What menopause is not

Your weekend roundup of hopefully helpful things

Just read this book if you ever get confused about what happens to us at midlife. Photo by Ava Sol on Unsplash

My copy of Robert Wilson’s 1966 HRT manifesto Feminine Forever has arrived. Expect to hear more about it soon. (It’s no Women Who Run With The Wolves)

A taster: “Many physicians,” Wilson wrote, “simply refuse to recognize menopause for what it is — a serious, painful and often crippling disease.”

All these years later, even after this author/doctor was unmasked as a pawn of the pharmaceutical industry (check out this article on it from 2007), I keep seeing sneaky variations on its main theme: that menopause is a problem that must be corrected, no matter how we feel or what we want.

If “estrogen deficiency” won’t work, how about “hormonal poverty”? Although this sneaky new term seems obviously made up and ridiculous, that hasn’t stopped two very prominent doctors from using it recently: One on social media and another in an email subject line.

(Remember Poise’s ‘giggle dribble’ f…