Speaker 1: The menopause gold rush is leaving women behind. While start
Speaker 1: ups and supplements are making billions, the healthcare mainstream hasn't
Speaker 1: kept pace with women's midlife needs. By Kristin V. Brown
Speaker 1: Read aloud by Mark Leedorf. When Yasmin Harris was in
Speaker 1: her early thirties, she began to suffer an array of
Speaker 1: perplexing symptoms. She had chronic urinary tract infections and always
Speaker 1: felt irritated. She was no longer interested in sex. One
Speaker 1: cold Colorado winter's day, she found herself feeling so overheated
Speaker 1: that she went and stood outside on the porch buck naked.
Speaker 1: But when she went to the doctor, all her labs
Speaker 1: came back normal. She received a prescription for antidepressants that
Speaker 1: she says didn't seem to help. I started thinking I
Speaker 1: was just crazy, she recalls. Harris, who works in it.
Speaker 1: Tried to white knuckle these symptoms until one night in
Speaker 1: October twenty twenty two, when while she was making pasta
Speaker 1: for dinner, her heart started pounding. Her father had died
Speaker 1: young of a heart attack. She feared she was having
Speaker 1: won two. At thirty nine, she was diagnosed with congestive
Speaker 1: heart failure, her first indication of any heart condition, prescribed
Speaker 1: a cocktail of drugs, and eventually implanted with a pacemaker.
Speaker 1: She was baffled. In a few years, she'd gone from
Speaker 1: a healthy, happy woman to someone in a perpetual state
Speaker 1: of distress. Then her periods went haywire, lasting for weeks
Speaker 1: at a time. She began to suspect all those disparate
Speaker 1: symptoms weren't random. When she typed them into Google, the
Speaker 1: results suggested she was in perimenopause. It all came together,
Speaker 1: she says. Harris's doctors disagreed she was too young. They said,
Speaker 1: a doctor prescribed birth control to regulate her cycle and
Speaker 1: sent her on her way. So Harris did what many
Speaker 1: frustrated patients do and turned back to the Internet for ideas.
Speaker 1: She sought solace from Reddit and advice from chat gpt.
Speaker 1: She drank more water, ate less sugar, and went for walks.
Speaker 1: She got a prescription for a compound and hormone therapy
Speaker 1: be cream. In the course of about a decade, she
Speaker 1: forught over thousands of dollars, including for all kinds of
Speaker 1: supplements that popped up in ads on Instagram and TikTok,
Speaker 1: black cohosh ashwagandha something called steel libido. If I saw it,
Speaker 1: I tried it, she says, if only any of it
Speaker 1: had worked. Although women around the world live longer than men,
Speaker 1: they spend more of their years in poor health. This
Speaker 1: is partly because of differences in biology, and partly because
Speaker 1: doctors and scientists just don't know enough about how a
Speaker 1: woman's body works, especially as it ages. That includes many
Speaker 1: medical specialists. A twenty twenty three survey found that roughly
Speaker 1: seventy percent of responding OBGYN residency programs in the US
Speaker 1: didn't include any menopause curriculum. Whether or not you're through
Speaker 1: med school, here's a primer. Menopause is a single day
Speaker 1: in a woman's life, marking twelve consecutive months without a period.
Speaker 1: In addition to signaling the end of her child bearing years.
Speaker 1: It marks a whole body change with sweeping consequences, including
Speaker 1: elevated risks of stroke, heart disease, and osteoporosis. But the
Speaker 1: process of getting there can be a year's long, confusing
Speaker 1: slog as a woman's reproductive system starts to behave more erratically.
Speaker 1: This phase is perimenopause. Menopause's hot cool little sister. As
Speaker 1: comedian Amy Miller has joked the infamous transitional era of
Speaker 1: hot flashes, night sweats, brain fog, and mood swings. Women
Speaker 1: have long been counseled about menopause through whisper networks, instructed
Speaker 1: to tough it out, or told nothing at all. In
Speaker 1: recent years, though, a swath of telehealth companies and influencers
Speaker 1: have begun promoting the power of modern remedies. Now everywhere
Speaker 1: you look, someone is blaming unruly hormones for another middle
Speaker 1: aged ailment. Migraines, You must be approaching menopause, anxiety. That's menopause, too,
Speaker 1: weight gain, dry skin, digestive issues, ding, ding, ding, menopause.
