It’s hard to believe our society is so rife with misinformation and unanswered questions about a routine stage of life that half the planet moves through, but this is pretty much the case with menopause.Luckily, things are starting to shift: Women are talking more and more about this natural process, which has been brought into the open in part by the proliferation of books on the topic, free-speaking celebrities and “femtech” apps, along with diets and remedies pitched to menopausal women. “But it’s still not something every woman hears about from her mother or sister,” says Jackie Thielen, M.D., director of the women’s health specialty clinic at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, FL.
The term “menopause” can be confusing even for doctors, says Stephanie Faubion, M.D., medical director of the North American Menopause Society (NAMS) and director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Women’s Health in Rochester, MN. People use the word to mean everything from a first skipped period to the decades after bleeding has stopped. But most of those definitions aren’t exactly accurate.
Menopause, stage by stage
piece of the confusion is that women tend to say they’re “in menopause.” But that phrase actually has little scientific meaning. is the stage when your ovaries start producing fewer hormones and your periods become less regular. The term refers to one year after your last menstrual flow—which you can’t know you’ve.
