Women Have Been Misled About Menopause
This was the headline of a recent article in the NYT by Susan Dominus. If you know me, then you know how passionate I am about this message and helping women live life to the fullest at every stage of their life. I was very happy to see this information published in a main stream news source!
In case you missed the article, I am sharing key takeaways here today. Here is the link to the entire article, it's definitely worth reading.
Hot flashes, sleeplessness, pain during sex: For some of menopause’s worst symptoms, there’s an established treatment. Why aren’t more women offered it?
Perimenopause, the biologically chaotic phase leading up to a woman’s last period, when her reproductive cycle makes its final, faltering runs. The shift, which lasts, on average, four years, typically starts when women reach their late 40s, the point at which the egg-producing sacs of the ovaries start to plummet in number. In response, some hormones — among them estrogen and progesterone — spike and dip erratically, their usual signaling systems failing. During this time, a woman’s period may be much heavier or lighter than usual. As levels of estrogen, a crucial chemical messenger, trend downward, women are at higher risk for severe depressive symptoms. Bone loss accelerates. In women who have a genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease, the first plaques are thought to form in the brain during this period. Women often gain weight quickly, or see it shift to their middles, as the body fights to hold onto the estrogen that abdominal fat cells produce. The body is in a temporary state of adjustment, even reinvention, like a machine that once ran on gas trying to adjust to solar power, challenged to find workarounds.
The symptoms experienced are varied and intrusive. Some lose hours of sleep every night, disruptions that chipped away at mood, energy, the vast resources of good will that it takes to parent and to partner.
Reports of doctors’ visits suggested that there is no obvious recourse for these symptoms. But imagine that there was a treatment for all these symptoms that doctors often overlooked. The scenario seems unlikely, and yet it’s a depressingly accurate picture of menopausal care for women. There is a treatment, hardly obscure, known as menopausal hormone therapy, that eases hot flashes and sleep disruption and possibly depression and aching joints. It decreases the risk of diabetes and protects against osteoporosis. It also helps prevent and treat menopausal genitourinary syndrome, a collection of symptoms, including urinary-tract infections and pain during sex, that affects nearly half of postmenopausal women.
Menopausal hormone therapy was once the most commonly prescribed treatment in the United States. In the late 1990s, some 15 million women a year were receiving a prescription for it. But in 2002, a single study, its design imperfect, found links between hormone therapy and elevated health risks for women of all ages. Panic set in; in one year, the number of prescriptions plummeted. Hormone therapy carries risks, to be sure, as do many medications that people take to relieve serious discomfort, but dozens of studies since 2002 have provided reassurance that for healthy women under 60 whose hot flashes are troubling them, the benefits of taking hormones outweigh the risks. The treatment’s reputation, however, has never fully recovered, and the consequences have been wide-reaching. It is painful to contemplate the sheer number of indignities unnecessarily endured over the past 20 years: the embarrassing flights to the bathroom, the loss of precious sleep, the promotions that seemed no longer in reach, the changing of all those drenched sheets in the early morning, the depression that fell like a dark curtain over so many women’s days.
About 85 percent of women experience menopausal symptoms. Rebecca Thurston, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh who studies menopause, believes that, in general, menopausal women have been underserved — an oversight that she considers one of the great blind spots of medicine. “It suggests that we have a high cultural tolerance for women’s suffering,” Thurston says. “It’s not regarded as important.”
Even hormone therapy, the single best option that is available to women, has a history that reflects the medical culture’s challenges in keeping up with science; it also represents a lost opportunity to improve women’s lives. Researchers now have a better appreciation of the benefits of hormone therapy. Positive reports about hormone therapy for women in their 50s started emerging as early as 2003, and they have never really slowed.
New formulations more closely mimic the natural hormones in a woman’s body. There are also new methods of delivery: Taking hormones via transdermal patch (or via pellets), rather than a pill, allows the medication to bypass the liver, which seems to eliminate the risk of clots.
Education on a stage of life that affects half the world’s population is still wildly overlooked at medical schools. A 2017 survey sent to residents across the country found that 20 percent of them had not heard a single lecture on the subject of menopause, and a third of the respondents said they would not prescribe hormone therapy to a symptomatic woman, even if she had no clear medical conditions that would elevate the risk of doing so. In recent years, there has been some progress: The University of Pennsylvania has established a menopause clinic, and Johns Hopkins now offers classroom instruction and hands-on experience for its residents. But the field of gynecology will, most likely for decades to come, be populated by many doctors who left medical school unprepared to offer guidance to menopausal women who need their help.
But there are many medical professionals and functional medicine practitioners committed helping women feel great and live full lives during this transition. If you are starting to experience signs of perimenopause, please know there is relief available. Give our office a call to schedule a consultation, we can help!
Mandi