87% of Women Don't Seek Help for Menopause
What that means for women and their partners.
A recent Mayo clinic survey found that 87% of women don’t seek medical help for their menopausal symptoms.
That’s a surprising number.
The Story Behind The Numbers
The reasons are even more revealing. 65% said they prefer to manage their symptoms on their own. For 37% time was the biggest factor, a lack of awareness of potential treatments was the reason given by 22% of women and embarrassment as a reason was given by 18%.
What interests me is the other responses.
For 37% of women, time was a factor. That speaks to the type of women I believe are being left out of the mainstream conversations. Frontline workers. Those women who don’t have flexible schedules and for whom taking time off to see a doctor has financial implications, loss of wages and the cost of seeing a doctor when they don’t have adequate healthcare solutions.
A lack of awareness is also not surprising. Women are still left in the dark in terms of adequate and well grounded information about the menopause transition. When they do seek information research suggests it comes from a variety of sources, Google, Friends and Family, social media and online communities. What’s missing from this list is clinicians.
Why Aren’t Doctors The First Place Women Turn?
Why might clinicians be one of the last places that a woman turns to? We already identified that 22% of women weren’t aware of potential treatments. But it’s broader than that. Women often don’t connect the symptoms they are feeling together as coming from one source.
The reality for some women is that they may have faced long wait times to see a doctor, perhaps their doctor wasn’t helpful the last time they saw them, or their symptoms were dismissed.
For 18% of women, embarrassment was a factor. They just didn’t want to discuss their symptoms. Some of that can be cultural, some of it ingrained in them to “not be a bother”.
If some of these women aren’t discussing their symptoms with their doctors and they are discussing them in community spaces where they feel safe discussing this topic, the other person that is likely to be left out of the conversation is their partner.
Where Do Men Get Their Information?
Where do their partners turn? Often to similar sources as the women in their lives, Google, AI and online communities. What they don’t have is the knowledge to leverage those sources properly. While a woman might search or discuss symptoms a man is more likely to search or discuss impact. Those are very different perspectives of the same situation. The symptoms are the root cause of the impact but without understanding that men will often jump to conclusions or even imply reasons that don’t exist.
In the MATE survey 63% of men said they had been impacted by menopause, 25% said it had affected their relationship. Those aren’t symptom discussions, those are impact discussions. In many situations, while men want to help they just aren’t finding the answers that can lead them in the direction that their partner needs most.
There is a big difference in searching for information based on “Why is my wife suddenly so different?” and “How can I help with hot flashes?” The results are not going to produce the same results in the relationship.
If women aren’t primarily getting their information from clinicians and men aren’t getting their information from women, then we have two separate people trying to navigate the same situation in isolation. This information gap can be, amongst others, the source of friction between partners. A lack of shared language, of shared knowledge.
When partners start to close that gap they can navigate this transition together.
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