Speaker 1: Earlier this year, after one of her Lawrence, scratched at
Speaker 1: her ears during an appearance on Amy Pohlar's podcast, Polar
Speaker 1: told her that itchy ears are a sign of perimenopause. Congrats, Babe,
Speaker 1: Polar said, as the thirty five year old Lawrence's jaw
Speaker 1: dropped in apparent horror. To be a middle aged woman
Speaker 1: is to live in diagnostic suspense perpetually, one symptom away
Speaker 1: from wrestling with the transition. Generally speaking, the gold standard
Speaker 1: for treating symptoms such as hot flashes and vaginal dryness
Speaker 1: is hormone therapy a boost of estrogen and in some cases, progesterone,
Speaker 1: delivered commonly via pill, patch or cream. Evidence also broadly
Speaker 1: supports hormone therapy to reduce the risk of osteoporosis and
Speaker 1: to treat estrogen decline caused by early loss of ovarian function,
Speaker 1: and as an added bonus, it may reduce the risk
Speaker 1: of cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Many women also report that
Speaker 1: it relieves other symptoms, including anxiety, but a lot of
Speaker 1: things can look like perimenopause, including autoimmune and thyroid disorder.
Speaker 1: Experts continue to debate just how much midlife misery can
Speaker 1: be penned on menopause and when medical intervention is appropriate.
Speaker 1: Menopause is happening in parallel with one of the peak
Speaker 1: accelerated aging moments, says Jill lyss an OBGYN who specializes
Speaker 1: in menopause and an adjunct associate professor at the University
Speaker 1: of Colorado. Hormones are so powerful and important, but they
Speaker 1: do not determine every health outcome. Lys, who has also
Speaker 1: recently signed on as senior medical director for the pharmaceutical
Speaker 1: giant Bear, advises women who suspect their undergoing a menopausal
Speaker 1: transition to seek out an appointment with a doctor who's
Speaker 1: conversant in evidence based treatment options. Here, though, we return
Speaker 1: to the problem of supply. The Menopause Society, an Ohio
Speaker 1: nonprofit that offers education to US doctors, has, through its exams,
Speaker 1: certified roughly fifty three hundred medical professionals across the country
Speaker 1: as experts in midlife women's health. That's not nearly enough
Speaker 1: to serve the world one point three million American women
Speaker 1: who reach menopause every year. Only one point seven percent
Speaker 1: of US women age forty and up used systemic hormone
Speaker 1: therapy in twenty twenty three, according to a Mayo Clinic
Speaker 1: study from June. Liz says her patients wait an average
Speaker 1: of six months to see her. Absent an army of
Speaker 1: new obgyns, a massive industry of a different sort has
Speaker 1: sprung up to monetize all that midlife dread. Now, instead
Speaker 1: of having no choices, women are confronted with a cacophony
Speaker 1: of products, providers, and promises. The global market for menopause
Speaker 1: treatment was eighteen point seven billion dollars in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: and it's expected to reach twenty eight point eight billion
Speaker 1: by twenty thirty three. Women spend more than ten billion
Speaker 1: dollars a year on non medical treatments such as supplements,
Speaker 1: according to an AARP survey, basically the opposite of evidence
Speaker 1: backed therapies. The occasional utilitarian product such as a symptom
Speaker 1: tracking app that uses artificial intelligence to generate reports form
Speaker 1: a woman's doctor to review, is far outnumbered by a
Speaker 1: morass of creatine powders, red light therapy, vibrators, and pricey
Speaker 1: empowerment retreats. You've got everybody trying to get in on it,
Speaker 1: says Monica Christmas, director of the Center for Women's Integrated
Speaker 1: Health at the University of Chicago. Women are left in
Speaker 1: the middle. Although the right kind of care often remains
Speaker 1: out of reach, many false choices are now extremely available.
Speaker 1: Instead of receiving appropriate clinical care, which isn't always hormone therapy,
Speaker 1: women are spending their time and money on Internet approved
Speaker 1: solutions such as testosterone pellets and menopause diets. We are
Speaker 1: modeling female empowerment, but it's really just internalized misogyny of
Speaker 1: being thin and looking youthful, but with a rebrand, Liz says.
