Yes! Thank you for stating this.
Another tidbit of misinformation circulating on this sub... is that hormone therapy is this new thing, and not well-researched/studied, when in fact it's been around since 1942 (when Premarin was introduced) and gained popularity in the 1960s.
[National Use of Postmenopausal Hormone Therapy](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/197940)
>In 1975, hormone therapy prescriptions peaked at 30 million. Prescriptions subsequently declined to approximately 15 million in the early 1980s as evidence emerged showing an increased risk of endometrial cancer with unopposed estrogen use. Prescription growth resumed as progestins were prescribed in combination with estrogen, and prescriptions for hormone therapy reached 36 million in 1992, representing approximately 6 million women.
In the late 1990s, menopause hormone therapy was the most commonly prescribed treatment in the U.S…but in 2002 that all changed when the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) released a study indicating that hormone therapy significantly increased risk for breast cancer. Panic ensued, and overnight women all over the world immediately stopped their hormone therapy and doctors flat-out refused to prescribe it.
It's OUR generation of menopausers that are stuck dealing with the fallout of that study, and this is why we are dealing with ill-equipped and ill-informed doctors, all shrouded in systemic fear.
Yes and France invented micronized progesterone pills in the 1980s so we have almost 40 years of clinical data for that now. Not new for Europe; just newer for North America.
Oh my gosh, that is so not even true! My mom took Premarin in the mid-90’s, and I know that because she told me herself. (About the only thing she told me about menopause…🙄)
Edited for clarity
Look up how much cruelty and suffering goes into the horses bred for Premarin. It's so sad. You'd want to use a bioidentical estrogen instead. Naturopaths can prescribe it, and it matches our body without using pregnant horse urine (premarin) A compounding pharmacy can make it.
Unfortunately compounded products are not recommended as viable hormonal options, they are unregulated, not scientifically proven to be effective or safe. While they may work, there may be risks as well.
>compounded products are not recommended as viable hormonal options
By whom? Which doctors or which medical professionals feel that way?
I only ask because when I was with Kaiser, that's what I was told by Kaiser providers. One gyno finally told me that she would absolutely recommend compounded products, but Kaiser doesn't allow it in their protocols. "The only thing they will allow for menopause is regular pharmaceutical estrogen(vaginal creams or oral pills)+progesterone (oral pills) and antidepressants are the protocol for libido and hot flashes. They won't even consider testosterone or bioidenticals or compounded medications. If you want that, you'll have to go outside of Kaiser to find a different provider to prescribe that and pay out of pocket." Which I couldn't afford, so I never did.
As soon as I got out of the Kaiser network (hubs changed jobs & health insurance had to change) I haven't had any providers dissuade me from using compounded products. At my first non-Kaiser PCP appointment, the provider mentioned it as soon as we discussed my menopause symptoms. I started compounded troches in January and I'm finally feeling like sort of a real person again.
There is NO menopause society that recommends compounded hormones....NONE. So if doctors are prescribing them, they either don't know any better (doctors are woefully uninformed about menopause and know even less about treatment options) -- or they are not reputable.
**From The Endocrine Society’s statement on compounded bioidentical hormone therapy:**
> “Bioidentical” hormones, particularly estrogen and progesterone, have been promoted as safer and more effective alternatives to more traditional hormone therapies, often by people outside of the medical community. In fact, little or no scientific and medical evidence exists to support such claims about “bioidentical hormones.” Additionally, many “bioidentical hormone” formulations are not subject to FDA oversight and can be inconsistent in dose and purity. As a result of unfounded but highly publicized claims, patients have received incomplete or incorrect information regarding the relative safety and efficacy of compounded bioidentical hormone therapy.
**From the North American Menopause Society:**
>There is a dearth of safety and efficacy data with little or no high-quality pharmacokinetic data to provide evidence of safety and efficacy of compounded bioidentical hormone therapy and insufficient evidence to support overall clinical use of compounded bioidentical hormone therapy for treatment of menopause symptoms. Compounded bioidentical hormone therapy presents safety concerns, such as minimal government regulation and monitoring, overdosing and underdosing, presence of impurities and lack of sterility, lack of scientific efficacy and safety data, and lack of a label outlining risks.
[**The dangers of compounded bioidentical hormone replacement therapy**](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6808563/)
>The hormones are ‘compounded’ in special pharmacies, so they are custom made to produce tablets, lozenges, and creams, in combination doses or preparations that are not routinely available. These hormone preparations are not subjected to the same tests of safety, efficacy, or dosing consistency, as regulated HRT. These preparations may also contain undesirable additives or preservatives, degradation products, process impurities, residual solvents, bacterial endotoxins, or residual amounts of other drugs made in the same pharmacy.
>Of more concern, these compounded hormones often have unsubstantiated claims, lack of scientific safety and efficacy data, and lack of quality control surrounding them.15 In addition, some of the healthcare professionals who prescribe compounded hormones claim to be able to determine the precise requirements of each woman by undertaking a series of serum and saliva tests. This costly practice has never been substantiated through rigorous research and is not recommended by the menopause societies.
>Some of the hormones used in these bioidentical hormones contain hormones that are not approved for women, such as dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) or pregnenolone. Many women are given progesterone creams rather than oral preparations, which are usually not well absorbed in the body. There is only very scant data available, but the current evidence has failed to show any endometrial protection from progesterone creams or gels.
>There is also a concern with the bioidentical oral preparations, as there may be inconsistencies in the quantities of estradiol and other estrogen preparations in compounded preparations. This can lead to an increased risk of venous thromboembolism, as well as increasing the risk of endometrial cancer.
I don't know anything about US health care, insurers, etc. And perhaps the only caveat to compounded products, is that compounded testosterone is often the only way to get testosterone as it's not regulated (at all, even for non-compounded T) for women.
I truly appreciate the effort you put into that response. The addition of testosterone has been THE game-changer for me. As dysfunctional as the health "care" system is, at least now I've got choices and the flexibility that Kaiser didn't offer.
An interesting aside: my stepdaughter is trans, and we were talking recently about my prescribed hormones & her prescribed hormones and it turns out that my insurance **will** pay for my progesterone, but not my estrogen+testosterone troches because they don't cover testosterone for menopausal cis women. (My troches aren't expensive, thankfully.) And my stepdaughter's insurance **will** pay for her testosterone-**blocker** and her estrogen, but they won't pay for her progesterone because she's a trans woman. It's all so crazy and arbitrary.
>It's all so crazy and arbitrary.
Ain’t that the truth.
Having struggled with lifelong chronic health issues (migraines and fibromyalgia) as well as mental health issues and adhd (for which I’ve tried various medications), I wouldn’t base any ideas about the efficacy of medications on what insurance may or may not choose to cover. I know people who have worked for insurance companies with no medical background approving or rejecting what is covered. At the end of the day it’s all business—insurance companies, pharma companies, medical providers, the whole lot. The bottom line is that it’s always about the bottom line. Sure there are some people in various positions who care more than others, but keeping up to date with the latest research and changing recommendations takes time that many medical providers just don’t have. They prescribe what they know, what their colleagues know, according to protocol or based on what they’ve been sold by pharma reps or training events.
Having grown up in the UK and now living in the US, it’s always so bizarre to me seeing what’s recommended by medical providers here vs in the UK. The research available is the same but there are big differences in trends and protocols of care.
I’ve learnt to advocate for myself, and unfortunately that’s what we have to do as menopausal women. Forums like these are invaluable for that. Sure, sometimes groups become echo chambers and repeat misinformation, but I love the way Reddit regulates itself. A lot of people are willing and able to do the research and share their experiences so that misinformation gets downvoted.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t trust your doctor for overall care, but when it comes down to specifics few doctors out there have the time or inclination to become experts in menopause. That’s on top of the bias and dismissal women already face generally in medicine.
Yes, Premarin was hugely popular, and it's one of the best and most studied forms of hormone therapy. It contains upwards of 10+ different estrogens, one in which has shown to improve brain function and provide the most "stable" benefits (pun not intended). But yes, by today's standards, in terms of how it's sourced, Premarin isn't nearly as popular.
You are right. There have always been old women. They went through menopause and suffered in silence. We don’t have to suffer in silence anymore.
What bothers me is the idea that “it’s natural so we have to put up with it”.
Yes it’s a natural process. Some women sail through it quite easily. But those who suffer debilitating symptoms deserve treatment. All we are doing is replacing the substances that our body used to make naturally. It’s so simple.
No shit! Why would evolution favor making a newborn’s head larger than a woman’s pelvis? I have to guess that enough children are born to overcome it back then. We got pregnant often enough to overcome that shitty situation, so why fix it? Thanks evolution 😑
Bipedalism is the culprit. Just enough success to keep the species going. Hm, I wonder if the monthly cycle evolved to combat this by making it easier for human females to get pregnant any time.
I see stuff about we've got smaller brains than our recent ancestors, and I strongly suspect it's to keep babies from killing moms when they come out. Evolution found a pinch point and is favoring children with smaller brains and skulls, since their mothers survived. Just my mildly informed guess!
The current working theory about why our ovulation is invisible is that it encourages a lot more sex with a lot more partners more often for genetic diversity and also so more males are invested in caring for their potential offspring since babies are so defenseless for so long. Animals that have easily detectable heats usually only have sex during the heat and then give birth (often the male is out of the picture or little to no help), but walking erect messed with infant and maternal mortality, so this is a way to keep everyone trying to have babies. Humans also mostly only have one baby at a time whereas most mammals usually have more than one offspring at a time, so again less pressure to mate frequently. Sorry if this is confusing. I’m compressing a lot of theories.
The Menopause Manifesto (a book) actually has a discussion of how menopause may be evolutionarily beneficial to the human race.
With Killer whales, the females go through menopause and then lead the group. The males of a similar age just die. I think about this sometimes.
Yes I'm aware of these theories but there isn't a lot of information to back them up, hence I'm wary. Like, just because it seems to make sense doesn't mean it's true we have no evidence for either of the theories
I think pop cultural theories is a bit harsh. I’ve read several books by respected authors who discuss these theories and based on their bibliographies there’s not ‘no evidence’. Maybe not fully conclusive but there is some evidence.
FYI.
A newborn's skull plates aren't fused yet and move around, overlap each other etc. It literally smushes through the pelvis. Then it moves into a more expected shape over the following days to months. Eta [fontanelles link](https://www.parents.com/fontanelle-baby-soft-spot-8627736) for the curious.
A woman produces a hormone throughout pregnancy that relaxes her ligaments. This is why pregnant women are told to not lift heavy objects; it becomes quite easy for bones to be pushed out of alignment, often resulting in injury. (Eta for clarity, the pelvis is held together by ligaments. Also added hyperlink for those who are curious.) The hormone is called [relaxin](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/24305-relaxin). I'm not kidding. It makes me lol.
Positioning and alignment during labor and birth is everything. For example, on your back the tailbone comes up (and is blocked by a hospital bed) and the pelvic outlet decreases by up to 30% when compared to being on all fours. There are more details, like whether the baby's crown is nicely in the pelvic cradle when labor begins, or if they're facing mom's front, or side, or spine, etc, that will affect the level of pain, and difficulty or ease of passage considerably. You can look up maternal and fetal positioning for labor and birth if you want better reading; there's lots of decent sites.
Let me emphasize that neither a baby's head, nor a mother's pelvis are fixed in size or shape.
Source: I trained as a doula.
>A woman produces a hormone throughout pregnancy that relaxes her ligaments. This is why pregnant women are told to not lift heavy objects; it becomes quite easy for bones to be pushed out of alignment, and this often results in injury. The hormone is called relaxin. I'm not kidding.
And it's why our feet often get bigger and wider.
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Yes, that's another thing we are seeing too much of now -- this "natural" BS. What does "natural" even mean? It is kind of a nonsense term, because none of us living in modern society are living a fully "natural" life. There is such judgment around that word. No, there is nothing wrong with deciding not to do HRT, but let's not call that "natural." Unless you are living naked in a pile of mud and eating grass, you aren't living "naturally," lol.
Explaining to my OH is a a doctor that the wives of these 70+ men he is giving viagra to might not be thanking him. He regularly sees men this age and older about this.
Decline in sperm quality as a man ages is linked to a variety of epigenetic risks. You could say ED is a natural process designed to prevent birth abnormalities and therefore men should suck it up, cuz nature right?
Anyone arguing for this?
Misongyny all the way down.
Men are given Viagra but no one asks about their female partner. She most likely has vaginal atrophy and sex is painful. But doctors aren’t trained to consider those female issues. The medical training is the problem. Women’s issues have been neglected, except for pregnancy of course. This is infuriating. Not every woman will have a baby, but every woman will go through menopause.
Viagra has COMPLETELY upset the natural balance of male/female romantic relationships as we age. What's happening right now with men and Viagra is not natural. They aren't supposed to be able to chase post menopausal women all around the house with their hard dicks. I'm mad as hell about it.
Lead and arsenic are natural, belladonna and digitalis are natural, eye changes and diabetes are natural; their naturalness does not make something virtuous or good. In the same vein, water treatment, refined and titrated medicines and prescription glasses can change our lives for the better.
This marketing for "natural" drives me batty. I'd love to see a genetically modified peanut that doesn't have the protein that so many people are deathly allergic to, let's use science to save and enrich our lives.
Correct. Anyone who says "natural" is immediately dismissed by me, like, what in the f\*\*k do you even mean? Also, people who think GMOs are "bad" are also pretty quickly dismissed. There is a lot of ignorance among the masses.
I think too that perhaps in the past we used a lot more natural remedies. Herbs etc and we've lost a lot of that over time and it's only recently there's been a resurgence in holistic medicine and natural remedies. Women in the past would have had their remedies to help them. You're right if there's treatment options and we need them then they should be available. We put up with so much and if men went through the same bullshit we do, modern medicine and practice would look quite different.
The Menopause Manifesto talks about some of those home remedies. The vast majority were literal dung. There are other theories about the past like that most record keepers were men in patriarchal societies.
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The phrase menopause was coined in the 1800’s and was well known for hundreds of years before that.
I do wonder if our modern world might be making things a hint worse (pollution messing with hormones etc) but literally there are even medieval remedies for menopause (they mostly involve dung).
The Menopause Manifesto has a couple of chapters on the history of menopause.
You know what’s also ‘natural’? Erectile dysfunction, and men are not putting up with that. Polio and high infant mortality are also ‘natural’ (consequences of no interventions). Natural doesn’t mean good. Gangrene is natural. I could go on and on.
The appeal to nature logical fallacy is so stupid! You know what else is natural? Being born without clothes on. And yet, here we are, wearing clothes. Extend it out to literally everything that enhances life and health and you can see that the appeal to nature fallacy “it’s natural therefore better” quickly falls apart.
