Dr. Luciano is a Menopause Society
Certified Practitioner.

Sparrow Women's Health is proud to share that Dr. Megan Luciano, our founder and Board-Certified Gynecologist, has earned the Menopause Society Certified Practitioner credential, abbreviated MSCP. The credential is awarded by The Menopause Society, the leading nonprofit scientific organization devoted to menopause and healthy aging in women, known for decades as the North American Menopause Society before its renaming.

Earning the MSCP means passing a competency examination that covers the full scope of menopause medicine, and it comes with an ongoing obligation: certified practitioners must complete continuing education specific to menopause to maintain the credential. In a field where the evidence has shifted meaningfully over the past two decades, that commitment to staying current is the point. Considering that millions of American women are in perimenopause or menopause at any given time, the number of clinicians holding this certification remains remarkably small, and finding one locally is far from guaranteed for most women.

Source: The Menopause Society

Here is the uncomfortable truth behind why a menopause credential needs to exist at all: menopause is barely taught. Surveys of medical residents, including those training in obstetrics and gynecology, have repeatedly found that only a small fraction receive a formal menopause curriculum, and most report feeling unprepared to manage menopausal patients when they finish training. Every woman who lives long enough will experience menopause, yet the average physician graduates having spent only a sliver of their education on it.

Women feel the consequences of that gap directly. Symptoms get minimized or misattributed. Hot flashes, sleep disruption, mood changes, and genitourinary symptoms go untreated for years. And in the vacuum left by undertrained medicine, a booming marketplace of untested hormone protocols and confident misinformation has been happy to step in. The MSCP credential exists precisely to close that gap: it verifies that a clinician has done the dedicated study that standard training skipped, and tested that knowledge against the evidence.

The certification exam covers the territory that menopause care actually spans, which is wider than most people expect. It includes the physiology of perimenopause and menopause; the evaluation and management of hot flashes and night sweats; genitourinary syndrome of menopause; the benefits and risks of hormone therapy across different ages, doses, and routes; the full range of nonhormonal treatments; and the long-term health domains that menopause touches, including bone density, cardiovascular and metabolic health, sleep, mood, and sexual health.

Just as important is what happens after the exam. Menopause medicine has been a moving target: the two decades since the Women's Health Initiative first frightened a generation of women and physicians away from hormone therapy have seen extensive reanalysis and refinement, reflected in The Menopause Society's evidence-based position statements. Certified practitioners are required to keep learning as that evidence evolves, completing menopause-specific continuing education on an ongoing basis to maintain the credential. Certification isn't a plaque earned once; it's a commitment to practicing from the current science, not the science of twenty years ago.

Source: The Menopause Society

Menopause may be the single most confusing corner of women's health to navigate as a patient. Social media overflows with contradictory hormone advice. Some clinics dismiss symptoms entirely; others sell expensive protocols with little evidence behind them. Between "just tough it out" and "everyone needs pellets," it can be genuinely difficult to find the evidence-based middle: real treatment, matched carefully to the individual.

That middle is what certification anchors. In practice, it means your care follows the guidelines the field's leading scientific organization actually publishes: identifying confidently who is a strong candidate for hormone therapy and who isn't, choosing doses and routes with the best safety evidence, offering proven nonhormonal options when hormones aren't right or aren't wanted, and folding bone, heart, sleep, and sexual health into the plan rather than treating symptoms in isolation. It also means straight answers about what the evidence supports, what it doesn't, and where genuine uncertainty remains.

Menopause and perimenopause care has been a core specialty at Sparrow from the day we opened, built around a comprehensive first consultation, unhurried follow-ups, and treatment plans tailored to each woman's symptoms, history, and goals. The MSCP doesn't change how that care works. It certifies it. The credential is the formal, verifiable version of a commitment that was already the foundation of the practice.

The practical details stay just as accessible. Menopause evaluations, hormone therapy visits, and follow-ups at Sparrow are in network with Aetna and Cigna, and Traditional Medicare is accepted, with additional major carriers in credentialing. Transparent self-pay pricing is available for everyone else. Certified menopause expertise shouldn't be a luxury product, and at Sparrow it isn't.

Details: Insurance & Payment at Sparrow Women's Health

One quietly useful thing about the MSCP: it's publicly verifiable. The Menopause Society maintains a searchable directory of certified practitioners on its website, so any woman, in any city, can look up whether a clinician advertising menopause expertise has actually demonstrated it. Given how freely the words "hormone specialist" get used in marketing, that verification is worth more than it might seem.

If you're in Winter Garden, Ocoee, Apopka, Horizon West, Windermere, or the greater Orlando area and your symptoms have been dismissed, minimized, or treated with a shrug, you don't have to keep negotiating for care. A comprehensive menopause consultation with Dr. Luciano is the place where your symptoms, your history, and the current evidence finally end up in the same room.

Source: The Menopause Society, Certified Practitioner Directory