Speaker 1: After all the supplements and creams. Harris found answers in
Speaker 1: the doctor's office. In February twenty twenty five, she saw
Speaker 1: a specialist in Liss's department who took her perimenopause suspicions seriously.
Speaker 1: Like Harris, Leslie Appia is black, and Harris recalls her
Speaker 1: explaining that black women often enter perimenopause earlier. They also
Speaker 1: often experience more severe symptoms and have more trouble accessing care.
Speaker 1: She prescribed Harris a low dosed estrogen patch paired with
Speaker 1: an IUD to deliver progestine, a synthetic version of progesterone.
Speaker 1: Within twenty four hours of putting that patch on, I
Speaker 1: felt one hundred percent normal. Harris says, a little more
Speaker 1: than a year after she started hormones, doctors removed the
Speaker 1: pacemaker she'd gotten to regulate her failing heart because she
Speaker 1: no longer needed it. In the nineteen forties, when a
Speaker 1: young doctor named William Masters began studying menopause, hormone therapy
Speaker 1: was viewed mostly as a temporary treatment for hot flashes
Speaker 1: and other symptoms. Menopausal women had long been viewed as
Speaker 1: deficient in the Victorian era. For instance, some were diagnosed
Speaker 1: with climacteric insanity and hidden away in asylums. Masters, who'd
Speaker 1: go on to revolutionize the study of human sexuality alongside
Speaker 1: his colleague and eventual wife and ex wife Virginia Johnson,
Speaker 1: expanded on this idea. Osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, and senility were
Speaker 1: all ailments of aging that he attributed to a decline
Speaker 1: in estrogen. Ovarian aging, he argued, was every woman's achilles Heel.
Speaker 1: After giving hormone therapy to a small group of women
Speaker 1: at an infirmary in Saint Louis, Masters and his colleagues
Speaker 1: reported in the Journal of Gerontology in nineteen forty eight
Speaker 1: that giving hormone therapy to an aged woman induces a
Speaker 1: reversal of one of the inevitable changes of aging, that
Speaker 1: is menopause. Estrogen, in Master's vision, was an anti aging drug,
Speaker 1: and small studies by his group and others seated the
Speaker 1: idea of long term hormone therapy. A New York gynecologist
Speaker 1: named Robert Wilson helped bring the idea to a larger
Speaker 1: audience when he published the book Feminine Forever in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty six. Every woman alive today has the option of
Speaker 1: remaining feminine forever, he wrote, no longer In each she
Speaker 1: fret about the cruel irony of women aging faster than men.
Speaker 1: He advocated for pap smears not only to check for cancer,
Speaker 1: but also to examine what percentage of a woman's cells
Speaker 1: were healthy and youthful, what he called the femininity Index. Suddenly,
Speaker 1: women across the country were headed to their doctor and
Speaker 1: clamoring for pills to make them young again. Only later
Speaker 1: was it revealed that Wilson had received funding from the
Speaker 1: makers of the blockbuster hormone therapy Premarin, short for pregnant
Speaker 1: mare urine, which is probably still available at your local pharmacy.
Speaker 1: Widespread adoption of hormone therapy suffered two generational setbacks in
Speaker 1: the years that followed. In the nineteen seventies, research linked
Speaker 1: estrogen therapy to higher risks of uterine cancer, a problem
Speaker 1: eventually mitigated by the addition of progesterone. By centuries end,
Speaker 1: as many as forty two percent of US women from
Speaker 1: age fifty to seventy four were taking prescription hormone drugs,
Speaker 1: but that number plummeted after the US National Institutes of
Speaker 1: Health published a large study d in two thousand and two,
Speaker 1: suggesting the risks of hormone therapy outweighed the benefits. Further
Speaker 1: study found the risks had been blown way out of proportion,
Speaker 1: but the damage was done. Both doctors and patients were spooked,
Speaker 1: and an array of unproven treatments cashed in on this
Speaker 1: distrust in their stead. Only recently has the fear that
Speaker 1: kept generations of women from receiving adequate menopause care begun
Speaker 1: to subside. Concerns about medical risks have eased just as
Speaker 1: extremely online gen xers and millennials have been reaching middle age.
Speaker 1: In November, the Food and Drug Administration announced it would
Speaker 1: drop the black box warning from hormone therapy treatments. Last year,
Speaker 1: about thirty two million prescriptions were written for a form
Speaker 1: of estrogen used to treat menopause, up from eighteen million
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one, according to Symphony Health data compiled
Speaker 1: by Bloomberg Intelligence. This run on hormone therapy has led
Speaker 1: to a shortage of the estrogen boosting patches known as estradiol.
