Ever since the last century, numerous diseases have been blamed on the drop in hormone levels that occur at menopause.
Before that time, female biology was often considered untrustworthy, prone to malfunction and even dangerous. But with the advancement of women’s rights, medicine had to find a way to dress up its misogyny.
How lucky that hormones were discovered and could be labeled as “crazy.”
How fascinating that women readily adopted the “crazy hormone” story.
From the onset of menstruation, we are taught to blame our hormones for ills, and relate to them as if they aren’t an integral part of us.
Modern medicine loves to divide up WOMAN, rather than view her as a magnificent and whole being, powered by divine intelligence.
“We’re living decades beyond the age that we used to live,” you’ll hear many menopause doctors claim, as they try to explain why menopause is supposedly the cause of suffering and disease.
This extended lifespan argument is a myth, which I’ve debunked in detail here. It’s embarrassing that doctors who women rely on for accurate information, still share this myth.
You’ll also hear the same menopause doctors talk about “estrogen receptors” all over the body that simply can’t cope with lower hormone levels that occur at menopause and beyond. We’re supposed to believe that our “estrogen receptors” are just another malfunctioning part of us, seemingly disconnected from divine intelligence.
Apparently, the “estrogen receptors” have a particularly hard time in the brain, where they are starved of the hormone they need to function. Then, we are told, they express “severe manifestations of estrogen withdrawal,” leading to brain fog, anxiety, depression, panic attacks, in addition to increasing our risk of dementia.
It’s as if the receptors didn’t notice that menopause was on the cards since birth, and has been so for millennia! It’s as if every woman never experienced similar low levels of hormones in her pre-pubescent years!
Do you want to call the BS on this with me?
It’s such nonsense!
But this nonsense serves a purpose: to keep women disempowered.
A part of modern medicine wants us to fear the body and keep searching outside of ourselves for a “fix.” A fix not just for menopause symptoms, but for the rest of our lives!
Don’t you know that from midlife onwards, the rates of chronic disease start increasing? It must be our drop in hormones!
Ignore the fact that rates of disease also increase for men, and that in most cases, disease arises from lifestyle factors. Pharmaceutical companies and their useful puppets want you to blame menopause.
Social media makes it easy to spread the science of stupid, so let me debunk the “menopause causes disease” argument in the simplest terms.
Currently, based on zero robust evidence, menopause influencers are happy to suggest that the natural drop in hormones that occurs at midlife is responsible for dementia, chronic heart disease, diabetes, and more. To avoid these diseases, (or disease X in the explanation below), the influencers are trying to convince you to take HRT for life.
And yet, all women, when they reach a certain age, go through menopause and experience a drop in hormones.
But not all women who go through menopause get disease X.
Other variables must cause disease X.
Menopause cannot be the cause of disease X.
So, can we stop blaming women’s biology, and start focusing on the other variables?
In the case of dementia (which has returned to be a hot topic), it's true that more women get dementia than men. However, it’s ridiculous to suggest that menopause has had the biggest negative impact on the brain of an average 75-year-old woman, when compared to an average 75-year-old man.
Here is a list of some of the variables we should be focusing on, all of which have documented negative side-effects:
The contraceptive pill
HRT
Other medicines
Hysterectomies (especially with ovary removal)
Toxic cleaning products
Toxic skincare products
Certain metals and other chemicals found in cookware
Low-fat diets
We should also be looking at the collapse of the extended family, and how that impacts women and men differently.
Many menopausal women have been involved in the care of an elder with a degenerative disease. Of course, when enough menopause fear porn is spread across all media, these women are likely to react if they are constantly told the myth that HRT can protect them from a similar fate.
Today, in the UK, there are women who’ve started taking HRT not because they were suffering in menopause, but because a celeb convinced them HRT could protect them against dementia, when the science simply isn’t there to back such a claim.
Healthier and toxic-free lifestyles are the only proven way to protect ourselves from disease, and even reverse some conditions.
The sensitive years of perimenopause and menopause serve a purpose to wake us up to what is healthy, and what will serve us as we move beyond our reproductive years.
If we crash into midlife while living a life that is out of balance, the body is going to start communicating with us. The body isn’t calling for more hormones! It knows how to journey smoothly through the time of hormonal flux and to stay healthy in the post-menopausal years. But we have the free-will to innocently fill our lives with stress, bad diets, lack of movement and deprive ourselves of rest.
As the media continues to disempower women with menopause fear porn, we can resist. Share this post and other posts you see that offer a more loving and honest message about perimenopause and menopause. This may seem like a small act, but multiplied many times, it can start to change the discourse around midlife women’s health.
In addition, if you’re concerned about how you can protect your health moving forward, and if you desire to experience fewer perimenopause and menopause symptoms right now, I have good news. You don’t need to wait for circumstances to change in order to live a less stressful life.
Following almost a decade of helping women transform their experiences of midlife change, I will be happy to support you at this time. Feel free to reach out.
