The Sunday Read: ‘Women Have Been Misled About Menopause’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 12 February 2023

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Menopausal hormone therapy was once the most commonly prescribed treatment in the United States. In the late 1990s, some 15 million women a year were receiving a prescription for it. But in 2002, a single study, its design imperfect, found links between hormone therapy and elevated health risks for women of all ages. Panic set in; in one year, the number of prescriptions plummeted. Hormone therapy carries risks, to be sure, as do many medications that people take to relieve serious discomfort, but dozens of studies since 2002 have provided reassurance that for healthy women under 60 whose hot flashes are troubling them, the benefits of taking hormones outweigh the risks. The treatment’s reputation, however, has never fully recovered, and the consequences have been wide-reaching. About 85 percent of women experience menopausal symptoms. Rebecca Thurston, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh who studies menopause, believes that, in general, menopausal women have been underserved — an oversight that she considers one of the great blind spots of medicine. “It suggests that we have a high cultural tolerance for women’s suffering,” Thurston said. “It’s not regarded as important.”

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	My name is Susan Dominus and I'm a staff writer for the New York Times magazine.
0:15.4	When I turned 51, I took a trip with a bunch of my closest women friends.
0:20.2	We talked about all kinds of things, but I would say of the seven days we were away,
0:25.7	at least half of one of those days was spent discussing one topic, menopause.
0:33.0	All of us were unbelievably baffled by what exactly was happening.
0:37.6	The night sweats, the hot flashes to start, and if and how we were supposed to treat it.
0:44.1	There was parry menopause, the run-up to menopause.
0:47.5	That was different.
0:48.8	Could you get any kind of treatment for that?
0:51.2	Were there supplements that worked?
0:56.3	The information we were seeing online was extremely confusing.
0:59.7	It was hard to figure out what the best sources of information were, and I found that shocking.
1:06.2	This is an inevitable thing that is coming for every healthy woman as she hits 50 or so.
1:12.0	How was it that we don't have as much information about menopause as we do about going through
1:16.7	puberty?
1:17.7	I thought if we're confused about this, probably a lot of other women are as well.
1:24.2	It turned out there was this hardly obscure treatment, menopausal hormone therapy.
1:29.6	NHT, as it's sometimes known, has risks considered to be low for women under 60, but can drastically
1:37.0	improve symptoms.
1:38.9	But it's very misunderstood.
1:41.6	For this Sunday read, I'm sharing an article I wrote about trying to understand menopausal
1:46.4	hormone therapy, the real risks and benefits, and why it has been given such a bad rap
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The New York Times, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The New York Times and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.