"What we’re seeing is an incredible emergence of a for-profit industry associated with menopause"

I'm waiting for the "What we’re seeing is an incredible emergence of a for-profit industry associated with impotence" articles. Which won't appear, because medical interventions for men don't tend to get picked over and used as yet another stick to beat them with.

You had me up to"cold water immersion". 😬

The practice nurse has agreed I need HRT. So relieved right now! I think I've had about a week of feeling normal so far this year.

I didn't even need to argue, which I was prepared to do rhis time! So I personally am very grateful for awareness raising, if it has helped me.

Anyway, sorry - I will take my personal woes to the Menopause board in future.

I was a head gardener in a city farm when my bones were crumbling. I was walking thousands and thousands of steps. I was carrying huge bags of compost daily. I'd been doing that for years. And the agonising pain just incrementally got worse and worse until I couldn't walk up the stairs.

There is no one simple magic wand. Seriously. Stop with this 'just do this one thing' nonsense.

Well, you know, that's the theory. In practise I forget it all, and fail, more often than I succeed. 😁

@ArabellaScott

wow wish i had your self discipline. I am hopeless at following any regime

Respect!!!!

Thanks for this thread. A very important subject that is so hard to navigate.

Louise Newsom, who has undoubtedly made many milions of pounds from treating menopausal women, pushed a strapline of 'make menopause history' and seemed to suggest all women should be put on HRT for the latter half of their lives.

That's one extreme - the other is that women should just struggle through.

We need evidence and impartial advice.

I've found this website useful.

https://www.menopausematters.co.uk/symptoms.php

And a few things that have helped for me so far:

Magnesium
Drinking lots of water
More protein
Cutting out sugar, caffeine, alcohol, eating after 7pm, trying to get to bed early, exercise, daylight. Vitamins D, B, C.
Meditation, yoga, cold water immersion.

It's a lot of hard work being female.

Glad this has not gone unnoticed. The best Fuck You to menopause is to lift heavy weights in the gym. Bonus you become strong. But that's just the cost of a gym membership and not everything else (Im not saying HRT doesn't have its place to help).

And before I retired, I used to listen to colleagues in their early-mid 40s talking about their brain fog in front of their managers, and feel a little anxious for them.

I sometimes think women are their own worst enemies. I've also heard women talk about "preg head" or "baby brain" but there isn't any evidence that pregnancy or giving birth has any effect on women's mental acuity.

I don't know about menopausal brain fog. I didn't suffer from it myself, but that's not to say that other women don't. But I'm reluctant to give organisations another excuse for not employing or promoting women.

How is the body 'more than equipped' for an early menopause, with your vagina disintegrating and your bones crumbling? Let alone the less significant issues such as feeling like you are melting from inside or unable to remember the words for basic everyday items or activities?

And having to so that for 25 years plus in a full time job?

Dead Sea salt currently because when I looked for a 25k sack of magnesium, one of the reviews said they used in conjunction with Dead Sea salt. So for a fiver I figured it was worth a try. So my plan is to use both, when the salt runs out, see if I feel worse for not using it.

If you get Epsom salts rather than Dead Sea salts, they contain magnesium.

Though when I was told to take salt baths twice a day, as part of treating an abscess, it was great for my skin. Table salt was good enough, though.

Yeah that is an interesting idea although I've no clue whether there's anything behind it. The menopause certainly jolted me into raising my health game quite significantly.

Of course there will be people cashing in on it just as they do concerning other life experiences like pregnancy, mental health, grieving, and ageing in general.
I think the menopause is similar to grief and anxiety. We all experience it differently, nobody really knows the answer, coping mechanisms will work better for some than others.
The body is more than equipped to deal with it, but mentally can be a different problem due to the severity of the symptoms.

I read an interesting theory recently that the menopause might be one of the reasons that women live longer than men because it forces women to look after themselves better in middle age. No idea if it's right but I thought it was an interesting idea. I've drastically cut down on alcohol because I have horrible sleepless hot flush-ridden nights if I drink more than a glass of wine before bed. No hot flushes at all when I don't drink. My DH at the same age as me (57) is gaily refusing to get his alcohol consumption down to government guidelines.

I'm not sure what to make of it to be honest but I think it's good to have this conversation.

