Menopause is a chapter in women's lives that brings a myriad of what can be debilitating medical issues that can last for more than a decade.

It's an area of medicine that for years has been overlooked and underfunded.

Isabella Gibillion of Rhode Island PBS Weekly has our story, which is part of our ongoing series, Unequal Treatment.

It was rage for no reason.

The only one I wasn't mad at was the dog.

Artist Tanya Glover was 45 years old when she started noticing symptoms that she

couldn't explain.

The anxiety big time.

That was the worst one.

The night sweats, the irregular periods,

the heavy periods. I just felt like I was kind of losing it a little bit. And a friend of

mine said something about perimenopause. I'm like, what is that? It's a familiar story for

Dr. Mary Jane Minkin, a gynecologist with Yale School of Medicine.

Menopausal symptoms, perimenopausal symptoms, can be extraordinarily disruptive to women.

Those symptoms can include increased anxiety, hot flashes, migraines, insomnia, vaginal dryness,

and changes in sexual desire.

And Dr. Minkin says, all too often, they aren't taken seriously.

I just feel horrible for so many of these women who come in, and they've been miserable for

so long, for no good reason.

We have some great therapies for them so that people can leave totally normal lives.

But those therapies are going underused because the traditional treatment, hormone replacement

therapy, developed a bad reputation in 2002. That's when Dr. Minkin says a prominent study

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