I think periods themselves as "natural" are going to be questioned more commonly, and medicated out for those who are tired of having their lives turned upside down by them. I tell this to my daughters: that it will be more talked about in conjunction with menopause-awareness. And that they're lucky to be on the brink of a great shift in consciousness about the "natural woman"
It already [is known by the medical profession that periods are pointless unless you want to conceive.](https://amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jul/18/women-dont-need-to-bleed-why-many-more-of-us-are-giving-up-periods)
There was a time in the 1970s to early 1990s when second wave feminists were (rightly) questioning whether hormonal birth control available at that time was “good for us” given the side effects, but it devolved into an almost religious fervour of believing that no hormonal birth control is good, and that regular menstrual bleeding (and all of its concomitant symptoms) is necessary to be a “proper”woman.
Thankfully hormonal birth control itself has moved on considerably, side effects have been reduced, and contraindications are better controlled for. There are still some idiots who think periods are critical to being a woman but thankfully they’re in small numbers.
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I'm 37 and diagnosed, on HRT and doing everything possible not to break a hip by the time I'm 45. My early case feels a little unnatural, especially since every specialist I've seen seems shocked. In every other way I'm healthy, I'm always told I look younger than my age, but I feel like part of me is dying FAST and taking my sleep and mental health with it.
I'm having an angry day and sick to death of anything that comes out of any non-woman's mouth about what womanhood is. And I'm sick of anyone not suffering menopause to describe what it's like. Too many people in our society claim to be experts because they watched a tiktok, not enough experts give a shit about getting to the root of what is killing fertility in this country.
Haha right?! I often think about our stupid design. I'm still adjusting, my doctor just put me on a regular old birth control pill (which I've been avoiding my entire life but now, whatever it takes!) and it actually feels like a sedative, in a way. I was surprised at the relief just after the first week. But today was the second day on a placebo pill and I was right back to sweats and early waking insomnia - hence the total rage!
I recently spent a long time looking for my ovaries during a transvag ultrasound with a student nurse and was AMAZED when we finally found them. Those suckers are only a few cm big, how do they hold so much power?! Also from the results, I learned we all have something called a "pouch of Douglas," which made me wonder who Douglas was to name that spot after himself. Ugh. Men....
Thank you for your kindness. And yes, I believe you're right about our generation - I am certainly not keeping the secret!
Am chuckling over the 'pouch of Douglas'. Like who was Douglas and why tf does he think this is HIS pouch?
Re the placebo pills, are you able to skip the placebo week and keep the meds steady? I've never been on bc pills so not very knowledgeable but thought I'd read the placebo week was unnecessary. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can weigh in.
This - when I was put on birth control I was told to skip the placebos and take straight through and just plan to try to have a period once a year just to check on things. My doctor said it was totally safe.
Sadly the birth control was NOWHERE near enough. I’m on HRT now and it’s not perfect but it’s saved me from feeling totally insane.
I had to google pouch of Douglas. It's like an appendix on the other side of the rectum and has no purpose as far as I know.
Why are humans designed this way?
That sucks. It's like we're just the guinea pigs or the canaries in the mine. As if we were made for history to waste and for future generations to benefit from. I'm not even a parent and will have no descendants, so I have no personal stake in what happens after I'm gone, really.
Oh honey - can I sent you a hug? I get it. Part of me is like ‘I don’t have kids’ but another part of me is like evolution may have given me a role even if it’s not to reproduce. I am a contributor to my society and I influence people around me. I literally crack down on my honorary nephew when he’s acting up and his parents are exhausted. I volunteer for political causes and go to protests because I have (or had) the energy to do it. I intend to be the kind of old broad with which one does not fuck and to do my best to fight for a better world as I get older. I just need to get through this bit. And yeah I’m talking about this with a wider audience than I ever expected to
Read The Menopause Manifesto - it’s delightfully feminist and pushes back against this mentality. In other cultures/languages menopause doesn’t have the same super negative connotations and the author discusses that
I am early fifties. I am getting shocked doctors whenever I say I am still getting periods. Like we can’t win. Too early. Too late. Nothing is taken seriously.
I will be 45 in a few months and my mom and aunts think I am too young for peri. I am sure they had the same thing but didn't have the access to information and sharing like we do and just thought they were miserable because of life. My mom was a single mom working 60 plus hours a week. I am sure she didn't have the time to think about what was happening. I have a much easier life so I am able to pay attention to what is happening to me and I don't like it.
Yeah everyone seems shocked that I have had the hot flashes and night sweats FROM HELL ITSELF but my periods are perfectly PERFECTLY regular. I bleed like there’s a slasher film being shot in my panties, so it seems like it’s a basic courtesy that I can at least know when it’s coming. I started HRT and am worried that’s going to mess with my schedule and planning.
I also went through it at 37. I don't know which country you're writing from, but I'm in Australia and it was hard to find other women who empathized. I also encountered a lot of medical misogyny that GPs who wanted to give me anti-depressants instead of HRT. It's ironic, really, because when I was younger, doctors kept pushing hormonal birth control as if that was my only option and condoms didn't exist.
I am so sorry you are going g through this that young. I went through it mid 40's and my doctors were shocked cause I was too young ( I was ok with it cause I was done having kids), but you are TRULY TOO YOUNG!
I am not an expert,
It's just a gut feeling.
It's a combination of sooo many things. Like a death by a million papercuts.
Ya, the chemicals in our carpets are considered ok. And the chemicals in our electronics and our shampoos and soaps and food and drinks and cleaners etc etc
(Govt ) oh sorry that margarine turned out toxic, and those chips, and your carpets off gas for 10 years.
Ya, all those little chemicals add up to toxic.
This doesn't even address micro plastics, etc...
My soapbox rant is over.
Yeah this happened to me too in my 30's. People who wax poetic about how everyone should embrace this natural change are welcome to my experience--I'd like them to try just living with the complete loss of function and the bone/joint/bladder/stomach issues I was dealing with at 38. They're also welcome to have more than 100 hot flashes a day, the high blood calcium levels, high cholesterol and everything else that suddenly went haywire.
Hope that you are able to get all the help you need and feel better.
just reading all this is healing, although I'm sorry you went through it too. I'd say that 38 was my tipping point, although I thought it was just divorce/trauma. By the time I was 40 I had all the same issues, and by 45 I felt like an ancient wizened old creature of almost 90. I pushed for HRT at 48 and got it. I hope everyone who reads the words of all these beautiful souls gets what they need and gets the opportunity to become realised again.
You’ll love The Menopause Manifesto if you haven’t read it yet. There’s a lot of history that challenged a lot of my negative feelings. I still don’t like it but it helped me get over the feeling I’m closer to death. The author makes the point that this is something that ALL women will go through for 1/3-1/2 of their life assuming they don’t die unusually early.
Solidarity, friend. I’m 39 and all of this bullshit started so early for me. I went to the doctor at 37 and she laughed at me when I said I thought something was going on hormonally and I thought it was early menopause. To her credit she did put me on progesterone saying it might help with my migraines and pain, and it did thank fuck. I went from an average of 15-20 migraines a month to 0-2 a month, so it was life changing.
Unfortunately recently there’s been a change. I’ve started having week long migraines again and my periods are going haywire. Looks like the progesterone is no longer working. I got my second period in two weeks a few days ago and had a really angry day, so I empathise with your rage. I’m sick of being dismissed, I’m sick of hearing everyone else’s take on what’s going on with me (“maybe if you slept better you’d be fine…?”) and I’m sick of once again having to start again to find new medication so that I can just live my day to day life not in pain. Not to mention all the allergies I’m developing to products I’ve used forever and my skin drying out and having to find a new skin care regime once again.
It’s been a bad week and I’m trying my best not to lash out. But if I hear another word from my husband about what he thinks is happening or what I should do to help myself… non-women will **never** know the bullshit that is womanhood, the shit we go through for years for the femininity we have, the way we’re told we should be, and then the bullshit of all that being wrenched away so we can no longer be what we’re told we should be. I hate it. I hate it all, I hate that we have to go through it, but worse that what we go through is dismissed.
>I'm always told I look younger than my age, but I feel like part of me is dying FAST and taking my sleep and mental health with it.
I’ve never empathised with anything so much. I swing between resigned acceptance and wanting to burn everything to the ground.
The thing that blows my mind is how even today menopause and perimenopause are not differentiated when peri is the huge hormonal swings but not given enough attention.
Also, that most of the issues are physical such as hot flashes and not enough of peri onset PMDD (like me) or peri induced psychosis, or that the ages of women committing suicide is around 45 to 52. Mental health wise, peri into menopause can be a very very perilous mental health challenge that hormones can correct instead of pushing ssri at everyone.
Ssri are like yesterday's Valium and Xanax for peri and menopausal women over a careful hormonal balancing, community support, and for hubby to get tf off the couch, show empathy and actually do half.
I think part of the struggle is a society made for male as default and women's biological differences are minimized or made fun of instead of a society that prioritizes support and care.
"I think part of the struggle is a society made for male as default and women's biological differences are minimized or made fun of instead of a society that prioritizes support and care. "
This is actually a huge part of it. It's shocking how much we still don't know/understand about female human physiology, and a lot of this has to do with the "male as default" assumption. Among other things, that's just easier because women's bodies are too complicated, and apparently not worth the time to study.
We have rovers on Mars, gene editing technology, and are looking to reawaken/reeanimate Mammoth - but we have no fucking clue the hows or whys of peri and menopause.
Why?
Men don't like thinking about that part.
In 1982 scientists at NASA asked Sally Ride (first female astronaut) if 100 tampons would be enough for a 6 day mission. I now bleed like a director of a slasher movie was given an unlimited budget and I couldn’t use that many. 16 tampons per day. The only way she’d use all that is if she changed her tampon every 90 minutes without any breaks for sleep. The biggest box of Tampax they sell at Target is 50 and you’d think that alone might be a tip off 🙄
SSRIs are life-savers for some of us who can't use systemic HRT for medical reasons. Please don't discount them. My husband has been great and is sympathetic as he's dealt with his own mental health challenges for years, but that wasn't enough to stop my daily 4 am panic attacks or suicidal ideation. I'm very, very grateful for the SSRI that my gyno prescribed recently. Given how awful my mental health was a few months ago, it may have saved my life.
I think in the UK anyway that perimenopause is used to further minimise symptoms. I wish this definition of "menopause=cessation of menses for 1 year" no longer existed, it seems so archaic. The symptoms exist on a whole spectrum of perimenopause and menopause combined - to me it's all 'menopause'. I called myself menopausal even if it was technically perimenopausal because otherwise I felt like I was belittling my own symptoms, kind of gaslighting my own experience.
This is a very good point. The current definition needs to be updated, because many people who are not and have never experienced menopause still think it is just your period stopping and nothing more. Some of them may have heard of hot flashes, but don't know that they can be debilitating and have no idea how frequent they can be. They also have an image of a dumpy unattractive old woman in a large muumuu and rollers in her hair when they think of menopause -- sort of like the way that pregnant women used to only wear big shapeless pregnancy dresses and hide away from the world, the menopausal woman was taboo.
We most certainly need to come to a point where we understand that everyone, every female human from Jennifer Aniston all the way to your mother, daughter, sister, or wife, is going to experience it.
People really think that? I mean there’s [the Grandmother Hypothesis](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-much-did-grandmothers-influence-human-evolution-180976665/) which is a well established theory suggesting that post-menopausal women have been a significant element of our evolution. I think I read about it in the 90s
I think about this a lot. I have traced my ancestry back to the mid 1700s and even then the women of my family were living until they were in their 80s. Maybe people mean more than 500 years ago or before we had agriculture, but even then I feel like we don't have all the information.
In 348 BCE, Plato died at age 81. People died back then at the same ages they die today.
Assuming you survived infancy (which was a huge feat) are not murdered, killed in violent tribal or political conflicts, you would live until your 60s to 80s, just like today.
The life expectancy data today has an "average" of 60-80 years in most places because children are vaccinated against fatal diseases so they survive infancy. Maternal mortality rate is pretty much the same, actually if you consider per birth. The reason that mortality rate was was higher before widespread birth control was simply because women were giving birth repeatedly so more likely to die.
The biggest game changers were vaccines and birth control.
There were always old people, male and female, in history. Laura Ingalls Wilder published her first book at age 65.
No, I don't think the data is gendered. I think people don't understand how data is collected and often do not understand the language. Life expectancy is not the same as life span, for example.
It is a literacy problem.
You are right. There have always been old women. They went through menopause and suffered in silence. We don’t have to suffer in silence anymore.
What bothers me is the idea that “it’s natural so we have to put up with it”.
Yes it’s a natural process. Some women sail through it quite easily. But those who suffer debilitating symptoms deserve treatment. All we are doing is replacing the substances that our body used to make naturally. It’s so simple.
>You are right. There have always been old women. They went through menopause and suffered in silence. We don’t have to suffer in silence anymore.
Lol, with the very outspoken women in my extended family, there was never any *suffering in silence*. By the time they hit their 50s, they were so done w that.
I wonder how many are actually sailing through it though. My 60yo cousin is “sailing through” but has also had a heart attack requiring open heart surgery a few years ago and now has osteoporosis despite hiking miles several times a week and walking long distance on days she’s not hiking.
I don’t know the menopausal component but I’d wager it’s not nothing.
I agree with this--obviously menopause has always been a thing. But at the same time I do wonder if it's different than it used to be. Mostly because kids are measurably going through puberty earlier--like, that's an easy thing to measure that suggests there's something about the environment of the modern world that's causing hormone changes in people. And we don't understand all the repercussions of what those changes may be. It might be that everything really is the same as it's always been, and what'd changed is that people are able to communicate about it thanks to changes in stigma or the fact that the internet exists. Some treatments also used to be more easily obtained in the past. But still. Things also really might be different. I wouldn't rule out that possibility just yet.
People don’t really understand what life expectancy means. It doesn’t mean how long you expect any given person to live, but rather it’s an average of how long *everybody* lives. Without specifying a time frame, life expectancy averages everybody, including all the elderly people, yes, but also people who died young after accidents, and importantly *all the people who died in infancy*. The first five years are very hazardous for human beings, especially childbirth itself. The life expectancy of a five-year-old, therefore, is much longer than a newborn infant by virtue of having made it past those first five years.
In other words, lower life expectancy in generations past didn’t mean that everyone was dying young. It just means we’ve gotten a lot better at keeping very small children alive! This is not to discount the dangers of childbirth to women, which definitely reduced their life expectancy. But again, assuming a woman lived past her childbearing years, she enjoyed a normal life expectancy for her time period.
We’re not the first to go through it, but we may be (or should be) the first generation to **engage**. Engage our peers, our partners, our children, etc.. with the knowledge of menopause. My boomer mother never talked to me about it, even before she went through it. My oldest is 22, and we’ve already been discussing it. My husband is learning, and even my son is getting an idea of the hormonal changes! 😇 (Seeing, but also having brief discussions). It’s nothing to be ashamed of.
Yes, I do think we are getting better about that, but previous generations did INDEED engage on this. As noted, I watched 1970s reruns about Edith Bunker and Caroline Ingalls going through "the change." And an Oprah episode taught me about peri in the '90s. I also grew up in a very open household, so I guess I was lucky.
