Approximately 1 million women experience the start of menopause every year, yet many are surprised and bewildered by its arrival, so much so that they can’t even help themselves. According to a 2021 survey of 1,000 U.S. women, more than 70% of women don’t treat their menopausal symptoms because they don’t even understand what’s happening to their own bodies.
It sneaks up on even the most well-resourced people. Oprah Winfrey and her longtime buddy, journalist Maria Shriver, spoke out about the silence surrounding menopause during a conversation in the Paramount+ series “The Checkup With Dr. David Agus.” Both women described being unprepared for the “change of life.”
The fact that people with resources like Winfrey and Shriver didn’t know what was happening to them shows just how little we talk about menopause. To combat this lack of knowledge, experts argue that we should “normalize” it; Australian obstetrician Martha Hickey and three women’s health professors from the United Kingdom, United States and Australia advocated doing just that in The British Medical Journal. Winfrey and Shriver also used that word.