I went through the menopause 10-15 years ago. For sure I talked about it with friends at a similar stage, some of whom had a really bad time and had very little help. I concluded that compared to them, my own symptoms were pretty mild and it never really occurred to me to seek ny kind of intervention beyond Black Cohosh (which incidentally did nothing at all for me). There was still a lot of suspicion and negativity around HRT. As for peri menopause, I never even heard about it.

It did however give me the push I needed to eat better, drink less and exercise more which, who knows, might turn out to be more beneficial than anything else I might have tried.

The change - if you'll pardon the pun - in attitudes since then is quite startling. I'm certainly glad to see more awareness and openness and I hope women who are suffering can now be taken more seriously and access help more easily than they could 10 years ago.

However I also have an uneasy feeling that the prime motivation is not women's welfare but profit for drug companies and so I'm wondering where that will take us. And before I retired, I used to listen to colleagues in their early-mid 40s talking about their brain fog in front of their managers, and feel a little anxious for them.

Many times it's seemed to me the message is that the only way we can prove we are equal to men is to deny that what is happening in our bodies affects us. Which is crazy. It is perfectly possible to be equal to men but be different from them. To have different bodies from men that have different requirements from the requirements that men do, but be equal because we are humans participating in society.

This! So much. I am honestly really pissed off with the sexist ‘feminist’ themes that only weak feminine woman get ill from natural processes like pregnancy and menopause and modern emancipated women just crack on with it and feel great and sexy with it.

I feel shit in peri. I’m wary of the meno industry making money off us all but also glad that it’s somewhat acknowledged that this is real and happening to a lot of women. I am pissed off that the women’s pension age has been equalised with men and the cost of living and housing has gone up so much because loads of us will probably be in very poor health or dead by the time we can stop working.

For fucks sake listen to yourself instead - you reacted as I hinted someone would - defensive not listening

i think you may find that many of us have a history of not being bloody listened to when seeking help for menopause related issues so we’ll react as we want thank you very much.

Menopause isn’t an illness, but for some women it causes issues that are “illnesses”. My brain fog, muscle pain and anxiety are real. I’m grateful for the increase in menopause awareness and hopeful that it translates for better training and awareness for medical professionals. Having been fobbed off myself before finding who was the right person to speak to at my GP surgery.

I am wary as I’ve said in another thread recently, that menopause policies at work could be a hindrance as much as a help, but otherwise I’m very grateful for people like Davina and Dr Newsom for speaking up and making me realise that I didn’t have to keep suffering and potentially resign from my job for not coping. If an “industry” has arisen, well we live in a capitalist society, if there’s money to be made then someone will do it. I can’t get too worked up about that. I’ve got enough on being the daughter support-unit, wife support-unit, sister support-unit and even the muppet support-unit at work.

Thank you. This is why it's a sensitive topic for me!

I'm really sorry to hear that. It's so hard to insist if someone dismisses your concerns. I hope you manage to get some help.

I agree, the menopause is not an illness, the menopause has an evolutionary function. The function is to make us available to help care for and nurture our grandchildren. Similar is seen in other species that have a menopause. They then care for grandchildren. Intelligent animals with long developmental childhoods need more than just the parents available. Grandparents are typically available for supervision, education and nurturing, while parents hunt and provide resources.

We need to drop this trope that the menopause is a "problem". Some people are unwell and need medical help, same as at any other stage of life. The stage of life itself is not the problem.

Can't help feeling there's got to be a happy medium here. Some women sail through the menopause. Some women have an absolutely terrible time. Some women benefit from HRT. Some don't.

I don't think that talking about the menopause as a "normal, natural" life stage is helpful, because it doesn't get you anywhere. It's like telling a woman with hyperemesis that pregnancy isn't an illness, or a woman who has bowel incontinence after a fourth-degree tear that childbirth is a normal physiological process.

The human body is imperfect. Sometimes medical interventions can help. HRT is a good protective against osteoporosis. About 14,000 people die every year following a hip fracture, which in most cases will have been caused by osteoporosis. This is a good source of info on the prevalence and risks relating to osteoporosis:

The one thing that does slightly irritate me is that some female celebrities behave as if menopause didn't exist before they discovered it. Women have been going through menopause since the start of humanity, but apparently no one talked about it until now. Or maybe they did, but people weren't listening?

Thank you. I'm actually at the Doctors today. But they have fobbed me off twice already.

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