Speaker 1: People are hormone curious. They want to under stand their
Speaker 1: hormones better, says Joanna Strober, the chief executive officer and
Speaker 1: co founder of Midi Health, a telehealth provider focused on
Speaker 1: menopause treatment, in February. Midi, founded in twenty twenty one
Speaker 1: on the heels of the pandemic telehealth Boom, became the
Speaker 1: first minopause treatment company valued above one billion dollars. I'm
Speaker 1: trying to switch the story here, Strober says, if you
Speaker 1: were a woman coming to me in your forties with
Speaker 1: anxiety and depression, I might start with the hormone, see
Speaker 1: if that feels better, and then try the SSRI or
Speaker 1: selective serotonin re uptake inhibitor. The shortage of healthcare professionals
Speaker 1: who are well equipped to treat menopause has left a
Speaker 1: care vacuum that companies such as Midi and rivals including
Speaker 1: Alloy Health have stepped in to fill. Alongside hormone therapy
Speaker 1: products Midi cells, branded supplements, skin creams, GLP ones and
Speaker 1: Sundry longevity prescriptions, other major telehealth companies, including Hymns and
Speaker 1: hers Health, have joined the party, as has maven Clinic,
Speaker 1: a virtual resource for women's health, plus smaller doctor led
Speaker 1: companies like my Menopause RX. The marketplace is a mix
Speaker 1: of companies that offer care covered by insurance or out
Speaker 1: of pocket, as well as those offering therapies approved by
Speaker 1: the FDA or compounded. Doctors who are also minopause influencers
Speaker 1: have authored best selling minopause books, host podcasts, sell serums
Speaker 1: and supplements, and charge as much as two thousand dollars
Speaker 1: for consultations at their boutique clinics. Women have money, women
Speaker 1: want solutions, says Kelly Casperson, a urologist and leading influencer
Speaker 1: in the field, who declined to disclose her fees. Celebrity
Speaker 1: obgyn Mary Claire Haver has amassed more than three point
Speaker 1: five million followers on Instagram, dispensing her own brand of
Speaker 1: no nonsense advice for middle aged women. Naomi Watts has
Speaker 1: a menopause company, Stripe's Beauty, that sells over the counter
Speaker 1: products such as body lotions and vaginal pH balancing probiotics,
Speaker 1: as does Halle Berry Respine. Drew Barrymore signed on as
Speaker 1: a minopause supplement spokesperson, and Middi's investors include Amy Schumer,
Speaker 1: Cheryl Sandberg, and Megan Markel. Weight Watchers and Noom have
Speaker 1: both created weight loss programs targeted at women going through menopause.
Speaker 1: Other entrants include home tracking kits with names like Mira
Speaker 1: that are meant to help show when someone's hormones are
Speaker 1: headed in a generally menopausal direction, as well as in
Speaker 1: person tests from companies ranging from young startups to the
Speaker 1: likes of Lab Corp Holdings. Most experts interviewed for this
Speaker 1: story say such consumer tests offer limited value because of
Speaker 1: women's hormones fluctuate constantly, it's tough to offer more than
Speaker 1: a snapshot of the moment the test was taken. The
Speaker 1: further away from FDA approved prescription therapy, the more dubious
Speaker 1: the claims can become. Meno Mania has blurred the line
Speaker 1: between care and commerce. The doctor in your feed explaining
Speaker 1: how to prevent UTIs or protect bone health could also
Speaker 1: be pushing unpre proven supplements that might be useless or
Speaker 1: even harmful. Black cohosh, for example, has been linked to
Speaker 1: liver damage, and when hormones are the default answer, other
Speaker 1: explanations might be overlooked. Last year, an editorial in the
Speaker 1: British Medical Journal warned that some consumer facing minopause services
Speaker 1: can be counterproductive. This past winter, Wall Street Journal reporter
Speaker 1: Jessica Tunkel wrote about how daughters dismissed her own symptoms
Speaker 1: as perimenopause when in fact she had cancer. As Barbara Hannah,
Speaker 1: an obgyn and founder of Mymenopause RX, puts it, have
Speaker 1: women gone from being dismissed and ignored to being preyed upon.
