first week of treatment, her sleep quality improved and nighttime waking decreased. Within two weeks, her anxiety had significantly reduced and she described feeling more like herself. At her next menstrual cycle, she reported no premenstrual hot flashes, substantially reduced cramping, and no menstrual migraine.
At one month, the protocol was reassessed. One formula was discontinued because it was no longer clinically necessary. Two others were replaced with a single more comprehensive formula that continued supporting the same underlying patterns while transitioning the treatment focus from acute symptom relief into deeper stabilization and long-term nourishment. She moved to a biweekly treatment schedule.
One woman recently shared that what stood out most was not only the improvement in her symptoms, but the feeling that someone was finally listening carefully enough to understand the whole picture. After one month of treatment, she described the work as thoughtful, intentional, and focused on finding and treating the root cause. That is the kind of care I believe every woman deserves during this transition.
This is not a one-size-fits-all menopause protocol. The herbal formulas and acupuncture treatment are adjusted continuously based on how the body responds. As symptoms change, treatment changes. The goal is not the suppression of symptoms. It is restoring the body's capacity to regulate itself.
Time-tested ancient medicine for the modern world.
In Their Own Words
“Dr. Valencie is the best natural healer and acupuncturist for me. She has successfully treated me for many years through herbal medicine and acupuncture treatments. Dr. Vie is knowledgeable, caring and dedicated to helping you achieve your wellbeing goals.”
Valencia Sydney
“I have been seeing Dr. Valencie for acupuncture for about a month now, and the results have been unbelievable. She takes the time to truly connect with you, listen carefully, and identify the root of the problem instead of just treating the symptoms. Her approach is thoughtful, intentional, and effective, and the results speak for themselves.”
Silfida Jean-Baptiste
“I had an exceptional experience with Dr. Valencie Exceus. As someone with a real fear of needles, I was honestly nervous going in — but she immediately put me at ease. What truly sets her apart is her empathy. She understands the physical aspects of care, but the emotional side as well, creating a safe and supportive environment throughout my experience.”
Sheila Dardompre
Gather With Us
Quarterly workshops and retreats are offered for women navigating this season together. These are held, embodied spaces that combine clinical education, somatic practice, and the particular quality of rest that a woman in transition actually needs. They are containers, not seminars.
restoration is possible.
You are welcome here.
This work begins with a conversation, a full intake, and a genuine clinical assessment of where you are and what your body is asking for.
(754) 243-57631306 E Broward Blvd · Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Tending to the Womb
An online offering for women navigating the hormonal, somatic, and emotional dimensions of perimenopause, menopause, reproductive health, and womb healing — wherever they are.
