Menopause 101: Let’s get the facts straight

Photo by marianne bos on Unsplash

Lately it seems that if you scratch the surface of anything, it falls apart. That’s why I am less than impressed with the current menopause narrative.

One prime example of general menopausal discourse laziness can be found in a clip Oprah Winfrey posted this week with American ob-gyn Dr Sharone Malone. Clutching a copy of Dr Malone’s book, Grown Women Talk, Oprah says: ‘We’re doing menopause 101. Do you know that there are at least 34 symptoms or more…”

Face. Palm. Anyone with half a brain knows there aren’t close to 34 symptoms of menopause.

Many people have been clocking menopause symptoms through the years, most recently Morphus co-founder and menopause researcher Andrea Donsky. She published an abstract clocking 103 symptoms in Menopause, the journal of the Menopause Society of North America, in December, and spoke about it when she appeared on the Hotflash inc Podcast.