Speaker 1: Many Alloy and their competitors have made menopause treatment easier
Speaker 1: to access, and some women have surely benefited, but some
Speaker 1: physicians stressed that there's no one size fits all prescription
Speaker 1: for health and happiness in midlife, no single fix that
Speaker 1: will work for every woman. What it does is it
Speaker 1: gives women a false sense of control, says Pauline Macki,
Speaker 1: a researcher at the University of Illinois Chako who studies
Speaker 1: menopause and the brain. She recalls sitting next to a
Speaker 1: woman on a plane who raved about her testosterone pellet,
Speaker 1: then turned around to reveal a bald patch, a side
Speaker 1: effect of too much testosterone. No testosterone product is approved
Speaker 1: for women in the US, though it sometimes prescribed off
Speaker 1: label for low libido. This hasn't stopped testosterone from becoming
Speaker 1: the hormone du jour. If I wasn't an expert in menopause,
Speaker 1: Maki says, I'm sure I would have gotten one too.
Speaker 1: Without enough access to good care, women can fall down
Speaker 1: the rabbit hole of supplements and compounded hormones which haven't
Speaker 1: gone through the FDA approval process, and expensive menopause retreats.
Speaker 1: Castperson says the problem isn't the marketplace. We need innovation,
Speaker 1: She emphasizes, it's education. She points to a campaign she
Speaker 1: recently saw for toning gummies as an example of the
Speaker 1: sort of thing women should simply know better than to
Speaker 1: fall for. What women really need is less noise and
Speaker 1: more trusted care, says Anne full and White, co founder
Speaker 1: and co CEO of Alloy. Everyone interviewed for this story
Speaker 1: agreed with that the question is how to get there.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back with the menopause gold rush is
Speaker 1: leaving women behind. Welcome back to the menopause gold rush
Speaker 1: is leaving women behind. On the fourth floor of a
Speaker 1: dilapidated shopping mall in Manhattan's Chinatown, a nurse who spoke
Speaker 1: very little English drew my blood. I was here because
Speaker 1: I'd been convinced by social media that I needed to
Speaker 1: interrogate my hormones and brace for the coming wreckage of midlife.
Speaker 1: The content appeared as if triggered by a calendar alert
Speaker 1: about six months before my fortieth birthday. If you're forty
Speaker 1: years old, I have seventeen years of advice for you. Hater,
Speaker 1: the obgyn and influencer said in one of the reels
Speaker 1: that popped up in my Instagram feed, you are most
Speaker 1: likely not prepared for your oncoming menopause. Hater, who declined
Speaker 1: several requests for comment for this article, is one of
Speaker 1: a group of doctors who refer to themselves colloquially as
Speaker 1: the menopause castperson. Is another. To prepare for menopause, I
Speaker 1: gleaned I needed to eat more protein and fiber, Adopt
Speaker 1: a weightlifting regimen by a weighted vest to boost my
Speaker 1: bone health. Start taking vitamin D, magnesium and maybe creatine powder.
Speaker 1: Sleep more, expose myself to sunlight first thing in the morning,
Speaker 1: and start tracking my hormones so I'd know the precise
Speaker 1: moment when things started to go south. Every time I
Speaker 1: scrolled through my phone, I stumbled upon a depressing new
Speaker 1: factoid about what lay ahead. My cholesterol would rise, my
Speaker 1: joints would ache, I'd develop fun new food intolerances for
Speaker 1: some reason, Winter would feel harder. The first sign of
Speaker 1: perimenopause I learned from Haver's posts was simply not feeling
Speaker 1: like yourself. What woman hasn't felt that lately? I'd been
Speaker 1: a little anxious, sleeping fitfully and waking up sweaty. I'd
Speaker 1: gained a few pounds, and actually, yeah, my skin was
Speaker 1: kind of dry. I was beginning to wonder if I
Speaker 1: could be in perimenopause already without even knowing it. So
Speaker 1: when an ad from a brand called Joy and Blokes
Speaker 1: offered hormone testing for eighty seven dollars, I thought why not.