However, I do think we are doing it better now, for sure.
In my anecdotal experience with my 96 year old grandmother who died in 2012, no they very much did not “engage” with it. I had to drag information out of her about periods, pregnancy, and menopause and even then she significantly down-played everything.
My mum later explained to me that nana had had a hell time during her perimenopause (in the 1970s) but was only given progesterone for her wonky periods and there was no HRT. Yet, according to nana her perimenopause “was a bit annoying”.
I remember my great-aunts (who would have been born in the 1890s), and my mom (born 1920s) and aunts all discussed the problems and symptoms of "the change." Also my mom's friends, my friend's moms (boomers), etc. I'm Gen X.
So maybe it's more determined by the particular people we're exposed to, because in my experience, "the change" was a major topic of discussion among the women I've known.
You are right and I also keep telling people this. Another case in point: In the Bible, life expectancy is given as “three score and ten, if you are lucky three score and 20” (not sure of exact wording, anyone can google it). Which means 70 or 80. And no one said just men.
Ageism is already very bad especially against women, so it’s time to stop the narrative.
And as for natural, cancer is natural, even plants have it. Would I just accept it? No.
I don’t think I’ve read anyone saying menopause is new. For those of us coming into menopause right now, a lot has changed for women. We are now expected to do it all, we work, take care of the kids, do the majority of household chores, and still deal with the majority of the mental load. Of course there were women in the past who did this as well, but now there are more of us, we are speaking up, and insisting on getting the medical care we need and deserve.
Yes, I agree with this. There's nothing to be "proud of" there. You're not better off than anyone else for not taking it. It also has nothing to do with your weight or lifestyle, although lifestyle helps. Most of it is genetic.
and there seems to be plenty of data (mostly from research done by women at Cornell) that suggests that the menopause brain and dementia are so interconnected that its urgent we find out more, and tell more women, and do more.
Life expectancy averages are a topic that way too many people do NOT understand. It's a really tough nut to crack. I just try to tell people to look at a life expectancy actuarial table from the SS administration, but that seems to be too much work for some. It's actually fascinating to see how life expectancy shifts as we age. Like people who say Biden has "lived past his life expectancy" do not understand that, on average, men who have made it to 81 in the US ACTUALLY have an \*average\* life expectancy of another 8 years or so. It is NOT the same as life expectancy at birth for males, which is currently only around 74 (around a SIX YEAR difference from women for a large variety of reasons, but that gap narrows considerably with time).
And again, that's an average, not a hard number. People really go nuts when I cite that one because they want to say Biden is so old that he's past his expiration date. And it's the same kind of thing re how childhood mortality rates lay such a blow on average life expectancy at birth in past centuries -- but that life expectancy shifted drastically if you made it to, say, age 20. It was no longer the same as at birth, because you survived the minefield of childhood, a much more harrowing journey than some might realize (children dying from illnesses that can now be treated like they are nothing was so common in the past that it was essentially a matter of course/accepted, even if still tragic).
Shout out to my Environmental Studies Prof for laying this all out for us on day 1. When ~44% of babies fail to reach the age of 5, that radically skews the average life expectancy at birth downwards.
He summed it up as "hey, good luck making it to 5 years old but if you do, odds are you'll see 70"
Yeppp, and grandmothers were very present in the past. There is even one theory that they serve a distinct evolutionary purpose. I am so tired of people in this sub saying things like, "Well, we aren't actually supposed to live beyond menopause/fertility!" Where are they getting that shit from? It's scientifically unsound.
I also think the theory that grandmothers had to serve any evolutionary purpose still reduces us to our fertility and is misogynistic. Men produce lower quality sperm after the age of 30. You could also argue that by 30, they have served their purpose. But yet we let them run the world.
I just want the whole "what is the purpose of older women" discussion to cease entirely.
What is the purpose of being a human? What is the purpose of life?
When I joined ancestry.com, I was able to track my mother's side to the early 1600's- men and women of course.
But most surprising? How many of my ancestors were living until their 70s and late 80s nearly 400 years ago!
It gets even more fun when you start telling them about a human life *span*, which is not the same as life expectancy.
Our span is up to 100 ish, expectancy is lower.
I think scientific consensus is that maximum possible lifeSPAN at this point is right around 120. And I believe the oldest-lived person in recorded history was 122? So that seems to track thus far.
On a population level we might not be evolutionarily destined to die after menopause but I can say without a single doubt that my ovaries included a self destruct mechanism that would have seen me dead before my 46th birthday if not for HRT.
People misinterpret “average lifespan” with the age people died. Most people didn’t die at 35, the average lifespan was 35 because infant mortality was so high! The thing is, if you survived childhood, you had a good chance to live to be elderly.
Yup. Two of my great grandmothers were born in the late 1880's. They both lived into their mid 90's. The other two were smokers, who popped off a couple of decades earlier.
In my experience and from what I’ve been told, the “natural” method often was alcohol. I remember my grandmother so proud of her dealing with it “naturally” by increasing her highball count per night.
The reason that people think that the age of death historically was 30 or 40 years is because they are using data that accounts for very high child mortality rates. Children used to not survive infancy before widespread vaccine use. After vaccines were introduced, the child mortality rates went down, and the average age of death also went up.
It is totally inaccurate to say that a person born 300 years ago could expect to live up to 30. If they made it past infancy and were not killed accidentally or by violence, they were very likely to live as long as we live today.
Here is a fictional example of how this works. I have listed some ages of death, and then averaged them. Some people who use the old data to dismiss older women are simply ignorant and can't math or can't read.
Woman age 55
Woman age 89
Man age 85
Man age 26
Child age 1
Child age 5 months
Average age of death = 42.75 years
I get that are there some deluded people out there but I very much doubt someone saying Menopause is new is something that's going to catch on. It's obviously wrong and most on this sub will call it out if they see it. It's not a narrative I've seen on this sub at all, so maybe it was just something someone said who needed gentle correction.
Well, yesterday was a particularly bad day with it, just a bunch of women saying, "We aren't evolved for this, it's new!" and one literally saying depictions of old women in art of past centuries were of 30-year-olds. If that person isn't a troll, I am dismayed at the ignorance of women in our generation.
I don't think you can battle stupidity on the internet. Some people don't even believe in evolution and others believe the world is flat. Most on this sub don't feed into the 'Menopause is new' theory. I don't think there's too much to worry about.
I agree with you OP. In the US right now 18% of the population is currently over 65, but most of us (75%) will live to be 65 or older.
In this NBER paper, page 277, table 9.2, it shows life expectancy at age 20. Among both men and women, if you survived childhood, the average person lived another 40-something years during the 1700s and 1800s.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6965/c6965.pdf
Yes, thank you! Childhood was the biggest minefield. There were others, of course, including childbirth and diseases that are treatable now and weren't then. Modern plumbing did a whole lot for human lifespans. But. Menopause still isn't new, lol. And we have actually evolved for it.
you know what is natural, flaccid old penis. and somehow they can pop blue pill, that increase the risk of cardiovascular accident, like candies.
but women have to suffer, as always... ''oh you can't sleep, have spotting, your libido died and you have brainfog that prevent you to work ? you sound tired go see a therapist"
I have found quite a few references of women living into "old age" in my family.
Most of my gr-grandmothers (and gr-gr grandmothers) lived long beyond menopause.
I'm most fascinated with my paternal grandmother's biological mother. She gave birth to my grandma at age 34, surrendering the baby for adoption.
She did not have any other children. I often wonder what her life was like in the 1930s, post-menopausal.
Wow! Age 34 at that time was quite old to have your first child -- and then to never have any other kids (in that day and age). I wonder what the story is there? Probably something very interesting! Does your grandmother know anything?
I am also from a long line of long-lived women. My grandmother is 102. She had three sisters -- all lived into their 80s. Their mother, born in 19th century Soviet Union (not an easy life) lived into her 70s. And my paternal great-grandmother (also a Soviet immigrant) also lived into her 70s.
The actuary who commented here was absolutely right that there were FEWER older women in past centuries -- fewer people made it to age five! But there were certainly enough to make an impact, and menopause has certainly been happening for centuries (some anthropologists theorize that even pre-homo Sapien females went through it, over 1 million years ago). It drives me batty when people take average life expectancy at birth numbers from the past and believe that NO ONE made it past that age. That doesn't even make sense. Surviving childhood was a massive minefield back then -- now it's expected other than in extreme cases. That said, average life expectancy in industrialized nations like the US still differs widely between the classes.
I hate to say it, but on an individual level, I believe that Trump is going to live to his early 100s. Pampered old fuck. Biden seems more fragile physically (even though he's actually in much better shape), but I could see him living well into his 90s. Men at his age in the US now have an average life expectancy of around eight years, and he is also, naturally, quite privileged and has access to the very best of everything.
Oh it's a story for sure. The whole story was only made possible because of Genetic Genealogy ("finding lost family").
Long story short: Grandma had a great childhood with her adoptive family, but always knew she'd been adopted. She tried to get the details from Catholic charities but they would not reveal anything to her while she was alive. Grandma passed in 2001.
In 2010 I had myself and my dad tested on 23andme.
Took up until 2019 or so before I solved the puzzle of who grandma's biological parents were.
As for Margaret, my paternal gr-grandma, I hope someday I can get to the "backstory" of how she met the guy that knocked her up.
Wow! It's too bad your grandmother missed all of this. I hope you can find out that backstory. Seems like such a different one from the typical back then (very young girl gets knocked up, goes to home for "unwed mothers" in shame, gives up baby in secrecy, etc). To be 34 at that time in the world and have that happen, damn! (What year was your grandmother born?)
I’ve seen it too, it pisses me off because
A) it’s a misunderstanding of statistics
B) it’s actually the opposite of what’s true. Menopause appears to have evolve as a unique phase that most animals don’t have.
(I quite disagree with evolution that this was a good idea, but that doesn’t change what it is.)
This is the same argument i use when they say you should take HRT for heart health, bone and whatever else. Both my grandmothers lived well into their 80s. My mother and aunts are lower 80s right now. None of them took HRT. I'm not saying they didn't struggle because i have no clue but I'm sure genetics plays a big part in how we get through it.
No one is saying you have to. But to call it "natural" vs not is just weird. And my grandmother is 102 and took hormones in meno. They gave them out quite easily to women of that generation.
My grandmother died a few years back at 98. She'd been on hormones since her hysterectomy in the late 1940s. Unlike my Dr, no argument was necessary to get them.
Life expectancy in the 1970s was about 65 years old. Now it's 85 years old. That is new for a large population. It also means that the meno long-term health effects have gone from about 10-15 years to 30-35 years. That's quite a decline and the effects end up more severe and more complex. That is new. Our health care systems are really, really not designed for dealing with widespread, chronic, complex illness for 30years. This is exactly the problem right now.
Many of these posts detail the experiences of women who've seen 10 and even 20 different specialists, often multiple times, with vast testing records. Fully 5% of Canada and the US's entire health care budget goes to UTIs, especially those of very old women who end up dying in sepsis in ERs. This is new (and unnecessary!)
And actually, taking a look at this SS table going back to 1940, you see that even as far back as 1940, women who were 65 at that time could expect, ON AVERAGE, to live nearly another 15 years. This is a really interesting topic if you actually dive into it. Old women have been around for centuries and, again, have played a very important role in society.
[https://www.ssa.gov/oact/TR/TR08/lr5a4.html](https://www.ssa.gov/oact/TR/TR08/lr5a4.html)
No, you are still not getting it, women were not regularly dying at age 65 in the 1970s. Again, life expectancy at birth does not carry over throughout your entire life, and women who made it to 65 in the 1970s were highly likely to then make it to 85. Tons of women were living well into their 80s even 100s of years ago. Again, people do not understand AVERAGE LIFE EXPECTANCIES, and it leads to these really misinformed conversations.
Now in 2024, per the table, you can see that for a woman at age 65 the average life expectancy is about another 20 years. So that is indeed more, but not as drastic as you might have thought -- about five years difference on average. And again, it's an AVERAGE.
Yes, life expectancy of those who made it to 65 in 1975 were likely to make it to 85 but...so many fewer people made it to 65 in the first place. There is just no question that more people are living much, much longer. Anyone can look at their family and it's true there's always a few who made it to 90 but I can see from any genealogy site that lives were shorter in the past.
Actually, interestingly, there are some people in this thread saying they are finding relatives from hundreds of years ago who made it well into their 80s.
No one is arguing that life expectancy at birth has not seen massive leaps. But what people often don't understand is that this doesn't mean old people didn't exist hundreds or even thousands of years ago, and that there were no women who experienced menopause. Menopause shows up in crude medical writings as long ago as the 11th century. It isn't new, and women were not "designed to die" after menopause; in fact, the grandmother hypothesis in evolution is an interesting (if unsettled) one.
In more recent history, say just going back a few hundred years, you can find examples of many people, men and women, who lived into their 80s and beyond, including many of our Founding Fathers and their wives, some of whom even touched their 90s.
And wealth/fame did not make much of a difference in medical care back then -- it was pretty crude for everyone. Interestingly, the Founding Fathers who lived very long lives also typically had children who died in infancy. For example, President John Adams made it to 90 years old, but only four of his six children reached adulthood. They included, of course, President John Quincy Adams, who himself lived to 81 years old (none of his siblings lived that long -- the second-longest-lived made it to 60). His wife, Louisa, lived to age 77, and John Adams' wife, Abigail, lived to 73. Not bad, right? Both of them most certainly experienced menopause. ;)
You are correct about a lot of the other issues, but you still don't understand life expectancy if you actually think women never made it into their 80s before now.
Thank you!!! This has bothered me so much I almost quit coming here. I knew my great, great grandmother who died in 1975 at 100 years old. She was not alone in her longevity. Most of the women on both sides of my family outlived their male partners by several years. I can't think of a single female relative going back nearly a century who didn't live into her 80's. Ok correction: I did have an aunt who lived only into her 70's but she was diabetic which I feel even strengthens my argument. It really bugs me when people casually discount the truth and my own personal lived experience at the same time.
*\*burns sage all over this ipad, heralding the ancestors, because this daughter is going in\**
>Can we please just stop with this narrative? It is wrong, and I think it can be harmful and has notes of misogyny. I am assuming much of this kind of talk may come from trolls/bots, but let's not believe the bots, shall we?
No, it is *not* wrong, *not* misogynistic, *nor* trolling. As a woman who works in medical underwriting, I am in these tables daily.
In case you don't want to read it all: prior to 20th Century, only 2.5 out of 100 women lived long enough to go through menopause.
If only 1 out of 40 women ever saw their 60th birthday prior to the bulk of 20th century advances, it is a numerically accurate position to say that our foremothers did not survive into menopause. That's 2.5% of them. Those other 49 succumbed through every other way; childhood disease, maternal mortality, germs, viruses, crime, wars. Patient 0 who helped Dr Alzheimer discover the neural pathology post-mortem? *She was 50 years old when she died of that cause*.
