Defining what is normal at menopause: How women's and clinician's different understandings may lead to a lack of provision for those in most need

Abstract

Many aspects of women's reproductive life have fallen under the medical gaze and the end of women's fertility has been no exception. For several years hormone therapy (HT) was considered the best solution for menopause symptoms and in some countries more than 50% of eligible women were prescribed oestrogen. Clinicians were accused of ‘medicalising the normal’ by applying the biomedical model to a natural lifestage and thus defining menopause as an illness which deviates from biological normality. The purpose of this paper is to review what women and their clinicians ‘know’ about menopause, and what happens when these two different types of knowledge collide. In the last decade, menopause has been demedicalised, partly because of criticism from feminist researchers, partly due to the publication of major studies indicating elevated risk of breast and ovarian cancers and venous thromboembolisms and, partly because neither physicians nor women experiencing menopause know what constitutes normality. The combined result has been that many clinicians have been cautious about prescribing drugs to treat problematic symptoms. This raises the concern that demedicalisation of menopause may have gone too far, leaving the 20–30% of women who experience distressing symptoms without adequate help or relief.

Keywords::

• Demedicalisation
• oestrogens
• primary care

Declaration of interest: The author reports no declarations of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of the paper.