Speaker 1: In February, I treked to the Chinatown Lab in the
Speaker 1: interest of being thorough. I also booked appointments with several
Speaker 1: of the biggest menopause telehealth companies, Middi, Alloy, Maven, and
Speaker 1: Electra to learn more about hormone therapy. The internet had
Speaker 1: suggested that with hormones earlier was better. At Alloy, after
Speaker 1: I filled out a form describing my symptoms, I promptly
Speaker 1: received a message from a doctor concluding that I was
Speaker 1: in paramenopause. Weight gain is often one of the first symptoms.
Speaker 1: She prescribed a low dose birth control pill one hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty dollars. Because Alloy doesn't accept insurance and suggested
Speaker 1: six hundred dollars in additional add ons. At MIDI, a
Speaker 1: nurse practitioner told me it can be hard to know
Speaker 1: what's paramenopause and what isn't. But starting hormone therapy earlier,
Speaker 1: she said, could help prevent osteoporosis and dementia. According to Maki,
Speaker 1: the brain researcher, evidence suggests it does not prevent cognitive decline.
Speaker 1: She prescribed a weekly estrogen patch and oral progesterone, which
Speaker 1: my insurance would cover. When my labs came back from
Speaker 1: Joy and Blokes, they suggested my testosterone was low and
Speaker 1: my thyroid stimulating hormone or TSH was high. I spiraled. Menopause,
Speaker 1: of course, also coincides with an age when thyroid dysfunction
Speaker 1: becomes more common. My regular doctor, however, was skeptical that
Speaker 1: these tests meant all that much. Hormone levels swing day
Speaker 1: to day. She reminded me. She retested my TSH it
Speaker 1: was normal. My testosterone levels, meanwhile, had been low for
Speaker 1: a man, but perfectly within range for a thirty nine
Speaker 1: year old woman. Generally speaking, a woman's testosterone levels reveal
Speaker 1: little on their own. There's no agreed upon cutoff that
Speaker 1: by itself requires treatment. In emailed statements to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, MIDI,
Speaker 1: Alloy and d Joy and Blokes all emphasized their commitment
Speaker 1: to helping women access hard to find evidence based care
Speaker 1: in a confusing marketplace. All said that they don't push
Speaker 1: specific courses of action and that they're dedicated to helping
Speaker 1: each patient find appropriate, individualized care. Our goal is not
Speaker 1: to prescribe more treatments. Josh Whalan, the CEO and co
Speaker 1: founder of Blokes, which operates Joy and Blokes, said in
Speaker 1: his statement, it's to ensure each woman receives the right treatment,
Speaker 1: if any. MIDI Chief medical Officer Kathleen Jordan said in
Speaker 1: her statement that trialing hormone therapy to see if it
Speaker 1: improves symptoms is a proactive approach. Addressing paramenopausal symptoms early
Speaker 1: is not aggressive medicine, she said. In Evaluating patients, an
Speaker 1: Alloy spokesperson said their company sees part of its role
Speaker 1: not as persuasion, but as education. Our role isn't to
Speaker 1: convince women they need treatment. It's to help them understand
Speaker 1: what's happening in their bodies. With some distance, my symptoms
Speaker 1: had more obvious explanations frequently stress baking macarones then eating them.
Speaker 1: My husband had piled blankets on the bed to ward
Speaker 1: off the winter chill. Once I removed them, my night
Speaker 1: sweats vanished. A nurse practitioner at Maven calmly suggested I
Speaker 1: revisit hormone testing with my regular ob before getting too
Speaker 1: riled up about perimenopause. At Electra, a gynecologist told me
Speaker 1: that every symptom of middle age, such as weight gain,
Speaker 1: wasn't necessarily as signed of peramenopause. I wasn't in perimenopause.
Speaker 1: I was just hot and whipped into a frenzy about
Speaker 1: an inevitability that women generally survive just fine. I wasn't
Speaker 1: alone texting with some girlfriends about the grip of the
Speaker 1: menopause algorithm. Another confessed she'd started to wonder whether she
Speaker 1: was in perimenopause herself. Olga, a forty year old software
Speaker 1: engineer in Brooklyn, says she viewed the transition as a betrayal.
Speaker 1: Your body just stops functioning, she says. People's hair falls out,
Speaker 1: they get fat, their skin gets bad. Who wants that?
Speaker 1: Three years ago, she'd begun or uttering a drug called
Speaker 1: rapamycin from India, inspired by early stage clinical trials that
Speaker 1: aim to show it can help in delaying the ovarian
Speaker 1: aging that leads to a decline in fertility and ultimately menopause.