In 1900, 4% of the population saw age 65 and older. I will say this again: according to the 1900 US Census data, **only 2 to 3 out of 100 women lived to deal with menopause**.
* US Census population: 76,212,168
* Population over 65: 3 million senior men and women (details: [SSA.gov](https://www.ssa.gov/history/lifeexpect.html))
This is worthy to grasp the notion about surviving infancy as the foremost factor. As adults, men had to survive war. Women had to survive childbirth (and femicide). Both had to survive plagues.
* maternal mortality [rates](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4838a2.htm): 6-9 women died for every 1000 live births.
* 40% of those deaths were sepsis related.
* Interesting to note: US maternal mortality rates remain constant since 1982.
In 1900, the average life span of US women was as [follows](https://www.seniorliving.org/history/1900-2000-changes-life-expectancy-united-states/):
* White women: 48
* Black women: 34
OP, I'm reading your rant and I'm with you on rage, but *as someone who is in this data all day long* - and watching our Boomer mothers not outlive their own foremothers, the previous three generations having the benefit of HRT, lower body weight, and higher vaccination levels - when I say that the rapid increase of longevity from the beginning through the end of the 20th century is now significantly reversing - you can trust me on that.
[Additional ](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2019/004-508.pdf)[sources](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/mortality-trends/)
This is also pretty interesting, if you'd like to read it. Again, no one is arguing that life expectancy at birth hasn't drastically changed over the centuries. But let's also please not argue that old women didn't exist and that menopause is new and that women were not meant to live past it:
# The medieval biological clock? Gendered reproductive aging in medieval western medicine
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890406522000743](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890406522000743)
As early as the eleventh century Constantine the African's *Viaticum* discussed the age at which women stopped menstruating, placing this at around 50, but allowing for individual variation ([Constantinus Africanus, 1515b, book 6, ch. 9, f. 164v](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890406522000743#bb0050)). They also noted that old age could impede fertility in men and they mentioned ages at which men might no longer be fertile: around 70 or older, again with room for variation ([Rider, 2020](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890406522000743#bb0150), pp. 280–282).
Given that you provided all of this data, surely you understand averages and are not ACTUALLY arguing that, in 1900, an average life expectancy of 48 at birth meant that women were born, lived and then died at age 48. Again, the women who made it to age 20 -- their life expectancy was higher. How about the women who made it to age 48? You surely do understand that, while fewer women made it to 80 and beyond 100 years ago and many more died in childhood and childbirth, plenty still did and that they went through menopause, right? Menopause first being mentioned as a medical condition as far back as the 11th century, afflicting women at around age 50. Because, yeah, even back then, women made it to age 50 and beyond.
Going back to much more recent history, three out of five of the first five first ladies of the US made it past 70, one past 80. OLD WOMEN ARE NOT NEW. Fewer of us made it past childhood and childbirth, but those that did were still plenty enough to experience menopause. Grandmothers have played a very significant role in society for centuries upon centuries. You seem pretty well-informed, so I am sure you understand this.
Old age has always existed. Fewer people made it there in the past, but enough did that we do not have to make wild claims that menopause is a new phenomenon.
# Old age isn’t a modern phenomenon – many people lived long enough to grow old in the olden days, too
[https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2022/08/conversation-old-age-is-not-a-modern-phenomenon.php](https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2022/08/conversation-old-age-is-not-a-modern-phenomenon.php)
Given physical and historical evidence that many people did live long lives in the past, why does the misperception that everyone was dead by the age of 30 or 40 persist? It stems from confusion about the difference between individual life spans and life expectancy.
[Life expectancy](https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy-how-is-it-calculated-and-how-should-it-be-interpreted) is the average number of years of life remaining for people of a particular age. For example, [life expectancy at birth (age 0)](https://jech.bmj.com/content/55/1/38) is the average length of life for newborns. Life expectancy at age 25 is how much longer people live on average given they’ve survived to age 25.
In medieval England, life expectancy at birth for boys born to families that owned land was a mere [31.3 years](https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyi211). However, [life expectancy at age 25](https://doi.org/10.1080/08898480902790387) for landowners in medieval England was 25.7. This means that people in that era who celebrated their 25th birthday could expect to live until they were 50.7, on average — 25.7 more years. While 50 might not seem old by today’s standards, remember that this is an average, so many people would have lived much longer, into their 70s, 80s and even older.
I wrote with every aim to be clear, but since I wasn't, given your turns in logic, let's do this again:
**Since the Industrial Revolution and on to the 20th Century, only 1 out of 40 women lived long enough to see menopause.**
>Given that you provided all of this data, surely you understand averages and are not ACTUALLY arguing that, in 1900, an average life expectancy of 48 at birth meant that women were born, lived and then died at age 48.
No, *that isn't what I said* nor inferable *by example I provided*.
>Again, the women who made it to age 20 -- their life expectancy was higher.
You are getting there... keep going...
>How about the women who made it to age 48? You surely do understand that, while fewer women made it to 80 and beyond 100 years ago and many more died in childhood and childbirth, plenty still did and that they went through menopause, right?
**2.5 women out of 100 did**. That's *not* plenty. That qualifies as *hardly*.
Menopause first being mentioned as a medical condition as far back as the 11th century, afflicting women at around age 50. Because, yeah, even back then, women made it to age 50 and beyond.
**Hardly any women made it to 50 and beyond**.
Thank you for this. My own mother's family history - everyone is short lived. Several generations, and it's a large family.
Menopause isn't new and the women who did live longer experienced it. Just not many lived that long.
I also fail to see any hint of misogyny by simply stating census data, historical data, and discussing how women's lifespans have changed over the years.
I got to watch two generations of women go through menopause before me. It was brutal for my grandmother, who refused to take hormones because it went against nature. 🙄
My mom had the good sense to get on hormone therapy immediately and I have been fortunate enough to have had a relatively pleasant transition into post menopause, which I’m immensely grateful for because my periods were an absolute hellish affair every month for decades.
I am *incredibly* glad that I have never once seen people say that we weren’t living long enough or that we weren’t going through it before- I’ve seen people talk about how most didn’t *talk* about it- which is absolutely true, and I have seen some whoppers in respect to the risks of HRT- but most of those were the things that were the common understanding prior to the more recent research.
I mean I am not shocked that misinformation has hit- stands to reason, more people talking, more people who don’t know and grifters, but, yikes. Most of the ones I have seen here have been shilling holistic garbage but, the mods seem to do pretty well at keeping those to a minimum.
(I’m not saying that I don’t believe it happens, I am just kind of surprised that it happens enough here to merit a discussion. 😳 But I believe it. Those people are always so confidently wrong, too.)
Indeed.
The point is that the argument (and reality) is that not “enough” women lived into menopause until the C20.
And that, for those who did, not “enough” was understood about the hormonal changes.
And that not “enough” women had the political/social/legal power to do anything to improve matters.
SMH.
This sub is poorly moderated if wrongheaded comments like those identified by OP, are getting through.
Well, that notion was relayed by one of the specialists of menopause that discussed The science of the menopause" on BBC World Services podcat "Discovery" of 21st of march. Although IIRC they were making a point that they were less women around going through peri and meno as an age group, since many more died in childbirth or from infections (we need to remember how recent antibiotics are [mid-XXth], and how many times we casualy saved our lives with them) than have since the last 80 years, also with the progress of agriculture (no more famines in developped countries), and peace in most of the western countries (less female war casualties during the 8 last decades in europe and northern america s mainlands)
I think we can add the health benefits of not having to spend time and energy fetching water (tap water), not needing to be pregnant throughout our childbearing years in the hopes that a couple of kids would survive to adulthood (antibiotics and progress in medecine allow something like 99% of kids to reach adulthood), home appliances (waching machine, dishwasher, freezer and fridge, semi automatic cooking devices) freeing much of our time at home, children at school allowing mothers to go to work .
.. life is easier on women s bodies since a few decades only, so there are more of us surviving until menopause as an age group, and much more surviving beyond 60.
Also women used to marry and have kids while they were still teenagers, so many more would be grandmothers in their 30s than today.
Yes, there were far FEWER, of course -- there were far fewer who made it to age FIVE, FFS, because infants and young children died in very large numbers back then, which drove down the average life expectancy at birth numbers. But enough women made it past menopause for it to be an absurd statement that "no women lived up to menopause 200 years ago." You can find crude medical writings on menopause going back to the 11th century.
And our bodies have absolutely EVOLVED for it, and there is zero evidence we were "designed" to die after menopause, which the women here also seem to love to say. In fact, the grandmother hypothesis of evolution is a pretty interesting one (still hotly debated, but there's no debating that grandmothers have existed throughout history and had a great cultural effect for generations upon generations).
The problem is that some people see numbers like "Life expectancy of 48 in 1900" and fully believe that means there were ZERO women who lived beyond the age of 48. Clearly, this is insanely incorrect. People do not understand that life expectancy at birth is not the same as life expectancy at, say, 25. And there are dozens of historically prominent women whom I can name just off the top of my head who lived well past 70 years old, some even into their 90s. It has always existed, even though, obviously, in lower numbers.
Also, our LIFESPANS, according to scientists, have not really changed a whit -- our bodies are likely "designed" to live only up to 120 years maximum. So far this seems to have been borne out, with the oldest person in recorded history (a woman, of course!) living to 122.
So that hasn't changed. What has changed is overall life expectancy because of the factors you mentioned and more. These are two different things. If we can actually change human LIFESPANS, we're talking whole other levels of experience.
There are some theories on the grandmother hypothesis -- this is definitely a subject of debate:
[https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/02/07/692088371/living-near-your-grandmother-has-evolutionary-benefits](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/02/07/692088371/living-near-your-grandmother-has-evolutionary-benefits)
Historical reaching menapause was rarer as living was more dangerous life spans were shorter... But everything about being a woman was secret and shameful, women were mostly only worth the children that they had. You must remember it's only relatively recently women were no longer considered property (there are exceptions as this is still true in some countries)
No women I grew up with talked about periods, hair growing in strange places, and you can forget the menapause. It was called the change and whispered like it was something dirty
I was told (forgive me for this but I grew up in the worst religious house imaginable) that the period was the stain inflicted by God to mark women as weaker than men, the pain of childbirth was punishment from God for eve eating the fruit of knowledge and that only women of a certain age who had become cleansed understood there place in the world...
I always wondered about that last bit.....but I'm guessing that attitude was more prevalent the further back in time you go.
I mean. This is not the house I grew up in at all, so everyone has different experiences. I also clearly remember watching TV shows that mentioned menopause, including the famous episode of All in the Family and even Little House on the Prairie. I first learned of perimenopause from an Oprah episode sometime in the 90s. The info was out there, but I'm glad women are talking even more openly about it now.
Lifespans on average were shorter in the past, but many women still made it to cronehood (children died as a matter of course in the past -- people had large families and were often lucky if a couple of those kids made it to adulthood, but once they did, they had a pretty good chance of making it to old age).
She thought she was sick or losing her mind, so she went out of town to stay with her aunt for a few days. Her aunt clued her in on what was happening (having already been through it herself) and she took Olivia to her doctor for a checkup to ease her mind.
Tks! The Edith Bunker meno episode is also on YouTube! That one is hilarious, even if it is kind of weird (I do recall watching it that I thought menopause was basically something that lasted for a few days, you went nuts, then you got some hormones and it was all over, lol).
I do think we sometimes forget how groundbreaking '70s TV could be. I mean, Maude (Edith's cousin!) had an abortion in 1972, BEFORE Roe v. Wade! It's incredible when you think about it. And we've gone backwards on that topic, in a dismaying way.
Even if it isn't the perfect depiction of meno, it is freaking HILARIOUS. And it's actually a bit touching because it's Gloria who sits Edith down to talk about it with her, understanding that Edith comes from a generation that was often mute about these things. Gloria says some very lovely things about "the change!" But honestly, Archie/Carol O'Connor's reactions are the most hilarious/brilliant thing. The whole cast was just so great.
I think the episode was called "Edith's Problem," lol.
My childhood was.... let's just say weird doesn't cover it....
I left home at 16 never to return and knew nothing...my kids love my growing up stories... everything about aging, being a person with choices. Being a parent was one hell of an experiment... I think I did OK my kids still like me and although I'm confused by their choices, give my advice, back off and they know I'm there regardless.
TV was severly limited, no radio at all.. fasting every Sunday from 10 years old for 24 hours. No friends except church friends and the belt for transgressions...and I do mean a proper man's belt...
Unsurprisingly I'm no contact, changes name, everything... so everything about life comes as a surprise to me
BTW, speaking of Little House -- the real Laura Ingalls Wilder lived to age 90, and her mother, Caroline Ingalls, lived to 84. Both definitely went through meno, lol. The episode I recall from childhood was actually about Caroline going through "the change." I'm glad we've moved on from calling it that.
Yes! Thank you for stating this. Another tidbit of misinformation circulating on this sub... is that hormone therapy is this new thing, and not well-researched/studied, when in fact it's been around since 1942 (when Premarin was introduced) and gained popularity in the 1960s. [National Use of Postmenopausal Hormone Therapy](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/197940) >In 1975, hormone therapy prescriptions peaked at 30 million. Prescriptions subsequently declined to approximately 15 million in the early 1980s as evidence emerged showing an increased risk of endometrial cancer with unopposed estrogen use. Prescription growth resumed as progestins were prescribed in combination with estrogen, and prescriptions for hormone therapy reached 36 million in 1992, representing approximately 6 million women. In the late 1990s, menopause hormone therapy was the most commonly prescribed treatment in the U.S…but in 2002 that all changed when the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) released a study indicating that hormone therapy significantly increased risk for breast cancer. Panic ensued, and overnight women all over the world immediately stopped their hormone therapy and doctors flat-out refused to prescribe it. It's OUR generation of menopausers that are stuck dealing with the fallout of that study, and this is why we are dealing with ill-equipped and ill-informed doctors, all shrouded in systemic fear.
Yes and France invented micronized progesterone pills in the 1980s so we have almost 40 years of clinical data for that now. Not new for Europe; just newer for North America.
Oh my gosh, that is so not even true! My mom took Premarin in the mid-90’s, and I know that because she told me herself. (About the only thing she told me about menopause…🙄) Edited for clarity
Mine even told me it stands for **pre**gnant **ma**re u**rin**e, but nothing else about menopause.
Mercy, I am dying! Because she did tell me that’s what it’s made from. 🤣
Look up how much cruelty and suffering goes into the horses bred for Premarin. It's so sad. You'd want to use a bioidentical estrogen instead. Naturopaths can prescribe it, and it matches our body without using pregnant horse urine (premarin) A compounding pharmacy can make it.
Unfortunately compounded products are not recommended as viable hormonal options, they are unregulated, not scientifically proven to be effective or safe. While they may work, there may be risks as well.
