Women Have Been Mislead About Menopause
By Susan Dominus for The New York Times
Hot flashes, sleeplessness, pain during sex: For some of menopause’s worst symptoms, there’s an established treatment. Why aren’t more women offered it?
For the past two or three years, many of my friends, women mostly in their early 50s, have found themselves in an unexpected state of suffering. The cause of their suffering was something they had in common, but that did not make it easier for them to figure out what to do about it, even though they knew it was coming: It was menopause.
The symptoms they experienced were varied and intrusive. Some lost hours of sleep every night, disruptions that chipped away at their mood, their energy, the vast resources of good will that it takes to parent and to partner. One friend endured weeklong stretches of menstrual bleeding so heavy that she had to miss work. Another friend was plagued by as many as 10 hot flashes a day; a third was so troubled by her flights of anger, their intensity new to her, that she sat her 12-year-old son down to explain that she was not feeling right — that there was this thing called menopause and that she was going through it. Another felt a pervasive dryness in her skin, her nails, her throat, even her eyes — as if she were slowly calcifying.
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.
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