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1. By 2025, over 1 billion women will have experienced perimenopause, the few years before your period stops where you might have 34 different symptoms. Yet, every person I spoke to for this article said something like: No one told me it would be like this? https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/well/perimenopause-symptoms.html
2. Part of the reason perimenopause has been overlooked and under discussed is historical and cultural. Victorian doctors believed menopausal women grew scales on their breasts and prescribed leeches as a remedy for “congested genitals.”
3. Other physicians of that era thought that perimenopausal women were more susceptible to mental illnesses, “among them ‘morbid irrationality,’ ‘minor forms of hysteria’, melancholia and the impulses to drink spirits, to steal, and perchance, to murder.”
4. No wonder these murderous lizard people did not want to talk about their various symptoms in public! But that taboo isn't the only reason for our lack of knowledge. Until the 80s, we didn’t even know what was going on for women, hormonally, in the years before menopause.
5. Scientists used to think you just ran out of estrogen, “But what we’ve learned is it is more of a turbulent process — hormones are bouncing around,” said Dr. Stephanie Faubion, the medical director of the North American Menopause Society.
6. Right now there are many so-called “fem tech” companies jumping in to help women manage perimenopause, and lots of publications beginning to address this period of life, often called a “second puberty.”
7. But it’s still a struggle for many women to get informed care, since perimenopause symptoms touch so many different parts of the body: hot flashes, brain fog, depression and what several women called “crime scene periods.”
8. It’s also important to change the conversation. “So much of what you hear about perimenopause is spoken about in an anti-feminist and ageist way,” said Dr. Lucy Hutner, a reproductive psychiatrist.
9. Read the whole piece here and send to your favorite murderous lizard person today. I can’t wait to grow my own scales. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/well/perimenopause-symptoms.html
10. For a list of major symptoms and what we know about them, read this wonderfully informative piece by @danilyst -- they don't even know why we HAVE hot flashes in the first place! https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/well/perimenopause-menopause-symptoms.html
