Have you seen this meme floating around the internet?
It looks like this...
Doctor: Don't confuse your google search with my medical degree
Picture a GOBSMACKED Patient with EVERYTHING she know about herself, her health and what she is feeling in her body. UGH!
It drives me insane when our medical professionals decide that their protocols, what they learned in school, back in the day, and the information they glean from trainings managed by pharmaceutical company reps, has more value than what you know about yourself and feel in your body.
It's utterly crazy that we talk about the doctor telling us what is going on in our bodies when to my mind, they should be listening to hear from us what we are experiencing!!! (there is a reason why AI performs better than a human in this profession! Let me just back that statement up... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6716335/)
The more I learn about neurobiology (nerd alert: alongside crappy reality TV, it's one of my passions!) and indigenous healing, the more I think about what we know about women's health, compared to what we don't and the way we manage women's health compared to what women really need to feel happy, healthy, lusty and relaxed on a daily basis.
When we defer to the science of behind menopause, the research and the data, (and hands-up, this is something I do a lot ) we are relying on a whole bunch of gaps and holes and blank spaces in our knowledge.
Let me explain with a hokey little diagram...
You see, throughout the history of medicine, ALL of the research has been carried out on men's bodies and then applied to women. We have been viewed as smaller men with breasts and not as separate, different-functioning people. This includes the majority of all the drug research and even basic assumptions about how our bodies 'work'.
It's why, in the year of our lady 2024, we find from Dr Lisa Mosconi's research that the neurobiology of our brains completely changes in menopause! It's real, we did not imagine the brain fog and futzes!
Remember, both science as a 'field' and medicine as a 'practice' are entrenched in patriarchy and misogyny. This is why, as women, we are routinely gaslit about our health and bodies.
It is why we have been held under the tyranny of the misogynistic and racist BMI for centuries when in reality, women's longevity is improved if we are 30 lbs overweight than if we are at our ideal weight (let me just back this big statement up here, too!) ...and why women are more likely to be seen as emotional when they describe their symptoms, why the vibrator was invented by a male doctor as a cure for depression! and not a woman, why IUD's are inserted without anesthetic and why the removal of the womb is still called a hysterectomy.
Frustratingly, there are also areas of health, important to women, that are just ignored by conventional medicine.
Our adrenal health, stress, burnout and adrenal failure have immense implications for our hormonal health, especially in menopause, because our adrenal glands produce and drip feed us juicy hormones after our ovaries have taken a rest.
But, conditions such as burnout and adrenal fatigue are ignored when they present in women, because THEY DO NOT EXIST!
Conventional medicine says it is not a thing. Unless you are horizontal on the bed and cannot get up to a vertical position you will not get a diagnosis or support!
There is no spectrum or gradient assigned to adrenal fatigue and so it's invisible and doesn't happen!!!!
(Let me tell you...I see adrenal fatigue ROUTINELY in my work with women (it is a whole module in Menopause U complete with a daily routine tracker, so you can use food, sleep, circadian rhythm, yoga, stress management, herbs and even your blood pressure to support your adrenal health and get your LIFETIME supply of hormones secreted by your adrenal glands, back on track) It is hard for me to deny something I have seen with my own eyes!
Because we live under capitalism, research is driven by profit.
This is why we have viagra to increase the sexual prowess of men but no real breakthroughs in drugs to support women's sexual health or libido since the birth control pill. Capitalism is also why we have ZERO preventative medicine practiced in our medical systems and this kills me daily because we are getting sicker as a society and people, even our children are in metabolic distress.
Now, this one thing drives me insane!
I get frustrated by the compartmentalization of our bodies carried out by medicine when our mind/bodies and lives are plainly all joined up. Medicine is a a series of little fiefdoms with a top-down hierarchy and we get shunted between endocrinologists, gynecologists, urologists and on and on....This structure does not honour the miraculous workings of our joined up mind/bodies. Medicine is not holistic in it's practice.
Then, there is patriarchy, it's role in our lives and the negative impact it has on our health.
We know from studies that women whose partners are willing take on their fair share of the household load in the home, have more sex and a healthier libido but doctors who see the solution to low libido in women, not as an imbalance in society but as a deficiency of hormone in a woman's body. For doctors the body is a machine and a prescription for testosterone is the solution. Hmmmm
All of this to say...in a world where we don't know much about women's heath and hormones, but we know our bodies are not a machine. When we are consulting with a profession that views our health and bodies as little men with boobies. When our health care providers compartmentalize our bodies and have blinkers on about our health issues...You are the authority on your health and body.
I encourage you to value what you are feeling in your body and what you gut is telling your brain about your health with as much weight as anything you are told by your doctor.
You know best what you want for your health. You know best what your normal feels like, what you are feeling right now and how your daily life, childhood wounds, pregnancy depletion and thoughts have impacted your body.
When you are in the middle of an under-researched process of hormonal change which impacts each women differently, with your biological individuality, trust you, trust your feelings, your thoughts and your experience of your own body.
Self-trust, and learning to trust the messages from your body are the first step to an empowered menopause.
Trust you, take that trust an educate yourself on what your body needs and then advocate for yourself, in peri-menopause, menopause and beyond.