"We Have Been Misled About Menopause" (cross posted from Women's Issues group)

[IcyPeas]

also: see post number 4 in this thread from NJCher.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/113814435

this is a NYT article from Yahoo news so there's no paywall.

Long article but interesting perspective.

Now 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 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.
...
Too many doctors are not equipped to parse these intricate pros and cons, even if they wanted to. Medical schools, in response to the W.H.I., were quick to abandon menopausal education. “There was no treatment considered safe and effective, so they decided there was nothing to teach,” says Minkin, the Yale OB-GYN. About half of all practicing gynecologists are under 50, which means that they started their residencies after the publication of the W.H.I. trial and might never have received meaningful education about menopause.

article continues here:

https://news.yahoo.com/misled-menopause-154103700.html

[Scrivener7]

1. But we also need to make another change about our view of menopause.

It isn't an illness. It's a process.

While women who experience symptoms should have access to the necessary medications, I do have an anecdotal story of the flip side of that: I am one of many sisters. Three of my sisters were given the option (before that study) to take hormones to stave off menopausal symptoms. Not to cure existing symptoms, but to prevent symptoms they had not yet experienced.

I had one particularly uncomfortable symptom: hot flashes every 45 minutes for about 2 years. I declined hormonal therapy, used Chinese herbs instead.

After 2 years, I was done with menopause. And life after menopause is not the terrible wasteland our society likes to tell us it is. I became much healthier. Many of my allergies disappeared, I stopped having sinus infections, which had been chronic with me, my migraines went away. I functioned very well on less sleep. There were a host of other positive health developments I noticed when I went through menopause.

My sisters would try to ease themselves off the hormones. They would get mild symptoms and when they did, they would jump back on the hormones. This process lasted over a decade for one of them.

So I guess the moral is: by all means get help for debilitating symptoms (and I know a number of women who had those) but if you don't have them, don't treat them.

[DUgosh]

2. Thanks

For posting this

[phylny]

3. My trip through menopause was eased by a side-effect of an

antidepressant I was taking.

Now I have no issues. Easy peasy.