Myths About Post Menopausal Women That Block Women from What We Need:

See all the Healthcasts at https://www.biobalancehealth.com/healthcast-blog

If you feel ignored and unheard by your doctor or nurse practitioner, your feelings are correct!  As a group women are not listened to and often dismissed as emotional and not smart enough to understand “complicated” medical information, by the Misogynistic American medical community, the US governmental agencies who make the rules for what women need.  If you feel unheard and dismissed by your doctor, your impression is probably right, and you need to vote with your feet and leave that doctor for someone who listens to you and treats your symptoms and conditions that undermine you and your productivity.

The Myths that the majority of people believe are created by men and broadcast by premenopausal women and the media who have no first-hand knowledge of the problems that women contend with when they become pre-menopausal. Here are just a few of the lies and Myths that we must contend with.

• Women love the freedom of being in menopause! No worry about pregnancy or bleeding.  LIE
• Women can’t become president’s companies or the President of the United States because we are going to hit the red button to destroy the world because we experience PMS before menopause, and after we just can’t think or make educated decisions. LIE
• Symptomatic Menopausal Women are Over-reacting to a “normal” Phenomenon that “strong” women take in their stride. LIE
• Women complain about menopausal symptoms to get attention. LIE
• Women’s menopausal symptoms are really from psychiatric disease. LIE
• Women who complain of bleeding all the time don’t need a hysterectomy! Just use medication (that doesn’t work). LIE
• Women’s menopause symptoms are from behavior problems. They need counselling! LIE
• Menopause should be a wonderful time of your life! Right!  LIE

All these LIES are damaging to the women who need medical treatment.  We don’t need name-calling, subtle dismissal of our symptoms by our doctors, one size fits all non-medical treatment like vitamins and herbs, or basically categorizing our physical symptoms as imaginary or mental which allows doctors to be excused from treating our hormone deficiencies.

No sex drive, painful sex, insomnia, fatigue, brain fog, weight gain, fatigue, hot flashes and sleep disturbances, migraines, loss of muscle weight gain and fatigue, depression and anxiety are physical symptoms of menopause and pre-menopause, that can all be treated with estradiol, testosterone and in some cases progesterone replacement.  Menopause and the years leading up to it CAN BE TREATED safely and effectively but we aren’t offered treatment by the doctors who work for our insurance companies! Refusing to provide the hormones you need at menopause is denying you the treatment for literally losing the hormones that made you, YOU is not only disturbing but scary!

Medical care includes the replacement of waning hormones The only differences between menopause and testosterone loss and hypothyroidism,  Cortisol deficiency (Addison’s disease), Parathyroid deficiency, Growth hormone deficiency in children are all paid for by insurance and doctors willingly treat these illnesses because they are not only paid to do so but they have taken a Hippocratic oath to treat the symptoms and diseases of the patients who come to them.  However, in my office I hear the struggles that women have had getting treatment for their symptoms.  Their doctors generally use the excuse, “I don’t believe in hormones.” So, they get out of treating half of their patients over 50.  Hormonal treatment isn’t a religion, it is a condition that 50% of the population will have in their lifetimes. If your doctor is a PCP Primary Care Physician or OBGYN, then they have the training and the duty to treat you.

 

Sadly, these lies have sculpted how women are looked at in the American and English-speaking countries.  Misogynistic beliefs are meant to keep women in a second-class status. The result is ignoring the simplest and the most affordable menopausal treatment -Estrogen and testosterone- and profit from our menopausal pain by serving up very expensive treatments for each of the many complaints secondary to menopause that no women can afford.  eg: one drug for dry vagina, another for just hot flashes, a third for4 the mood changes that occur with menopause, and another for osteoporosis.  All these symptoms can be treated with a combination of testosterone and estradiol, and you can get your sex drive back too! If you think that your government is going to help you , remember the leaders  in US government are mostly men who buy-in to the destructive misogynist group think!

Lie #1: Women love the freedom of being in menopause!  No worry about pregnancy or bleeding anymore.

Menopause might have been a relief from bleeding every month however, we no longer worry about childbearing before menopause since the birth control pill was created in the 1960s.  In contrast the women of the first half of the 1900’s before Birth control, because menopause stopped women from having unwanted or unaffordable numbers of children. In reality, women living 100 years ago rarely lived past age 45 for women so most women didn’t live to experience menopause!  Women suffered then but they were gagged by societal rules, and no one cared how they felt after childbearing years.  Now we are very integral to society at any age, not just for childbearing, and menopause is not freedom or enjoyable! We need one all encompassing answer.  The answer is long-acting estradiol and testosterone pellets that can resolve all these symptoms and make the years of a woman’s life after menopause like any other era.

Lie #2. Women can’t become presidents of companies or the President of the United States because we are too emotionally unstable.  Women are portrayed as unreasonable, hysterical and unreliable. LIE!

The belief that women can’t be a CEO or president of an organization, or of the US, because we are too emotional before menopause, and after menopause we are not competent to make decisions, is based on uneducated beliefs and old wives tales (really old husband’s tales).  We are more competent than men before menopause because we can think of more than one thing at a time, and act on the information, and because we have outstripped men in high school and college class status for decades. As for after menopause, we are at least as competent to lead if we have our menopause treated as men who are aging and becoming addled.

If we had the information that has been kept from us about the treatment for menopause, and if we were encouraged to get treatment instead of disparaged by our doctors of both sex in the US, and the US government, then we could hold any position we are qualified for, probably better than men.  Even the “Societies” that say they are for women don’t seem to be when they publish articles like the one, I read last week from the Medical Journal called “Menopause” women need counselling not medical treatment for the symptoms that we “imagine”.