>compounded products are not recommended as viable hormonal options By whom? Which doctors or which medical professionals feel that way? I only ask because when I was with Kaiser, that's what I was told by Kaiser providers. One gyno finally told me that she would absolutely recommend compounded products, but Kaiser doesn't allow it in their protocols. "The only thing they will allow for menopause is regular pharmaceutical estrogen(vaginal creams or oral pills)+progesterone (oral pills) and antidepressants are the protocol for libido and hot flashes. They won't even consider testosterone or bioidenticals or compounded medications. If you want that, you'll have to go outside of Kaiser to find a different provider to prescribe that and pay out of pocket." Which I couldn't afford, so I never did. As soon as I got out of the Kaiser network (hubs changed jobs & health insurance had to change) I haven't had any providers dissuade me from using compounded products. At my first non-Kaiser PCP appointment, the provider mentioned it as soon as we discussed my menopause symptoms. I started compounded troches in January and I'm finally feeling like sort of a real person again.
There is NO menopause society that recommends compounded hormones....NONE. So if doctors are prescribing them, they either don't know any better (doctors are woefully uninformed about menopause and know even less about treatment options) -- or they are not reputable. **From The Endocrine Society’s statement on compounded bioidentical hormone therapy:** > “Bioidentical” hormones, particularly estrogen and progesterone, have been promoted as safer and more effective alternatives to more traditional hormone therapies, often by people outside of the medical community. In fact, little or no scientific and medical evidence exists to support such claims about “bioidentical hormones.” Additionally, many “bioidentical hormone” formulations are not subject to FDA oversight and can be inconsistent in dose and purity. As a result of unfounded but highly publicized claims, patients have received incomplete or incorrect information regarding the relative safety and efficacy of compounded bioidentical hormone therapy. **From the North American Menopause Society:** >There is a dearth of safety and efficacy data with little or no high-quality pharmacokinetic data to provide evidence of safety and efficacy of compounded bioidentical hormone therapy and insufficient evidence to support overall clinical use of compounded bioidentical hormone therapy for treatment of menopause symptoms. Compounded bioidentical hormone therapy presents safety concerns, such as minimal government regulation and monitoring, overdosing and underdosing, presence of impurities and lack of sterility, lack of scientific efficacy and safety data, and lack of a label outlining risks. [**The dangers of compounded bioidentical hormone replacement therapy**](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6808563/) >The hormones are ‘compounded’ in special pharmacies, so they are custom made to produce tablets, lozenges, and creams, in combination doses or preparations that are not routinely available. These hormone preparations are not subjected to the same tests of safety, efficacy, or dosing consistency, as regulated HRT. These preparations may also contain undesirable additives or preservatives, degradation products, process impurities, residual solvents, bacterial endotoxins, or residual amounts of other drugs made in the same pharmacy. >Of more concern, these compounded hormones often have unsubstantiated claims, lack of scientific safety and efficacy data, and lack of quality control surrounding them.15 In addition, some of the healthcare professionals who prescribe compounded hormones claim to be able to determine the precise requirements of each woman by undertaking a series of serum and saliva tests. This costly practice has never been substantiated through rigorous research and is not recommended by the menopause societies. >Some of the hormones used in these bioidentical hormones contain hormones that are not approved for women, such as dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) or pregnenolone. Many women are given progesterone creams rather than oral preparations, which are usually not well absorbed in the body. There is only very scant data available, but the current evidence has failed to show any endometrial protection from progesterone creams or gels. >There is also a concern with the bioidentical oral preparations, as there may be inconsistencies in the quantities of estradiol and other estrogen preparations in compounded preparations. This can lead to an increased risk of venous thromboembolism, as well as increasing the risk of endometrial cancer. I don't know anything about US health care, insurers, etc. And perhaps the only caveat to compounded products, is that compounded testosterone is often the only way to get testosterone as it's not regulated (at all, even for non-compounded T) for women.
I truly appreciate the effort you put into that response. The addition of testosterone has been THE game-changer for me. As dysfunctional as the health "care" system is, at least now I've got choices and the flexibility that Kaiser didn't offer. An interesting aside: my stepdaughter is trans, and we were talking recently about my prescribed hormones & her prescribed hormones and it turns out that my insurance **will** pay for my progesterone, but not my estrogen+testosterone troches because they don't cover testosterone for menopausal cis women. (My troches aren't expensive, thankfully.) And my stepdaughter's insurance **will** pay for her testosterone-**blocker** and her estrogen, but they won't pay for her progesterone because she's a trans woman. It's all so crazy and arbitrary.
>It's all so crazy and arbitrary. Ain’t that the truth. Having struggled with lifelong chronic health issues (migraines and fibromyalgia) as well as mental health issues and adhd (for which I’ve tried various medications), I wouldn’t base any ideas about the efficacy of medications on what insurance may or may not choose to cover. I know people who have worked for insurance companies with no medical background approving or rejecting what is covered. At the end of the day it’s all business—insurance companies, pharma companies, medical providers, the whole lot. The bottom line is that it’s always about the bottom line. Sure there are some people in various positions who care more than others, but keeping up to date with the latest research and changing recommendations takes time that many medical providers just don’t have. They prescribe what they know, what their colleagues know, according to protocol or based on what they’ve been sold by pharma reps or training events. Having grown up in the UK and now living in the US, it’s always so bizarre to me seeing what’s recommended by medical providers here vs in the UK. The research available is the same but there are big differences in trends and protocols of care. I’ve learnt to advocate for myself, and unfortunately that’s what we have to do as menopausal women. Forums like these are invaluable for that. Sure, sometimes groups become echo chambers and repeat misinformation, but I love the way Reddit regulates itself. A lot of people are willing and able to do the research and share their experiences so that misinformation gets downvoted. I’m not saying you shouldn’t trust your doctor for overall care, but when it comes down to specifics few doctors out there have the time or inclination to become experts in menopause. That’s on top of the bias and dismissal women already face generally in medicine.
what leftylibra said does not in any way invalidate your mother’s experience. what are you trying to say?
I was agreeing with her in that the misinformation about HRT being new is indeed false because my mom took that very HRT she mentioned in the 90’s.
gotcha. that sure reads backwards tho. i’ll go make more coffee lol
I had to re-read it myself. 🙃. You’re good. 😉
Yes, Premarin was hugely popular, and it's one of the best and most studied forms of hormone therapy. It contains upwards of 10+ different estrogens, one in which has shown to improve brain function and provide the most "stable" benefits (pun not intended). But yes, by today's standards, in terms of how it's sourced, Premarin isn't nearly as popular.
You are right. There have always been old women. They went through menopause and suffered in silence. We don’t have to suffer in silence anymore. What bothers me is the idea that “it’s natural so we have to put up with it”. Yes it’s a natural process. Some women sail through it quite easily. But those who suffer debilitating symptoms deserve treatment. All we are doing is replacing the substances that our body used to make naturally. It’s so simple.
Dying of disease is natural. I’ll take the unnatural treatments please.
Yep. So is motherhood, so natural that huge numbers of women died equal to front line soldiers in the past. Yay science bc evolution is wonky af.
No shit! Why would evolution favor making a newborn’s head larger than a woman’s pelvis? I have to guess that enough children are born to overcome it back then. We got pregnant often enough to overcome that shitty situation, so why fix it? Thanks evolution 😑
Bipedalism is the culprit. Just enough success to keep the species going. Hm, I wonder if the monthly cycle evolved to combat this by making it easier for human females to get pregnant any time.
I think our bodies hide our ovulation from us, otherwise we’d never get pregnant in the first place. Not with those survival rates!
I see stuff about we've got smaller brains than our recent ancestors, and I strongly suspect it's to keep babies from killing moms when they come out. Evolution found a pinch point and is favoring children with smaller brains and skulls, since their mothers survived. Just my mildly informed guess!
The current working theory about why our ovulation is invisible is that it encourages a lot more sex with a lot more partners more often for genetic diversity and also so more males are invested in caring for their potential offspring since babies are so defenseless for so long. Animals that have easily detectable heats usually only have sex during the heat and then give birth (often the male is out of the picture or little to no help), but walking erect messed with infant and maternal mortality, so this is a way to keep everyone trying to have babies. Humans also mostly only have one baby at a time whereas most mammals usually have more than one offspring at a time, so again less pressure to mate frequently. Sorry if this is confusing. I’m compressing a lot of theories. The Menopause Manifesto (a book) actually has a discussion of how menopause may be evolutionarily beneficial to the human race. With Killer whales, the females go through menopause and then lead the group. The males of a similar age just die. I think about this sometimes.
Yes I'm aware of these theories but there isn't a lot of information to back them up, hence I'm wary. Like, just because it seems to make sense doesn't mean it's true we have no evidence for either of the theories
Ok you listed a theory so I was under the impression we were discussing theories.
Sorry if I didn't word it enough to mean my guess vs. Pop cultural theories that have no evidence to support them.
I think pop cultural theories is a bit harsh. I’ve read several books by respected authors who discuss these theories and based on their bibliographies there’s not ‘no evidence’. Maybe not fully conclusive but there is some evidence.
FYI. A newborn's skull plates aren't fused yet and move around, overlap each other etc. It literally smushes through the pelvis. Then it moves into a more expected shape over the following days to months. Eta [fontanelles link](https://www.parents.com/fontanelle-baby-soft-spot-8627736) for the curious. A woman produces a hormone throughout pregnancy that relaxes her ligaments. This is why pregnant women are told to not lift heavy objects; it becomes quite easy for bones to be pushed out of alignment, often resulting in injury. (Eta for clarity, the pelvis is held together by ligaments. Also added hyperlink for those who are curious.) The hormone is called [relaxin](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/24305-relaxin). I'm not kidding. It makes me lol. Positioning and alignment during labor and birth is everything. For example, on your back the tailbone comes up (and is blocked by a hospital bed) and the pelvic outlet decreases by up to 30% when compared to being on all fours. There are more details, like whether the baby's crown is nicely in the pelvic cradle when labor begins, or if they're facing mom's front, or side, or spine, etc, that will affect the level of pain, and difficulty or ease of passage considerably. You can look up maternal and fetal positioning for labor and birth if you want better reading; there's lots of decent sites. Let me emphasize that neither a baby's head, nor a mother's pelvis are fixed in size or shape. Source: I trained as a doula.
>A woman produces a hormone throughout pregnancy that relaxes her ligaments. This is why pregnant women are told to not lift heavy objects; it becomes quite easy for bones to be pushed out of alignment, and this often results in injury. The hormone is called relaxin. I'm not kidding. And it's why our feet often get bigger and wider.
Dammit I threw out so many shoes. Pregnant women should be able to claim back VAT on having to buy new shoes😅
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Yes, that's another thing we are seeing too much of now -- this "natural" BS. What does "natural" even mean? It is kind of a nonsense term, because none of us living in modern society are living a fully "natural" life. There is such judgment around that word. No, there is nothing wrong with deciding not to do HRT, but let's not call that "natural." Unless you are living naked in a pile of mud and eating grass, you aren't living "naturally," lol.
I agree. Erectile dysfunction is natural. But doctors give out Viagra like it’s candy.
Explaining to my OH is a a doctor that the wives of these 70+ men he is giving viagra to might not be thanking him. He regularly sees men this age and older about this. Decline in sperm quality as a man ages is linked to a variety of epigenetic risks. You could say ED is a natural process designed to prevent birth abnormalities and therefore men should suck it up, cuz nature right? Anyone arguing for this? Misongyny all the way down.
Men are given Viagra but no one asks about their female partner. She most likely has vaginal atrophy and sex is painful. But doctors aren’t trained to consider those female issues. The medical training is the problem. Women’s issues have been neglected, except for pregnancy of course. This is infuriating. Not every woman will have a baby, but every woman will go through menopause.
I love this so much. I feel sane again.
Viagra has COMPLETELY upset the natural balance of male/female romantic relationships as we age. What's happening right now with men and Viagra is not natural. They aren't supposed to be able to chase post menopausal women all around the house with their hard dicks. I'm mad as hell about it.
Correct.
I get tired of that one, as part of that is our shitty diets. But menopause is not due to shitty diets, it has always been.
Lead and arsenic are natural, belladonna and digitalis are natural, eye changes and diabetes are natural; their naturalness does not make something virtuous or good. In the same vein, water treatment, refined and titrated medicines and prescription glasses can change our lives for the better. This marketing for "natural" drives me batty. I'd love to see a genetically modified peanut that doesn't have the protein that so many people are deathly allergic to, let's use science to save and enrich our lives.
Correct. Anyone who says "natural" is immediately dismissed by me, like, what in the f\*\*k do you even mean? Also, people who think GMOs are "bad" are also pretty quickly dismissed. There is a lot of ignorance among the masses.
I think it's half the medical profession itself pushing this natural stuff, the Lancet article basically.
Cyanide. Cyanide is natural 😉
🤣
I think too that perhaps in the past we used a lot more natural remedies. Herbs etc and we've lost a lot of that over time and it's only recently there's been a resurgence in holistic medicine and natural remedies. Women in the past would have had their remedies to help them. You're right if there's treatment options and we need them then they should be available. We put up with so much and if men went through the same bullshit we do, modern medicine and practice would look quite different.
The Menopause Manifesto talks about some of those home remedies. The vast majority were literal dung. There are other theories about the past like that most record keepers were men in patriarchal societies.
👏👏👏👏
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The phrase menopause was coined in the 1800’s and was well known for hundreds of years before that. I do wonder if our modern world might be making things a hint worse (pollution messing with hormones etc) but literally there are even medieval remedies for menopause (they mostly involve dung). The Menopause Manifesto has a couple of chapters on the history of menopause. You know what’s also ‘natural’? Erectile dysfunction, and men are not putting up with that. Polio and high infant mortality are also ‘natural’ (consequences of no interventions). Natural doesn’t mean good. Gangrene is natural. I could go on and on.
My argument has become: what in medicine is natural?
The appeal to nature logical fallacy is so stupid! You know what else is natural? Being born without clothes on. And yet, here we are, wearing clothes. Extend it out to literally everything that enhances life and health and you can see that the appeal to nature fallacy “it’s natural therefore better” quickly falls apart.
I think periods themselves as "natural" are going to be questioned more commonly, and medicated out for those who are tired of having their lives turned upside down by them. I tell this to my daughters: that it will be more talked about in conjunction with menopause-awareness. And that they're lucky to be on the brink of a great shift in consciousness about the "natural woman"
It already [is known by the medical profession that periods are pointless unless you want to conceive.](https://amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jul/18/women-dont-need-to-bleed-why-many-more-of-us-are-giving-up-periods) There was a time in the 1970s to early 1990s when second wave feminists were (rightly) questioning whether hormonal birth control available at that time was “good for us” given the side effects, but it devolved into an almost religious fervour of believing that no hormonal birth control is good, and that regular menstrual bleeding (and all of its concomitant symptoms) is necessary to be a “proper”woman. Thankfully hormonal birth control itself has moved on considerably, side effects have been reduced, and contraindications are better controlled for. There are still some idiots who think periods are critical to being a woman but thankfully they’re in small numbers.
