Health

It isn't an illness. It's a process.

While women who experience symptoms should have access to the necessary medications, I do have an anecdotal story of the flip side of that: I am one of many sisters. Three of my sisters were given the option (before that study) to take hormones to stave off menopausal symptoms. Not to cure existing symptoms, but to prevent symptoms they had not yet experienced.

I had one particularly uncomfortable symptom: hot flashes every 45 minutes for about 2 years. I declined hormonal therapy, used Chinese herbs instead.

After 2 years, I was done with menopause. And life after menopause is not the terrible wasteland our society likes to tell us it is. I became much healthier. Many of my allergies disappeared, I stopped having sinus infections, which had been chronic with me, my migraines went away. I functioned very well on less sleep. There were a host of other positive health developments I noticed when I went through menopause.

My sisters would try to ease themselves off the hormones. They would get mild symptoms and when they did, they would jump back on the hormones. This process lasted over a decade for one of them.

So I guess the moral is: by all means get help for debilitating symptoms (and I know a number of women who had those) but if you don't have them, don't treat them.