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

[GoodOldEmmaNess]

Not sure why we need researchers to tell us this, since it should be flaming obvious to anyone how the menopause has been pushed and pushed to us all over the last few years as some sort of glitch in femaleness that makes us ALL go faulty in middle age.

It is so flaming regressive. Some women are ill as a result of menopause, and need proper medical help and support, but the menopause itself is not an illness.

Until just a few years ago, we fought against the idea that 'women of a certain age' were defined by their transition to a post-reproductive phase in their life. That was part of feminism. Now we are being sold a false narrative that seems to regard pathologising the menopause as a form of empowerment.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/05/companies-portray-menopause-as-medical-problem-and-push-women-towards-ineffective-treatments-papers-find

Absolutely. I'm only in peri and feeling really fucking awful. It is debilitating quite a lot of the time.

I'm glad not every woman suffers, but I wish the smug types could accept that everyone is different and some of us absolutely DO need medicinal help.

I don't think anyone is saying that at all. However, treatment for the menopause seems to be in the hands of public opinion with wildly conflicting advice including from GPs. If I needed advice I'd hope my GP was like @RunningAllDay . Very willing to prescribe hrt or other treatments (I'm very tired of women getting outraged when antidepressants are suggested) but also aware it might not be necessary.

"Why shouldn't we have access to drugs that can save our lives?"

We absolutely should. However, we shouldn't be bombarded with constant advertisements for everything from shampoo to saucepans telling us that we are defective and need to be fixed.

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

There is actual evidence that they type of symptoms women experience is in part affected by how they expect to be affected- get over it

Quite significantly
but ignore that because...because your symptoms are bad and you see that as blaming ? Because you are in the business of selling drugs ?

Early menopause can't even be called a " "symptom "

I not saying you can think yourself better - mental stuff is somewhat harder to fix that just "think yourself better " but it still exists as a factor

Your brain is just another organ in your body

And I've been struggling along on natural remedies and diet changes and exercise for a couple of years now (I don't really drink much these days).

Can we just have a middle ground, please, for those of us who really do suffer??

And we also don't want women being told that their genuine feelings are "just your hormones, dear" or to normalise the idea that 45 year old women are unreliable because of "brain fog"

Absolutely, if you are struggling then talk to your GP about it. Hope it gets better for you.

So what do you suggest then?

place holder

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the things that worries me about the recent leap in messaging around the menopause is that it functions as an easy alternative focus for policy makers who want to look as if they are paying attention to women's needs without actually doing much.
Look at the severity of social problems faced by women -

• the huge burden women of menopausal age face, caring both for their parents and for their older children in a context where the NHS is collapsing and social care is completely screwed
• the gender pay gap
• high levels of domestic abuse
• the total collapse of prosecutions for rape
• a police service that harbours rapists.

There is no real political will to deal with any of these. Instead it is really easy for policy makers and policy influencers to focus on free sanitary wear for women who are still bleeding and HRT for women when they stop bleeding. As if they want to deny that there is anything more to the demographic 'woman' than our uteruses and ovaries.

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.

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?

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.