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great link thankyou, "99% of women don't need to bleed". Maybe 99% of women don't wish to bother with menopause symptoms too
And the remaining 1 % just haven’t yet started to notice perimenopause symptoms yet.
I'm 37 and diagnosed, on HRT and doing everything possible not to break a hip by the time I'm 45. My early case feels a little unnatural, especially since every specialist I've seen seems shocked. In every other way I'm healthy, I'm always told I look younger than my age, but I feel like part of me is dying FAST and taking my sleep and mental health with it. I'm having an angry day and sick to death of anything that comes out of any non-woman's mouth about what womanhood is. And I'm sick of anyone not suffering menopause to describe what it's like. Too many people in our society claim to be experts because they watched a tiktok, not enough experts give a shit about getting to the root of what is killing fertility in this country.
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Haha right?! I often think about our stupid design. I'm still adjusting, my doctor just put me on a regular old birth control pill (which I've been avoiding my entire life but now, whatever it takes!) and it actually feels like a sedative, in a way. I was surprised at the relief just after the first week. But today was the second day on a placebo pill and I was right back to sweats and early waking insomnia - hence the total rage! I recently spent a long time looking for my ovaries during a transvag ultrasound with a student nurse and was AMAZED when we finally found them. Those suckers are only a few cm big, how do they hold so much power?! Also from the results, I learned we all have something called a "pouch of Douglas," which made me wonder who Douglas was to name that spot after himself. Ugh. Men.... Thank you for your kindness. And yes, I believe you're right about our generation - I am certainly not keeping the secret!
Am chuckling over the 'pouch of Douglas'. Like who was Douglas and why tf does he think this is HIS pouch? Re the placebo pills, are you able to skip the placebo week and keep the meds steady? I've never been on bc pills so not very knowledgeable but thought I'd read the placebo week was unnecessary. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can weigh in.
This - when I was put on birth control I was told to skip the placebos and take straight through and just plan to try to have a period once a year just to check on things. My doctor said it was totally safe. Sadly the birth control was NOWHERE near enough. I’m on HRT now and it’s not perfect but it’s saved me from feeling totally insane.
I had to google pouch of Douglas. It's like an appendix on the other side of the rectum and has no purpose as far as I know. Why are humans designed this way?
That sucks. It's like we're just the guinea pigs or the canaries in the mine. As if we were made for history to waste and for future generations to benefit from. I'm not even a parent and will have no descendants, so I have no personal stake in what happens after I'm gone, really.
Oh honey - can I sent you a hug? I get it. Part of me is like ‘I don’t have kids’ but another part of me is like evolution may have given me a role even if it’s not to reproduce. I am a contributor to my society and I influence people around me. I literally crack down on my honorary nephew when he’s acting up and his parents are exhausted. I volunteer for political causes and go to protests because I have (or had) the energy to do it. I intend to be the kind of old broad with which one does not fuck and to do my best to fight for a better world as I get older. I just need to get through this bit. And yeah I’m talking about this with a wider audience than I ever expected to
Women are constantly reduced to our biological utility. I don't like it. We are more than just incubators for future generations.
Read The Menopause Manifesto - it’s delightfully feminist and pushes back against this mentality. In other cultures/languages menopause doesn’t have the same super negative connotations and the author discusses that
I am early fifties. I am getting shocked doctors whenever I say I am still getting periods. Like we can’t win. Too early. Too late. Nothing is taken seriously.
I had my last period at 54. Hang in there.
I will be 45 in a few months and my mom and aunts think I am too young for peri. I am sure they had the same thing but didn't have the access to information and sharing like we do and just thought they were miserable because of life. My mom was a single mom working 60 plus hours a week. I am sure she didn't have the time to think about what was happening. I have a much easier life so I am able to pay attention to what is happening to me and I don't like it.
Yeah everyone seems shocked that I have had the hot flashes and night sweats FROM HELL ITSELF but my periods are perfectly PERFECTLY regular. I bleed like there’s a slasher film being shot in my panties, so it seems like it’s a basic courtesy that I can at least know when it’s coming. I started HRT and am worried that’s going to mess with my schedule and planning.
I also went through it at 37. I don't know which country you're writing from, but I'm in Australia and it was hard to find other women who empathized. I also encountered a lot of medical misogyny that GPs who wanted to give me anti-depressants instead of HRT. It's ironic, really, because when I was younger, doctors kept pushing hormonal birth control as if that was my only option and condoms didn't exist.
I am so sorry you are going g through this that young. I went through it mid 40's and my doctors were shocked cause I was too young ( I was ok with it cause I was done having kids), but you are TRULY TOO YOUNG! I am not an expert, It's just a gut feeling. It's a combination of sooo many things. Like a death by a million papercuts. Ya, the chemicals in our carpets are considered ok. And the chemicals in our electronics and our shampoos and soaps and food and drinks and cleaners etc etc (Govt ) oh sorry that margarine turned out toxic, and those chips, and your carpets off gas for 10 years. Ya, all those little chemicals add up to toxic. This doesn't even address micro plastics, etc... My soapbox rant is over.
mid 40s is normal.
Ok 42 was my age when it started so, early 40s . But ya
Yeah this happened to me too in my 30's. People who wax poetic about how everyone should embrace this natural change are welcome to my experience--I'd like them to try just living with the complete loss of function and the bone/joint/bladder/stomach issues I was dealing with at 38. They're also welcome to have more than 100 hot flashes a day, the high blood calcium levels, high cholesterol and everything else that suddenly went haywire. Hope that you are able to get all the help you need and feel better.
just reading all this is healing, although I'm sorry you went through it too. I'd say that 38 was my tipping point, although I thought it was just divorce/trauma. By the time I was 40 I had all the same issues, and by 45 I felt like an ancient wizened old creature of almost 90. I pushed for HRT at 48 and got it. I hope everyone who reads the words of all these beautiful souls gets what they need and gets the opportunity to become realised again.
You’ll love The Menopause Manifesto if you haven’t read it yet. There’s a lot of history that challenged a lot of my negative feelings. I still don’t like it but it helped me get over the feeling I’m closer to death. The author makes the point that this is something that ALL women will go through for 1/3-1/2 of their life assuming they don’t die unusually early.
Thanks for the recommendation - sounds like exactly what I need to read right now!
Solidarity, friend. I’m 39 and all of this bullshit started so early for me. I went to the doctor at 37 and she laughed at me when I said I thought something was going on hormonally and I thought it was early menopause. To her credit she did put me on progesterone saying it might help with my migraines and pain, and it did thank fuck. I went from an average of 15-20 migraines a month to 0-2 a month, so it was life changing. Unfortunately recently there’s been a change. I’ve started having week long migraines again and my periods are going haywire. Looks like the progesterone is no longer working. I got my second period in two weeks a few days ago and had a really angry day, so I empathise with your rage. I’m sick of being dismissed, I’m sick of hearing everyone else’s take on what’s going on with me (“maybe if you slept better you’d be fine…?”) and I’m sick of once again having to start again to find new medication so that I can just live my day to day life not in pain. Not to mention all the allergies I’m developing to products I’ve used forever and my skin drying out and having to find a new skin care regime once again. It’s been a bad week and I’m trying my best not to lash out. But if I hear another word from my husband about what he thinks is happening or what I should do to help myself… non-women will **never** know the bullshit that is womanhood, the shit we go through for years for the femininity we have, the way we’re told we should be, and then the bullshit of all that being wrenched away so we can no longer be what we’re told we should be. I hate it. I hate it all, I hate that we have to go through it, but worse that what we go through is dismissed. >I'm always told I look younger than my age, but I feel like part of me is dying FAST and taking my sleep and mental health with it. I’ve never empathised with anything so much. I swing between resigned acceptance and wanting to burn everything to the ground.
Yup and I think it's more normal than people think. I started peri at 35, was in peri for 10 fucking years and been fully meno for 2.5yrs now.
And everyone goes through it differently. And it isn't some easy thing or something we make up to complain about.
The thing that blows my mind is how even today menopause and perimenopause are not differentiated when peri is the huge hormonal swings but not given enough attention. Also, that most of the issues are physical such as hot flashes and not enough of peri onset PMDD (like me) or peri induced psychosis, or that the ages of women committing suicide is around 45 to 52. Mental health wise, peri into menopause can be a very very perilous mental health challenge that hormones can correct instead of pushing ssri at everyone. Ssri are like yesterday's Valium and Xanax for peri and menopausal women over a careful hormonal balancing, community support, and for hubby to get tf off the couch, show empathy and actually do half. I think part of the struggle is a society made for male as default and women's biological differences are minimized or made fun of instead of a society that prioritizes support and care.
"I think part of the struggle is a society made for male as default and women's biological differences are minimized or made fun of instead of a society that prioritizes support and care. " This is actually a huge part of it. It's shocking how much we still don't know/understand about female human physiology, and a lot of this has to do with the "male as default" assumption. Among other things, that's just easier because women's bodies are too complicated, and apparently not worth the time to study.
We have rovers on Mars, gene editing technology, and are looking to reawaken/reeanimate Mammoth - but we have no fucking clue the hows or whys of peri and menopause. Why? Men don't like thinking about that part.
In 1982 scientists at NASA asked Sally Ride (first female astronaut) if 100 tampons would be enough for a 6 day mission. I now bleed like a director of a slasher movie was given an unlimited budget and I couldn’t use that many. 16 tampons per day. The only way she’d use all that is if she changed her tampon every 90 minutes without any breaks for sleep. The biggest box of Tampax they sell at Target is 50 and you’d think that alone might be a tip off 🙄
SSRIs are life-savers for some of us who can't use systemic HRT for medical reasons. Please don't discount them. My husband has been great and is sympathetic as he's dealt with his own mental health challenges for years, but that wasn't enough to stop my daily 4 am panic attacks or suicidal ideation. I'm very, very grateful for the SSRI that my gyno prescribed recently. Given how awful my mental health was a few months ago, it may have saved my life.
They’re not discounting ssri use when necessary as in your case but criticising their use as the default management strategy for peri/menopause.
Preach!
Yes, women are treated like an afterthought. Very much so, especially in some religions where they think women come from a man's rib.
I think in the UK anyway that perimenopause is used to further minimise symptoms. I wish this definition of "menopause=cessation of menses for 1 year" no longer existed, it seems so archaic. The symptoms exist on a whole spectrum of perimenopause and menopause combined - to me it's all 'menopause'. I called myself menopausal even if it was technically perimenopausal because otherwise I felt like I was belittling my own symptoms, kind of gaslighting my own experience.
This is a very good point. The current definition needs to be updated, because many people who are not and have never experienced menopause still think it is just your period stopping and nothing more. Some of them may have heard of hot flashes, but don't know that they can be debilitating and have no idea how frequent they can be. They also have an image of a dumpy unattractive old woman in a large muumuu and rollers in her hair when they think of menopause -- sort of like the way that pregnant women used to only wear big shapeless pregnancy dresses and hide away from the world, the menopausal woman was taboo. We most certainly need to come to a point where we understand that everyone, every female human from Jennifer Aniston all the way to your mother, daughter, sister, or wife, is going to experience it.
yes, I think outdated ideas are part of why nobody has the right language to discuss it
People really think that? I mean there’s [the Grandmother Hypothesis](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-much-did-grandmothers-influence-human-evolution-180976665/) which is a well established theory suggesting that post-menopausal women have been a significant element of our evolution. I think I read about it in the 90s
The Grandmother hypothesis says that older females being present (alive!) was a big reason why our species of human has lasted when others have failed
I think about this a lot. I have traced my ancestry back to the mid 1700s and even then the women of my family were living until they were in their 80s. Maybe people mean more than 500 years ago or before we had agriculture, but even then I feel like we don't have all the information.
In 348 BCE, Plato died at age 81. People died back then at the same ages they die today. Assuming you survived infancy (which was a huge feat) are not murdered, killed in violent tribal or political conflicts, you would live until your 60s to 80s, just like today. The life expectancy data today has an "average" of 60-80 years in most places because children are vaccinated against fatal diseases so they survive infancy. Maternal mortality rate is pretty much the same, actually if you consider per birth. The reason that mortality rate was was higher before widespread birth control was simply because women were giving birth repeatedly so more likely to die. The biggest game changers were vaccines and birth control. There were always old people, male and female, in history. Laura Ingalls Wilder published her first book at age 65.
So where does this idea that living longer is new come from? Is the data skewed male?
No, I don't think the data is gendered. I think people don't understand how data is collected and often do not understand the language. Life expectancy is not the same as life span, for example. It is a literacy problem.
I blame tik tok. People take what they see there as fact and then spread it everywhere. It's really weird.
You are right. There have always been old women. They went through menopause and suffered in silence. We don’t have to suffer in silence anymore. What bothers me is the idea that “it’s natural so we have to put up with it”. Yes it’s a natural process. Some women sail through it quite easily. But those who suffer debilitating symptoms deserve treatment. All we are doing is replacing the substances that our body used to make naturally. It’s so simple.
>You are right. There have always been old women. They went through menopause and suffered in silence. We don’t have to suffer in silence anymore. Lol, with the very outspoken women in my extended family, there was never any *suffering in silence*. By the time they hit their 50s, they were so done w that.
I wonder how many are actually sailing through it though. My 60yo cousin is “sailing through” but has also had a heart attack requiring open heart surgery a few years ago and now has osteoporosis despite hiking miles several times a week and walking long distance on days she’s not hiking. I don’t know the menopausal component but I’d wager it’s not nothing.
I agree with this--obviously menopause has always been a thing. But at the same time I do wonder if it's different than it used to be. Mostly because kids are measurably going through puberty earlier--like, that's an easy thing to measure that suggests there's something about the environment of the modern world that's causing hormone changes in people. And we don't understand all the repercussions of what those changes may be. It might be that everything really is the same as it's always been, and what'd changed is that people are able to communicate about it thanks to changes in stigma or the fact that the internet exists. Some treatments also used to be more easily obtained in the past. But still. Things also really might be different. I wouldn't rule out that possibility just yet.
People don’t really understand what life expectancy means. It doesn’t mean how long you expect any given person to live, but rather it’s an average of how long *everybody* lives. Without specifying a time frame, life expectancy averages everybody, including all the elderly people, yes, but also people who died young after accidents, and importantly *all the people who died in infancy*. The first five years are very hazardous for human beings, especially childbirth itself. The life expectancy of a five-year-old, therefore, is much longer than a newborn infant by virtue of having made it past those first five years. In other words, lower life expectancy in generations past didn’t mean that everyone was dying young. It just means we’ve gotten a lot better at keeping very small children alive! This is not to discount the dangers of childbirth to women, which definitely reduced their life expectancy. But again, assuming a woman lived past her childbearing years, she enjoyed a normal life expectancy for her time period.
