"We Have Been Misled About Menopause"

[IcyPeas]

this is a NYT article from Yahoo news so there's no paywall.

Long article but interesting perspective.

Now imagine that there was a treatment for all these symptoms that doctors often overlooked. The scenario seems unlikely, and yet it’s a depressingly accurate picture of menopausal care for women. There is a treatment, hardly obscure, known as menopausal hormone therapy, that eases hot flashes and sleep disruption and possibly depression and aching joints. It decreases the risk of diabetes and protects against osteoporosis. It also helps prevent and treat menopausal genitourinary syndrome, a collection of symptoms, including urinary-tract infections and pain during sex, that affects nearly half of postmenopausal women.

Menopausal hormone therapy was once the most commonly prescribed treatment in the United States. In the late 1990s, some 15 million women a year were receiving a prescription for it. But in 2002, a single study, its design imperfect, found links between hormone therapy and elevated health risks for women of all ages. Panic set in; in one year, the number of prescriptions plummeted. Hormone therapy carries risks, to be sure, as do many medications that people take to relieve serious discomfort, but dozens of studies since 2002 have provided reassurance that for women under 60 whose hot flashes are troubling them, the benefits of taking hormones outweigh the risks. The treatment’s reputation, however, has never fully recovered, and the consequences have been wide-reaching. It is painful to contemplate the sheer number of indignities unnecessarily endured over the past 20 years: the embarrassing flights to the bathroom, the loss of precious sleep, the promotions that seemed no longer in reach, the changing of all those drenched sheets in the early morning, the depression that fell like a dark curtain over so many women’s days.

About 85 percent of women experience menopausal symptoms.
...
Too many doctors are not equipped to parse these intricate pros and cons, even if they wanted to. Medical schools, in response to the W.H.I., were quick to abandon menopausal education. “There was no treatment considered safe and effective, so they decided there was nothing to teach,” says Minkin, the Yale OB-GYN. About half of all practicing gynecologists are under 50, which means that they started their residencies after the publication of the W.H.I. trial and might never have received meaningful education about menopause.

article continues here:

https://news.yahoo.com/misled-menopause-154103700.html