The Menopause No One Studies, and Why That Has to Change

Every woman who lives long enough will go through menopause. It is the only universal hormonal transition in human biology. And yet, depending on which review you read, somewhere between 0.5% and 5% of medical research has ever studied female-specific health, and a sliver of that has ever studied menopause.

We have spent billions on erectile dysfunction. We have spent comparatively almost nothing on the decade in which half the human population renegotiates its relationship with its own body.

The consequences are everywhere. Women in perimenopause are sent for psychiatric assessment when what they have is fluctuating oestrogen. Women in their forties are told their cardiac symptoms are anxiety, when what they have are the early signs of cardiovascular risk that always rises in the years after ovarian function declines. Women with endometrial cancer are told, for years, that their bleeding is 'just perimenopause', until the day it cannot be ignored.

My own mother was one of those women. Five years of being dismissed. Five years of being told that what she was experiencing was normal. By the time she was finally taken seriously, she had stage 3 endometrial cancer. She survived. Many women do not. I do this work, in part, for her, and for every woman who is being told today that what she knows about her own body is wrong.

If you are a woman in your late thirties or forties and something feels different, you are not imagining it. Perimenopause can begin a full decade before the menopause itself. The symptoms are subtle at first. Sleep that breaks at 3am. Anxiety that arrives without a reason. Periods that get heavier, lighter, closer together, further apart. Brain fog. Joint pain. A short fuse.

There is real, effective, holistic support. Nutrition that supports your liver and your bones. Strength training. Sleep. Stress work. Targeted nutrients. For some women, body-identical hormone replacement, prescribed properly. For all women, the right to be listened to.

You are not crazy. You are not broken. You are entering a transition that medicine, until very recently, has refused to look at. We are looking at it now. You are not on your own.