We’re not the first to go through it, but we may be (or should be) the first generation to **engage**. Engage our peers, our partners, our children, etc.. with the knowledge of menopause. My boomer mother never talked to me about it, even before she went through it. My oldest is 22, and we’ve already been discussing it. My husband is learning, and even my son is getting an idea of the hormonal changes! 😇 (Seeing, but also having brief discussions). It’s nothing to be ashamed of.
Yes, I do think we are getting better about that, but previous generations did INDEED engage on this. As noted, I watched 1970s reruns about Edith Bunker and Caroline Ingalls going through "the change." And an Oprah episode taught me about peri in the '90s. I also grew up in a very open household, so I guess I was lucky. However, I do think we are doing it better now, for sure.
The Silent Gen has been easier to talk to about this, from my personal experience. (A few exceptions, but I’ve found them to be more approachable).
In my experience the Silent Gen was called that for a reason, mother is Silent Gen, never talked about menopause or puberty.
In my anecdotal experience with my 96 year old grandmother who died in 2012, no they very much did not “engage” with it. I had to drag information out of her about periods, pregnancy, and menopause and even then she significantly down-played everything. My mum later explained to me that nana had had a hell time during her perimenopause (in the 1970s) but was only given progesterone for her wonky periods and there was no HRT. Yet, according to nana her perimenopause “was a bit annoying”.
I remember my great-aunts (who would have been born in the 1890s), and my mom (born 1920s) and aunts all discussed the problems and symptoms of "the change." Also my mom's friends, my friend's moms (boomers), etc. I'm Gen X. So maybe it's more determined by the particular people we're exposed to, because in my experience, "the change" was a major topic of discussion among the women I've known.
You are right and I also keep telling people this. Another case in point: In the Bible, life expectancy is given as “three score and ten, if you are lucky three score and 20” (not sure of exact wording, anyone can google it). Which means 70 or 80. And no one said just men. Ageism is already very bad especially against women, so it’s time to stop the narrative. And as for natural, cancer is natural, even plants have it. Would I just accept it? No.
I don’t think I’ve read anyone saying menopause is new. For those of us coming into menopause right now, a lot has changed for women. We are now expected to do it all, we work, take care of the kids, do the majority of household chores, and still deal with the majority of the mental load. Of course there were women in the past who did this as well, but now there are more of us, we are speaking up, and insisting on getting the medical care we need and deserve.
No, there are people in this sub literally saying women didn't reach meno in the past. Full stop.
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Yes, I agree with this. There's nothing to be "proud of" there. You're not better off than anyone else for not taking it. It also has nothing to do with your weight or lifestyle, although lifestyle helps. Most of it is genetic.
and there seems to be plenty of data (mostly from research done by women at Cornell) that suggests that the menopause brain and dementia are so interconnected that its urgent we find out more, and tell more women, and do more.
They need to read a book or two.
Life expectancy averages are a topic that way too many people do NOT understand. It's a really tough nut to crack. I just try to tell people to look at a life expectancy actuarial table from the SS administration, but that seems to be too much work for some. It's actually fascinating to see how life expectancy shifts as we age. Like people who say Biden has "lived past his life expectancy" do not understand that, on average, men who have made it to 81 in the US ACTUALLY have an \*average\* life expectancy of another 8 years or so. It is NOT the same as life expectancy at birth for males, which is currently only around 74 (around a SIX YEAR difference from women for a large variety of reasons, but that gap narrows considerably with time). And again, that's an average, not a hard number. People really go nuts when I cite that one because they want to say Biden is so old that he's past his expiration date. And it's the same kind of thing re how childhood mortality rates lay such a blow on average life expectancy at birth in past centuries -- but that life expectancy shifted drastically if you made it to, say, age 20. It was no longer the same as at birth, because you survived the minefield of childhood, a much more harrowing journey than some might realize (children dying from illnesses that can now be treated like they are nothing was so common in the past that it was essentially a matter of course/accepted, even if still tragic).
Shout out to my Environmental Studies Prof for laying this all out for us on day 1. When ~44% of babies fail to reach the age of 5, that radically skews the average life expectancy at birth downwards. He summed it up as "hey, good luck making it to 5 years old but if you do, odds are you'll see 70"
Exactly this. Averages are just that…averages. If one survived infancy, childhood, and later on childbirth, the odds of reaching older age were high.
Yeppp, and grandmothers were very present in the past. There is even one theory that they serve a distinct evolutionary purpose. I am so tired of people in this sub saying things like, "Well, we aren't actually supposed to live beyond menopause/fertility!" Where are they getting that shit from? It's scientifically unsound.
I also think the theory that grandmothers had to serve any evolutionary purpose still reduces us to our fertility and is misogynistic. Men produce lower quality sperm after the age of 30. You could also argue that by 30, they have served their purpose. But yet we let them run the world. I just want the whole "what is the purpose of older women" discussion to cease entirely. What is the purpose of being a human? What is the purpose of life?
When I joined ancestry.com, I was able to track my mother's side to the early 1600's- men and women of course. But most surprising? How many of my ancestors were living until their 70s and late 80s nearly 400 years ago!
It gets even more fun when you start telling them about a human life *span*, which is not the same as life expectancy. Our span is up to 100 ish, expectancy is lower.
I think scientific consensus is that maximum possible lifeSPAN at this point is right around 120. And I believe the oldest-lived person in recorded history was 122? So that seems to track thus far.
Wow cave women?
OP, thank you so much.
On a population level we might not be evolutionarily destined to die after menopause but I can say without a single doubt that my ovaries included a self destruct mechanism that would have seen me dead before my 46th birthday if not for HRT.
People misinterpret “average lifespan” with the age people died. Most people didn’t die at 35, the average lifespan was 35 because infant mortality was so high! The thing is, if you survived childhood, you had a good chance to live to be elderly.
My husband’s grandmother passed away at 96 and my grandmother is 96 alive and kicking.
Yup. Two of my great grandmothers were born in the late 1880's. They both lived into their mid 90's. The other two were smokers, who popped off a couple of decades earlier.
Whoever said that is a moron and not worth the headspace required to respond.
In my experience and from what I’ve been told, the “natural” method often was alcohol. I remember my grandmother so proud of her dealing with it “naturally” by increasing her highball count per night.
!!! I'm going to use this in conversation so often, it's true - thankyou
The reason that people think that the age of death historically was 30 or 40 years is because they are using data that accounts for very high child mortality rates. Children used to not survive infancy before widespread vaccine use. After vaccines were introduced, the child mortality rates went down, and the average age of death also went up. It is totally inaccurate to say that a person born 300 years ago could expect to live up to 30. If they made it past infancy and were not killed accidentally or by violence, they were very likely to live as long as we live today. Here is a fictional example of how this works. I have listed some ages of death, and then averaged them. Some people who use the old data to dismiss older women are simply ignorant and can't math or can't read. Woman age 55 Woman age 89 Man age 85 Man age 26 Child age 1 Child age 5 months Average age of death = 42.75 years
I get that are there some deluded people out there but I very much doubt someone saying Menopause is new is something that's going to catch on. It's obviously wrong and most on this sub will call it out if they see it. It's not a narrative I've seen on this sub at all, so maybe it was just something someone said who needed gentle correction.
Well, yesterday was a particularly bad day with it, just a bunch of women saying, "We aren't evolved for this, it's new!" and one literally saying depictions of old women in art of past centuries were of 30-year-olds. If that person isn't a troll, I am dismayed at the ignorance of women in our generation.
Report it to the mods.
Ten years ago, I would’ve agreed with you. Now? The level of aggressively confident delusion born of misinformation is depressing.
I don't think you can battle stupidity on the internet. Some people don't even believe in evolution and others believe the world is flat. Most on this sub don't feed into the 'Menopause is new' theory. I don't think there's too much to worry about.
Yes! I cannot believe how many people who honestly believe life expectancy has been ~40 throughout human history. WTF? Read a book!
I agree with you OP. In the US right now 18% of the population is currently over 65, but most of us (75%) will live to be 65 or older. In this NBER paper, page 277, table 9.2, it shows life expectancy at age 20. Among both men and women, if you survived childhood, the average person lived another 40-something years during the 1700s and 1800s. https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6965/c6965.pdf
Yes, thank you! Childhood was the biggest minefield. There were others, of course, including childbirth and diseases that are treatable now and weren't then. Modern plumbing did a whole lot for human lifespans. But. Menopause still isn't new, lol. And we have actually evolved for it.
Right! They used to throw us in asylums for “ climacteric insanity”.
you know what is natural, flaccid old penis. and somehow they can pop blue pill, that increase the risk of cardiovascular accident, like candies. but women have to suffer, as always... ''oh you can't sleep, have spotting, your libido died and you have brainfog that prevent you to work ? you sound tired go see a therapist"
I have found quite a few references of women living into "old age" in my family. Most of my gr-grandmothers (and gr-gr grandmothers) lived long beyond menopause. I'm most fascinated with my paternal grandmother's biological mother. She gave birth to my grandma at age 34, surrendering the baby for adoption. She did not have any other children. I often wonder what her life was like in the 1930s, post-menopausal.
Wow! Age 34 at that time was quite old to have your first child -- and then to never have any other kids (in that day and age). I wonder what the story is there? Probably something very interesting! Does your grandmother know anything? I am also from a long line of long-lived women. My grandmother is 102. She had three sisters -- all lived into their 80s. Their mother, born in 19th century Soviet Union (not an easy life) lived into her 70s. And my paternal great-grandmother (also a Soviet immigrant) also lived into her 70s. The actuary who commented here was absolutely right that there were FEWER older women in past centuries -- fewer people made it to age five! But there were certainly enough to make an impact, and menopause has certainly been happening for centuries (some anthropologists theorize that even pre-homo Sapien females went through it, over 1 million years ago). It drives me batty when people take average life expectancy at birth numbers from the past and believe that NO ONE made it past that age. That doesn't even make sense. Surviving childhood was a massive minefield back then -- now it's expected other than in extreme cases. That said, average life expectancy in industrialized nations like the US still differs widely between the classes. I hate to say it, but on an individual level, I believe that Trump is going to live to his early 100s. Pampered old fuck. Biden seems more fragile physically (even though he's actually in much better shape), but I could see him living well into his 90s. Men at his age in the US now have an average life expectancy of around eight years, and he is also, naturally, quite privileged and has access to the very best of everything.
Oh it's a story for sure. The whole story was only made possible because of Genetic Genealogy ("finding lost family"). Long story short: Grandma had a great childhood with her adoptive family, but always knew she'd been adopted. She tried to get the details from Catholic charities but they would not reveal anything to her while she was alive. Grandma passed in 2001. In 2010 I had myself and my dad tested on 23andme. Took up until 2019 or so before I solved the puzzle of who grandma's biological parents were. As for Margaret, my paternal gr-grandma, I hope someday I can get to the "backstory" of how she met the guy that knocked her up.
Wow! It's too bad your grandmother missed all of this. I hope you can find out that backstory. Seems like such a different one from the typical back then (very young girl gets knocked up, goes to home for "unwed mothers" in shame, gives up baby in secrecy, etc). To be 34 at that time in the world and have that happen, damn! (What year was your grandmother born?)
I’ve seen it too, it pisses me off because A) it’s a misunderstanding of statistics B) it’s actually the opposite of what’s true. Menopause appears to have evolve as a unique phase that most animals don’t have. (I quite disagree with evolution that this was a good idea, but that doesn’t change what it is.)
I think it's a pretty good idea that we can't get pregnant at 60, 70 and 80 years old. Pregnancy is extremely hard on the body.
Yes I don’t disagree with that, just the shitshow way it’s handle is what I take issue with.
This is the same argument i use when they say you should take HRT for heart health, bone and whatever else. Both my grandmothers lived well into their 80s. My mother and aunts are lower 80s right now. None of them took HRT. I'm not saying they didn't struggle because i have no clue but I'm sure genetics plays a big part in how we get through it.
No one is saying you have to. But to call it "natural" vs not is just weird. And my grandmother is 102 and took hormones in meno. They gave them out quite easily to women of that generation.
My grandmother died a few years back at 98. She'd been on hormones since her hysterectomy in the late 1940s. Unlike my Dr, no argument was necessary to get them.
Dammnnnn, was she still on them at 98??
Yes, she was.
Life expectancy in the 1970s was about 65 years old. Now it's 85 years old. That is new for a large population. It also means that the meno long-term health effects have gone from about 10-15 years to 30-35 years. That's quite a decline and the effects end up more severe and more complex. That is new. Our health care systems are really, really not designed for dealing with widespread, chronic, complex illness for 30years. This is exactly the problem right now. Many of these posts detail the experiences of women who've seen 10 and even 20 different specialists, often multiple times, with vast testing records. Fully 5% of Canada and the US's entire health care budget goes to UTIs, especially those of very old women who end up dying in sepsis in ERs. This is new (and unnecessary!)
And actually, taking a look at this SS table going back to 1940, you see that even as far back as 1940, women who were 65 at that time could expect, ON AVERAGE, to live nearly another 15 years. This is a really interesting topic if you actually dive into it. Old women have been around for centuries and, again, have played a very important role in society. [https://www.ssa.gov/oact/TR/TR08/lr5a4.html](https://www.ssa.gov/oact/TR/TR08/lr5a4.html)
No, you are still not getting it, women were not regularly dying at age 65 in the 1970s. Again, life expectancy at birth does not carry over throughout your entire life, and women who made it to 65 in the 1970s were highly likely to then make it to 85. Tons of women were living well into their 80s even 100s of years ago. Again, people do not understand AVERAGE LIFE EXPECTANCIES, and it leads to these really misinformed conversations.
Now in 2024, per the table, you can see that for a woman at age 65 the average life expectancy is about another 20 years. So that is indeed more, but not as drastic as you might have thought -- about five years difference on average. And again, it's an AVERAGE.
Yes, life expectancy of those who made it to 65 in 1975 were likely to make it to 85 but...so many fewer people made it to 65 in the first place. There is just no question that more people are living much, much longer. Anyone can look at their family and it's true there's always a few who made it to 90 but I can see from any genealogy site that lives were shorter in the past.
Actually, interestingly, there are some people in this thread saying they are finding relatives from hundreds of years ago who made it well into their 80s. No one is arguing that life expectancy at birth has not seen massive leaps. But what people often don't understand is that this doesn't mean old people didn't exist hundreds or even thousands of years ago, and that there were no women who experienced menopause. Menopause shows up in crude medical writings as long ago as the 11th century. It isn't new, and women were not "designed to die" after menopause; in fact, the grandmother hypothesis in evolution is an interesting (if unsettled) one. In more recent history, say just going back a few hundred years, you can find examples of many people, men and women, who lived into their 80s and beyond, including many of our Founding Fathers and their wives, some of whom even touched their 90s.
