The Great Menopause Myth

From hormone replacement therapy to the benefits of yoga and meditation, this book is a comprehensive guide to navigating menopause. Includes discussion of the importance of self care; menopause and your sex life; the truth about your hormones; solutions for vaginal health; the myriad of symptoms that accompany perimenopause and menopause; how your diet can improve your health; and the effects of inflammation on the body.

Beat midlife mayhem and thrive through menopause with this comprehensive, holistic guide offering the latest research and treatment advice. As a woman, menopause and perimenopause is a time when your health shifts dramatically. Hot flashes, disruptions in sleep, along with declines in mood, cognition, weight management, bone density, and heart health can have a significant impact on your well-being and quality of life. More than simply an end to your reproductive capacity, it is a time when your health can spin out of control due to hormonal shifts that impact everything from immunity to risk for chronic health conditions. Up until recently, the messaging around these unwelcome midlife changes has been that they are an inevitable part of aging and that, if you can just white-knuckle the discomfort, it will eventually pass. For decades, conventional wisdom--and medical practice--have told women to simply endure the constellation of symptoms, from hot flashes and sleeplessness to loss of muscle mass, depression, painful sex, joint pain, and incontinence. Or a traditional MD might reluctantly recommend a one-size-fits-all HRT prescription. However, new research and clinical practice is showing that that approach is wrong and sets you up to age quicker, sicker, and with a lower quality of life. The findings reveal that menopause is not just about the uterus and ovaries--it affects the whole body from brain to bones. The Great Menopause Myth fills in the missing picture for women and gives comprehensive information on: Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) Heath Risks After Menopause Metabolic health Gut function Nutrition Movement Sleep quality Stress management Centered on your overall health and happiness, The Great Menopause Myth offers a welcome new narrative on menopause.

The first book to explain the biology of menopause in clear, everyday terms, Turning Point offers women an intelligent portrait of what happens to the body during menopause and reveals what they can do to make this time less distressing. It will allow them to question physicians with authority, understand their answers, and take a more active role in treatment.

"If a menopausal woman has pain or makes trouble, pound her hard on the jaw." (Egyptian medical text, 2000 B.C.) For almost a century women have been taking some form of estrogen to combat the effects of menopause and aging,and more recently to prevent a host of diseases, from osteoporosis to Alzheimer's to heart disease. For most of that hundred years, doctors have been prescribing estrogen in either its organic or synthetic forms, and women have gone to their pharmacists and dutifully filled their prescriptions. In some cases, menopause sufferers who were experiencing the most extreme symptoms were in search of relief from hot flashes, night sweats, dryness, and more, but increasingly in recent years, women began receiving estrogen sometimes with progesterone as "hormone therapy," not because they were in immediate danger of anything but rather as a preventative. But was this regimen warranted? Did doctors know enough about estrogen and its effects to be widely prescribing it for such a range of ailments? Or were women being used as guinea pigs in a great experiment, an experiment the author terms "The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women"? Since the 1960s, women's health icon Barbara Seaman has been one of the lone voices in journalism to question whether doctors have sufficient justification to be writing so many estrogen prescriptions, or whether it is the pharmaceutical industry that is driving the research, marketing, and use of hormone replacement therapy. In 2002, several important women's health studies revealed that estrogen may cause more problems in patients than it is correcting or preventing, and that in fact it has a dismal record in terms of prevention. This groundbreaking book illuminates today's "menopause industry," tracing the history of estrogen use from its early purveyors, including a well-meaning British doctor who lost control of the marketing of DES and therefore inadvertently led to the DES baby crisis, to Nazi experimentation with women and estrogen, to the present, and looks at how an experiment of this proportion could have been conducted without oversight,intervention, or real knowledge as to what its effects would be.