Dubai, United Arab Emirates (CNN) — International experts have concluded that women are not a single lump, their experiences of menopause are not entirely negative, and that there is no need to medicalize this stage of life.
In an analytical article published in the British Medical Journal, on Wednesday, obstetrician Martha Hickey of the Royal Women’s Hospital in Victoria, Australia, and three professors of women’s health from the UK, US and Australia discussed the social and cultural attitudes of life when menstruation is interrupted. The menstruation period of most women, usually between 45 and 55 years, was needed to “normalize” menopause.
A global survey conducted in 2021 revealed that between 16-40% of women experience moderate to severe symptoms during menopause, such as fatigue, hot flashes, difficulty sleeping, and muscle or joint pain. The current treatment commonly used to relieve these symptoms is hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which uses medications to replace hormones lost during menopause, which in turn relieve these symptoms. Several studies have shown its effectiveness in helping women of this age, although there are risks from taking it, such as an increased risk of breast cancer, but it is believed that the benefits outweigh these risks.
Nevertheless, Hickey and her co-authors are of the view that effective treatments, such as hormone replacement therapy, are important for those who suffer from unpleasant symptoms, but that “medical treatment may increase women’s anxiety and understanding of this normal phase of life.”
They added, “The medicalization of menopause threatens to undermine the large-scale experiences of middle-aged women who have gone through this natural process, turning it into a well-defined disease that requires treatment and tends to emphasize the negative aspects of menopause.”
The four experts also noted that while “some women who suffer from severe hot flashes and night sweats often benefit from hormone therapy for menopause, most women consider menopause to be a natural process and would prefer not to take the medication.”
“Medicalization of menopause scares women and reduces their ability to treat it as a normal life event,” Hickey told CNN.
Maintaining a healthy and youthful appearance
Medical caution against the use of HRT is not new. In her 2007 book, The Elixir of Estrogen: The History of Hormone Replacement in America, Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, Professor of History of the Health Sciences, outlined the reasons for and responses to the growing popularity of HRT.
For Watkins, approaching menopause reveals not only where the science stands, but the position of culture when it comes to middle-aged women. Watkins pointed out that E. Cost Shelton, a clinical professor of medicine at UCSD, who “promoted long-term hormonal therapy as a solution to the problems of middle-aged women”, believing that estrogen would not only “prevent” the development of osteoporosis, a condition common in women during menopause, but would also contribute to the development of osteoporosis. Also by maintaining a youthful appearance, positive attitude, and a happy marriage.”
The book quotes from an article written by Shelton in 1954, in which he said that the lack of estrogen during menopause is “often accompanied by a decline in the attractiveness of the woman previously … that she feels insecure and inferior, and that she is neglected most of the time during the period when she is feeling fragile. major in her married life.
So share experiences here or with your women circles. Talk about menopause. Read about it. See your doc but don’t assume they know everything!
Also get your Vitamin D supplements in (see earlier thread on my TL) but it apparently makes a difference.
“The belief that aging can be delayed or reversed by hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is persistent and reinforced by the media, medical literature, and women’s information,” the authors of the analysis wrote.
But why do these associations persist? Hickey and her fellow participants provided the answer: “Menopause marketing is a profitable business.”
“If you have a drug that half the population has to take, that’s a huge profit,” Hickey told CNN.
Hickey and her colleagues advocate changing the narrative by highlighting positive aspects, such as freedom from menstruation, pregnancy, and contraceptives, as well as educating women about how to manage unpleasant symptoms. They believe advocating this “may enable women to manage menopause with greater confidence.
Novels about menopause
Sunny Singh understands how powerful the narrative is. And in 2019, the novelist and professor of creative writing and inclusion in the arts at London Metropolitan University, she wrote a widely shared Twitter thread. She shared her own experience about pre-menopause.
Candidly and with great humor, Singh wrote, “We’ve been hearing vague chatter about hot flashes but here’s my experience leading up to this stage. My body has decided it needs a hot water bath, but soon sweats an hour later. First I wait until I feel Fresh off and then get dressed. Second: I added an hour to my morning routine.”
She added: “The current discourse skews between everything is normal (yes, so is death) and a full diagnosis… We need to talk about menopause without excessive medical treatment.”
Singh says she has benefited from sharing her mother’s experience with menopause in her 30s, and says this should happen more often. “There is a dearth of information sharing about menopause,” she told CNN. “We need women from different races and regions to talk about menopause.”
The British Medical Journal analysis found the same conclusion: “Normalizing aging in women, and celebrating the strength, beauty, and accomplishments of middle-aged women can change the narrative and provide positive role models.”