Menopause champions? No, we just need GPs to do their job!
It’s almost 30 years since I went to my GP feeling a bit fed up, tired, with an unreliable menstrual cycle and feeling hot a lot. she immediately did a blood test to measure a hormone called FsH — follicle-stimulating hormone — which is found in higher levels during the perimenopause. ‘Yes’, she said, ‘you are clearly perimenopausal. What do you want, pills or patches?’
I didn’t realise at the time how lucky I was to have a GP who recognised the typical symptoms in a woman in her mid-40s, knew how to confirm her diagnosis and what treatment to offer.
It was her knowledge and my ignorance of the condition, which affects every middle-aged woman in the world, that led me to find out more.
Why were so many of us ignorant of the symptoms? Why did we not know that the perimenopause is generally the time in midlife in which our bodies go a bit haywire? that we can describe ourselves as menopausal a year after the last period has ended? Why were we ignorant of what effective treatments might be available?
Why did so few GPs seem to take the condition seriously as a major change in a woman’s life? Why did so many appear to have nothing to offer but antidepressants?
I wrote a book called Is It Me Or Is It Hot In Here? A Modern Woman’s Guide to the Menopause. It sold well and I like to think it was helpful to my generation and the one that followed.
But now, all this time later, it seems this vital stage in every woman’s life is yet another aspect of women’s health that is still under-researched and poorly understood by so many in the medical profession.
How can it be that in 2022, as was reported this week, a woman, failed by her doctor, who ignored her symptoms for years, was diagnosed as menopausal by her dentist?
From the campaigning that’s been going on recently, it appears not every woman can rely on the kind of understanding, sympathy and knowledge from her doctor that I was lucky enough to have.
It should not have been necessary for Mariella Frostrup, Lisa snowdon, Penny Lancaster and Davina McCall to go to Parliament for a menopause march on the Commons this week.
they demanded a Menopause Mandate, a ‘revolution’ in the support received by women, including more menopause clinics, a dedicated menopause champion in every GP practice and they’ve persuaded the Commons speaker, sir Lindsay Hoyle, to sign a pledge to make the Commons ‘menopause friendly’.
I hesitate to criticise the efforts of a new generation of menopausal women, but I can’t go along with the campaigners’ argument that every GP surgery should have a menopause specialist champion. that seems an unnecessary expense in a cash-strapped NHs when GP practices are barely managing to recover from the horrors of the pandemic.
What’s more, having just one dedicated menopause champion gives the rest of the doctors in a practice the perfect get-out clause — the excuse to remain ignorant. ‘Menopause you say? Not my area, I’ll just send you down the corridor to the nurse.’
No, what’s needed — and urgently — is a surgery with a full complement of fully-trained doctors, all of whom have been taught everything there is to know about a condition that affects 50 per cent of the population. If not more.
the male menopause doesn’t have such clear hormonal symptoms as present in women, but testosterone does fall as men age and we women have all observed grumpiness, irritability and forgetfulness in the middle-aged man. Understanding all round sounds to me like the best policy.
And while we’re on the topic, I applaud publishers such as HarperCollins who are saying enough of chick lit, let’s have more literature we might dub meno-lit, featuring ‘menopausal women as smart, funny, powerful characters who are liberated, walk tall and fight back’. Women such as Birgitte Nyborg, the Danish minister, played by sidse Babett Knudsen, who has returned in the fourth series of the brilliant Borgen on Netflix.
In 2010, in the first series, she rose to become Prime Minister, dealing with young children and a husband who resented her dedication to her job. It led to divorce, but she battled on alone.
twelve years on, the children are grown up and she’s now foreign minister. In meetings she dabs at the moisture on her face. she changes her shirt time and time again. A sudden, unexpected flood has her rushing out to her secretary, checking the back of her skirt and asking for a tampon. Making up in front of her mirror we see her plucking hairs from her chin.
Yet she remains as tough, hardworking and as clever as ever. No HRt, because in series three she had breast cancer.
We need more such women to be present in our cultural lives. It’s time the menopause was viewed as a change — for the better.