How the CEO of her own health consumes menopause media

Carefully. Very carefully.

Photo by Ashni on Unsplash

“If it feels like menopause is to blame for every ache, strand of lost hair, and what’s-your-name-again moment… that’s because it is.” - Oprah Daily

The whole reason I started Hotflash inc in 2020 – obsessing about the idea and researching it for a good 2.5 years before that – was because the midlife hormonal transition coverage I saw, that I needed, was so lacking. Mixed in with the odd good piece was a mixture of self-serving, one-sided, designed to make someone money, vague, Freelancer.com-type content, or it was full of fear-mongering. It was rarely well-balanced, well-researched, presented with proper context, and, most importantly, objective.

We are at a place now where there is more menopause journalism, just like there are more influencers, celebrities and doctors on social media. And since there’s more, there’s more basic issues – like poorly conducted reporting and failure to check basic facts – and lots of mediocrity.

I started calling myself a "recovering journalist" in 2020, as I watched journalists around the world abandon all of the tools I’d been taught to use: holding government officials to account and querying their claims, gathering a range of expert opinions (including ‘alternative views’), reporting objectively rather than stoking tribalism, presenting numbers in context, independently verifying reports by official sources, using primary sources, keeping opinion out of straight-up reporting, approaching each story with a semblance of an open mind – the list goes on.

And so a pattern has emerged in menopause journalism, in which everything is being blamed on menopause. The veins of victim mentality that run through the current range of menopause coverage were skewered brilliantly in the NewsBiscuit article Absolutely everything fifty-year-old woman does attributed to menopause.

“Susan Perrin is not sure that she exists as an individual any more, since everything she has done, felt or experienced recently has been attributed to her cessation of ovarian follicular activity rather than her enduring or situational personality traits or fleeting preferences.”

UK satire site NewsBiscuit

It’s a short article, but it’s delightful. (“Drawn a picture of a cock and balls with marker pen under a subway? Menopause.”)

After almost five years living and breathing this transition (both personally and professionally), I also worry about this. A lot. I was a woman who thought her exhaustion, digestive issues, brain fog, skin rashes and serious emotional disregulation were just “perimenopause” – and everywhere I looked, the world backed that up for me. Instead, once I found the right doctor, what I had was an entirely treatable interlinked constellation of Hashimoto’s, low thyroid, leaky gut, fatty liver, insulin resistance and pre-diabetes, caused by decades of IBS caused by living in a chronic stress state probably caused by childhood and on-the-job trauma, undiagnosed ADHD, genetic variations, with a side of going on oral contraceptives as a teenager. The more people I talk to, the more this kind of thing turns out to be the case.

Sometimes it’s perimenopause. Sometimes it’s something else. You really don’t know that you don’t know that until you do. This is just one of the many nuances that get missed. I’ll outline some others to keep in mind while you are reading after the jump.

How to navigate menopause media