Speaker 1: I plan on taking birth control until I can't anymore,
Speaker 1: and then switching to hormone therapy until I die, says Olga,
Speaker 1: who prefer not to use her full name when discussing
Speaker 1: the legally dubious practice of importing prescription drugs. I can
Speaker 1: mitigate the downsides of having a female body. In some
Speaker 1: parts of Asia, where menopause may carry fewer negative cultural
Speaker 1: associations and older women often hold greater social status, studies
Speaker 1: have sometimes found that women report fewer classic symptoms. Studies
Speaker 1: of modern Maya women and HUDs of women in Tanzania
Speaker 1: have found similarly low rates of some typical menopause symptoms.
Speaker 1: In ancient Greece, where the Hippocratics believed women's constitutions grew
Speaker 1: stronger late in life, there was much ado about the
Speaker 1: dangers of puberty, menstruation, and childbirth, but virtual nothing about menopause.
Speaker 1: The ancient Greeks didn't even have a word for it.
Speaker 1: Women in today's industrialized societies may genuinely be experiencing a
Speaker 1: rougher go of it for a variety of reasons, but
Speaker 1: medicalization deeply influences experiences of menopause in modern societies. As
Speaker 1: the historian Susan Mattern writes in her book The Slow
Speaker 1: Moon Climbs and freaking out doesn't seem to help either.
Speaker 1: This is where the MENO marketing blitz might well be counterproductive.
Speaker 1: Although menopause is emphatically not a disease, the AD's flooding
Speaker 1: women's social media accounts often make it seem otherwise, says
Speaker 1: Dina Emera, an evolutionary biologist who studies menopause at the
Speaker 1: Independent Buck Institute for Research on Aging in California. When
Speaker 1: I go on Instagram, like half the stuff I see
Speaker 1: is on menopause, Emera says, it's hard to get away
Speaker 1: from the messages that your body is messed up. The
Speaker 1: truth is there's no magic salve for the many indignities
Speaker 1: of aging. Estrogen therapy helps many women, but sometimes other
Speaker 1: interventions such as antidepressants, cognitive behavioral therapy, or non hormonal
Speaker 1: hot flash medications are a better choice for easing the
Speaker 1: symptoms of transition. It's a normal life transition, says Stephanie Phobion,
Speaker 1: medical director of the Menopause Society. It can affect women
Speaker 1: in different ways, and some not at all and often,
Speaker 1: says Regita Patil, an obgyn and director of the Menopause
Speaker 1: Program at the University of California at Los Angeles. The
Speaker 1: recipe for healthy aging has more to do with diet, sleep, exercise,
Speaker 1: social connection, and stress. She created a software tool, now
Speaker 1: in use among UCLA doctors that turns a patient's intake forms,
Speaker 1: why are you here, questions, health history into a risk
Speaker 1: profile before their appointment to help each physician spend more
Speaker 1: time focused on listening to the person and developing a
Speaker 1: course of treatment. In other words, she's trying to accelerate
Speaker 1: the odyssies of patients like Harris at scale to steer
Speaker 1: them away from the potions and pills toward the appropriate care.
Speaker 1: There's not a lot of money in menopause if you
Speaker 1: do it the right way, Patil says. In April, I
Speaker 1: sat in the audience at the first Livelong Women's Health
Speaker 1: Summit in San Francisco. More than two thousand women had
Speaker 1: shelled out hundreds of dollars to attend. Har who was
Speaker 1: there with a book aimed at younger women called the
Speaker 1: new perimenopause, pulled the audience from the stage. Before we
Speaker 1: talk about estrogen leaving the building, I'd like to ask
Speaker 1: how much estrogen is in the building, she said, asking
Speaker 1: those on hormone therapy to raise their hands or clap.
Speaker 1: The auditorium erupted in applause, about three fourths of the
Speaker 1: room raising their hands. After she'd finished speaking, a group
Speaker 1: of energetic young women in track pants led the audience
Speaker 1: in a dance break. Outside the auditorium's main entrance, a
Speaker 1: huge booth was selling Har's books and supplements. While browsing,
Speaker 1: I met a thirty five year old woman attending the
Speaker 1: conference with her mother. When I asked her why she
Speaker 1: was there, she told me she was already worrying about menopause.