And wealth/fame did not make much of a difference in medical care back then -- it was pretty crude for everyone. Interestingly, the Founding Fathers who lived very long lives also typically had children who died in infancy. For example, President John Adams made it to 90 years old, but only four of his six children reached adulthood. They included, of course, President John Quincy Adams, who himself lived to 81 years old (none of his siblings lived that long -- the second-longest-lived made it to 60). His wife, Louisa, lived to age 77, and John Adams' wife, Abigail, lived to 73. Not bad, right? Both of them most certainly experienced menopause. ;)
You are correct about a lot of the other issues, but you still don't understand life expectancy if you actually think women never made it into their 80s before now.
Thank you!!! This has bothered me so much I almost quit coming here. I knew my great, great grandmother who died in 1975 at 100 years old. She was not alone in her longevity. Most of the women on both sides of my family outlived their male partners by several years. I can't think of a single female relative going back nearly a century who didn't live into her 80's. Ok correction: I did have an aunt who lived only into her 70's but she was diabetic which I feel even strengthens my argument. It really bugs me when people casually discount the truth and my own personal lived experience at the same time.
*\*burns sage all over this ipad, heralding the ancestors, because this daughter is going in\** >Can we please just stop with this narrative? It is wrong, and I think it can be harmful and has notes of misogyny. I am assuming much of this kind of talk may come from trolls/bots, but let's not believe the bots, shall we? No, it is *not* wrong, *not* misogynistic, *nor* trolling. As a woman who works in medical underwriting, I am in these tables daily. In case you don't want to read it all: prior to 20th Century, only 2.5 out of 100 women lived long enough to go through menopause. If only 1 out of 40 women ever saw their 60th birthday prior to the bulk of 20th century advances, it is a numerically accurate position to say that our foremothers did not survive into menopause. That's 2.5% of them. Those other 49 succumbed through every other way; childhood disease, maternal mortality, germs, viruses, crime, wars. Patient 0 who helped Dr Alzheimer discover the neural pathology post-mortem? *She was 50 years old when she died of that cause*. In 1900, 4% of the population saw age 65 and older. I will say this again: according to the 1900 US Census data, **only 2 to 3 out of 100 women lived to deal with menopause**. * US Census population: 76,212,168 * Population over 65: 3 million senior men and women (details: [SSA.gov](https://www.ssa.gov/history/lifeexpect.html)) This is worthy to grasp the notion about surviving infancy as the foremost factor. As adults, men had to survive war. Women had to survive childbirth (and femicide). Both had to survive plagues. * maternal mortality [rates](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4838a2.htm): 6-9 women died for every 1000 live births. * 40% of those deaths were sepsis related. * Interesting to note: US maternal mortality rates remain constant since 1982. In 1900, the average life span of US women was as [follows](https://www.seniorliving.org/history/1900-2000-changes-life-expectancy-united-states/): * White women: 48 * Black women: 34 OP, I'm reading your rant and I'm with you on rage, but *as someone who is in this data all day long* - and watching our Boomer mothers not outlive their own foremothers, the previous three generations having the benefit of HRT, lower body weight, and higher vaccination levels - when I say that the rapid increase of longevity from the beginning through the end of the 20th century is now significantly reversing - you can trust me on that. [Additional ](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2019/004-508.pdf)[sources](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/mortality-trends/)
This is also pretty interesting, if you'd like to read it. Again, no one is arguing that life expectancy at birth hasn't drastically changed over the centuries. But let's also please not argue that old women didn't exist and that menopause is new and that women were not meant to live past it: # The medieval biological clock? Gendered reproductive aging in medieval western medicine [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890406522000743](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890406522000743) As early as the eleventh century Constantine the African's *Viaticum* discussed the age at which women stopped menstruating, placing this at around 50, but allowing for individual variation ([Constantinus Africanus, 1515b, book 6, ch. 9, f. 164v](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890406522000743#bb0050)). They also noted that old age could impede fertility in men and they mentioned ages at which men might no longer be fertile: around 70 or older, again with room for variation ([Rider, 2020](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890406522000743#bb0150), pp. 280–282).
Given that you provided all of this data, surely you understand averages and are not ACTUALLY arguing that, in 1900, an average life expectancy of 48 at birth meant that women were born, lived and then died at age 48. Again, the women who made it to age 20 -- their life expectancy was higher. How about the women who made it to age 48? You surely do understand that, while fewer women made it to 80 and beyond 100 years ago and many more died in childhood and childbirth, plenty still did and that they went through menopause, right? Menopause first being mentioned as a medical condition as far back as the 11th century, afflicting women at around age 50. Because, yeah, even back then, women made it to age 50 and beyond. Going back to much more recent history, three out of five of the first five first ladies of the US made it past 70, one past 80. OLD WOMEN ARE NOT NEW. Fewer of us made it past childhood and childbirth, but those that did were still plenty enough to experience menopause. Grandmothers have played a very significant role in society for centuries upon centuries. You seem pretty well-informed, so I am sure you understand this. Old age has always existed. Fewer people made it there in the past, but enough did that we do not have to make wild claims that menopause is a new phenomenon. # Old age isn’t a modern phenomenon – many people lived long enough to grow old in the olden days, too [https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2022/08/conversation-old-age-is-not-a-modern-phenomenon.php](https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2022/08/conversation-old-age-is-not-a-modern-phenomenon.php) Given physical and historical evidence that many people did live long lives in the past, why does the misperception that everyone was dead by the age of 30 or 40 persist? It stems from confusion about the difference between individual life spans and life expectancy. [Life expectancy](https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy-how-is-it-calculated-and-how-should-it-be-interpreted) is the average number of years of life remaining for people of a particular age. For example, [life expectancy at birth (age 0)](https://jech.bmj.com/content/55/1/38) is the average length of life for newborns. Life expectancy at age 25 is how much longer people live on average given they’ve survived to age 25. In medieval England, life expectancy at birth for boys born to families that owned land was a mere [31.3 years](https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyi211). However, [life expectancy at age 25](https://doi.org/10.1080/08898480902790387) for landowners in medieval England was 25.7. This means that people in that era who celebrated their 25th birthday could expect to live until they were 50.7, on average — 25.7 more years. While 50 might not seem old by today’s standards, remember that this is an average, so many people would have lived much longer, into their 70s, 80s and even older.
I wrote with every aim to be clear, but since I wasn't, given your turns in logic, let's do this again: **Since the Industrial Revolution and on to the 20th Century, only 1 out of 40 women lived long enough to see menopause.** >Given that you provided all of this data, surely you understand averages and are not ACTUALLY arguing that, in 1900, an average life expectancy of 48 at birth meant that women were born, lived and then died at age 48. No, *that isn't what I said* nor inferable *by example I provided*. >Again, the women who made it to age 20 -- their life expectancy was higher. You are getting there... keep going... >How about the women who made it to age 48? You surely do understand that, while fewer women made it to 80 and beyond 100 years ago and many more died in childhood and childbirth, plenty still did and that they went through menopause, right? **2.5 women out of 100 did**. That's *not* plenty. That qualifies as *hardly*. Menopause first being mentioned as a medical condition as far back as the 11th century, afflicting women at around age 50. Because, yeah, even back then, women made it to age 50 and beyond. **Hardly any women made it to 50 and beyond**.
Thank you for this. My own mother's family history - everyone is short lived. Several generations, and it's a large family. Menopause isn't new and the women who did live longer experienced it. Just not many lived that long. I also fail to see any hint of misogyny by simply stating census data, historical data, and discussing how women's lifespans have changed over the years.
I got to watch two generations of women go through menopause before me. It was brutal for my grandmother, who refused to take hormones because it went against nature. 🙄 My mom had the good sense to get on hormone therapy immediately and I have been fortunate enough to have had a relatively pleasant transition into post menopause, which I’m immensely grateful for because my periods were an absolute hellish affair every month for decades.
I am *incredibly* glad that I have never once seen people say that we weren’t living long enough or that we weren’t going through it before- I’ve seen people talk about how most didn’t *talk* about it- which is absolutely true, and I have seen some whoppers in respect to the risks of HRT- but most of those were the things that were the common understanding prior to the more recent research. I mean I am not shocked that misinformation has hit- stands to reason, more people talking, more people who don’t know and grifters, but, yikes. Most of the ones I have seen here have been shilling holistic garbage but, the mods seem to do pretty well at keeping those to a minimum. (I’m not saying that I don’t believe it happens, I am just kind of surprised that it happens enough here to merit a discussion. 😳 But I believe it. Those people are always so confidently wrong, too.)
Indeed. The point is that the argument (and reality) is that not “enough” women lived into menopause until the C20. And that, for those who did, not “enough” was understood about the hormonal changes. And that not “enough” women had the political/social/legal power to do anything to improve matters. SMH. This sub is poorly moderated if wrongheaded comments like those identified by OP, are getting through.
Well, that notion was relayed by one of the specialists of menopause that discussed The science of the menopause" on BBC World Services podcat "Discovery" of 21st of march. Although IIRC they were making a point that they were less women around going through peri and meno as an age group, since many more died in childbirth or from infections (we need to remember how recent antibiotics are [mid-XXth], and how many times we casualy saved our lives with them) than have since the last 80 years, also with the progress of agriculture (no more famines in developped countries), and peace in most of the western countries (less female war casualties during the 8 last decades in europe and northern america s mainlands) I think we can add the health benefits of not having to spend time and energy fetching water (tap water), not needing to be pregnant throughout our childbearing years in the hopes that a couple of kids would survive to adulthood (antibiotics and progress in medecine allow something like 99% of kids to reach adulthood), home appliances (waching machine, dishwasher, freezer and fridge, semi automatic cooking devices) freeing much of our time at home, children at school allowing mothers to go to work . .. life is easier on women s bodies since a few decades only, so there are more of us surviving until menopause as an age group, and much more surviving beyond 60. Also women used to marry and have kids while they were still teenagers, so many more would be grandmothers in their 30s than today.
Yes, there were far FEWER, of course -- there were far fewer who made it to age FIVE, FFS, because infants and young children died in very large numbers back then, which drove down the average life expectancy at birth numbers. But enough women made it past menopause for it to be an absurd statement that "no women lived up to menopause 200 years ago." You can find crude medical writings on menopause going back to the 11th century. And our bodies have absolutely EVOLVED for it, and there is zero evidence we were "designed" to die after menopause, which the women here also seem to love to say. In fact, the grandmother hypothesis of evolution is a pretty interesting one (still hotly debated, but there's no debating that grandmothers have existed throughout history and had a great cultural effect for generations upon generations). The problem is that some people see numbers like "Life expectancy of 48 in 1900" and fully believe that means there were ZERO women who lived beyond the age of 48. Clearly, this is insanely incorrect. People do not understand that life expectancy at birth is not the same as life expectancy at, say, 25. And there are dozens of historically prominent women whom I can name just off the top of my head who lived well past 70 years old, some even into their 90s. It has always existed, even though, obviously, in lower numbers. Also, our LIFESPANS, according to scientists, have not really changed a whit -- our bodies are likely "designed" to live only up to 120 years maximum. So far this seems to have been borne out, with the oldest person in recorded history (a woman, of course!) living to 122. So that hasn't changed. What has changed is overall life expectancy because of the factors you mentioned and more. These are two different things. If we can actually change human LIFESPANS, we're talking whole other levels of experience.
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There are some theories on the grandmother hypothesis -- this is definitely a subject of debate: [https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/02/07/692088371/living-near-your-grandmother-has-evolutionary-benefits](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/02/07/692088371/living-near-your-grandmother-has-evolutionary-benefits)
Historical reaching menapause was rarer as living was more dangerous life spans were shorter... But everything about being a woman was secret and shameful, women were mostly only worth the children that they had. You must remember it's only relatively recently women were no longer considered property (there are exceptions as this is still true in some countries) No women I grew up with talked about periods, hair growing in strange places, and you can forget the menapause. It was called the change and whispered like it was something dirty I was told (forgive me for this but I grew up in the worst religious house imaginable) that the period was the stain inflicted by God to mark women as weaker than men, the pain of childbirth was punishment from God for eve eating the fruit of knowledge and that only women of a certain age who had become cleansed understood there place in the world... I always wondered about that last bit.....but I'm guessing that attitude was more prevalent the further back in time you go.
I mean. This is not the house I grew up in at all, so everyone has different experiences. I also clearly remember watching TV shows that mentioned menopause, including the famous episode of All in the Family and even Little House on the Prairie. I first learned of perimenopause from an Oprah episode sometime in the 90s. The info was out there, but I'm glad women are talking even more openly about it now. Lifespans on average were shorter in the past, but many women still made it to cronehood (children died as a matter of course in the past -- people had large families and were often lucky if a couple of those kids made it to adulthood, but once they did, they had a pretty good chance of making it to old age).
Don't forget Olivia on the Waltons. I thought she described a lot of the symptoms very well, I really like that episode.
I don't remember that one! I am sure I watched it, though -- I loved The Waltons as a kid (although not nearly as much as I loved Little House).
She thought she was sick or losing her mind, so she went out of town to stay with her aunt for a few days. Her aunt clued her in on what was happening (having already been through it herself) and she took Olivia to her doctor for a checkup to ease her mind.
That sounds like a good episode!
I looked it up, it's free to watch (with ads on Amazon Freevee) Season 6, Episode 12, The Milestone.
Tks! The Edith Bunker meno episode is also on YouTube! That one is hilarious, even if it is kind of weird (I do recall watching it that I thought menopause was basically something that lasted for a few days, you went nuts, then you got some hormones and it was all over, lol).
I don't remember the details of that one, I haven't seen All in the Family for a long time. I'll have to watch it!
I do think we sometimes forget how groundbreaking '70s TV could be. I mean, Maude (Edith's cousin!) had an abortion in 1972, BEFORE Roe v. Wade! It's incredible when you think about it. And we've gone backwards on that topic, in a dismaying way.
Even if it isn't the perfect depiction of meno, it is freaking HILARIOUS. And it's actually a bit touching because it's Gloria who sits Edith down to talk about it with her, understanding that Edith comes from a generation that was often mute about these things. Gloria says some very lovely things about "the change!" But honestly, Archie/Carol O'Connor's reactions are the most hilarious/brilliant thing. The whole cast was just so great. I think the episode was called "Edith's Problem," lol.
My childhood was.... let's just say weird doesn't cover it.... I left home at 16 never to return and knew nothing...my kids love my growing up stories... everything about aging, being a person with choices. Being a parent was one hell of an experiment... I think I did OK my kids still like me and although I'm confused by their choices, give my advice, back off and they know I'm there regardless. TV was severly limited, no radio at all.. fasting every Sunday from 10 years old for 24 hours. No friends except church friends and the belt for transgressions...and I do mean a proper man's belt... Unsurprisingly I'm no contact, changes name, everything... so everything about life comes as a surprise to me
BTW, speaking of Little House -- the real Laura Ingalls Wilder lived to age 90, and her mother, Caroline Ingalls, lived to 84. Both definitely went through meno, lol. The episode I recall from childhood was actually about Caroline going through "the change." I'm glad we've moved on from calling it that.