If we are interested in healing perimenopause or menopause symptoms naturally and simply, it’s important to understand why the 10 myths listed below are made-up stories about women’s health.
Believing these common myths can keep us caught in a web of disempowerment and searching for external fixes.
Transformative healing can occur once (having seen through the myths) we:
- embrace the body as brilliant (not diseased or malfunctioning)
- realize that we already have everything we need to heal our symptoms naturally
- reconnect with a divine intelligence that is always available to guide us on a path of good health, even while our hormones are in flux!
LET’S BUST THOSE MYTHS!
Myth #1: Menopause is a hormone deficiency.
Menopause is a natural part of a woman’s lifecycle – a rite of passage to enable a woman to evolve into a wiser elder.
Deficiency is not a natural part of our lifecycle.
People can become deficient in many elements when they fall off nature’s path of innate health – it’s an innocent human creation. To be deficient is not part of our inherent design.
The body instinctively knows what hormones we need at different times in our lives. No doctor needs to “fix” a woman journeying through natural menopause with hormones, because she is not broken.
Myth #2: Women never used to live beyond menopause.
It’s unfortunate that even celebrity doctors can’t understand the law of averages. Through the ages, AVERAGE life expectancy was low because child mortality was horrifically high. Women (or men) didn’t used to reach the age of 40 and drop dead (as is too often argued in the media).
Even today, we can see that in contemporary hunter gatherer societies, once a girl makes it through to adulthood, she has a good chance of living decades beyond menopause. This has always been the case, which is why when menopausal women appear in literature from the last two millennia, they are never described as rare freaks of nature!
Living beyond menopause is part of our design.
Myth #3: A woman needs a lab computer to tell her if she is in menopause or not.
Menopause is a process of change that lasts years. Over the last few decades, medicine has divided up the process into perimenopause, menopause and post-menopause.
Leading up to the menopausal years, women’s hormones are in constant flux but a lab test measures hormones from a specific point of time. As we move from the energy of our reproductive years to something new, if we are unmedicated, we’ll know!
If women have a greater awareness of what to expect in perimenopause and menopause and if women are more used to listening to their bodies, rather than numbing them, it becomes obvious how we can best take care of ourselves during this sensitive time.
I don’t need a lab computer to tell me what energy state I am in; no woman does! And we also don’t need to be fixated on hormone levels – our bodies know how to take care of that.
Myth #4: HRT offers the most effective relief for over 30 menopause symptoms.
How peculiar that a drop in female hormones (experienced by ALL menopausal women) can supposedly be responsible for such a wide range of symptoms in some women, and far fewer symptoms or even none in others.
Surely logic suggests that the broad experiences of symptoms or lack of them cannot therefore be attributed to a drop in hormones. There must be other factors at play!
Indeed, when women engage in healthier lifestyles (including the most overlooked factor, stress reduction) they experience significant symptom relief.
The trend over the last few decades has been to downplay the effectiveness of HRT for different symptoms (with the North American Menopause Society limiting the recommended use of HRT to three categories of symptoms or conditions).
Unfortunately, there are menopause influencers who recklessly make promises about the types of symptoms that HRT can relieve, without there being any solid science to back them up.
Myth #5: HRT helps prevent disease.
THERE IS NOT A SINGLE DISEASE THAT HRT CAN PREVENT IN HEALTHY WOMEN GOING THROUGH NATURAL MENOPAUSE. No large randomized controlled trials carried out over long periods of time have suggested that any form of HRT prevents diseases such as dementia, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, cancer, strokes and more.
With regards to osteoporosis, it should be noted that HRT taken at midlife has no lasting effect once the medication is halted. So, for a woman who is not experiencing bone density issues at midlife, she will not prevent bone density issues decades later by taking HRT for an average of seven years in her 40s or 50s.
Myth #6: Menopause causes disease.
It is nonsensical to suggest that a natural part of our lifecycle causes disease. Disease can indeed arise more frequently in older populations, but it is caused by lifestyle habits. The older we get, the more often we’ve repeated such habits.
Menopause offers us the opportunity to learn how good health is created because if we ignore the foundations of good health during the sensitive time of midlife change, we will experience symptoms. Our symptoms encourage us to get back on nature’s path.
By looking at the lifestyles of populations in Blue Zones (areas in the world where life expectancy is high and disease rates are low) we can see that menopause is no more likely to cause disease, just as HRT is no more likely to prevent it.
Myth #7: Our hormones are to blame for our discomfort.
It is impossible that our hormones act beyond the intelligence behind all life. It is also impossible to disconnect our hormones from our innate well-being. We feel “hormonal” when something upstream from our hormones is out of balance. We create imbalance in our innocence; it is not created by hormones.
Hormones have gotten a bad rap – they are labeled as crazy and out of control – and certain interests want us to believe that an external source of hormones will “fix” us! Instead, we should be looking at taking responsibility for obvious components that create and maintain good health: nutrition, movement, low stress, sleep, and time spent outdoors.
Myth #8: Today’s HRT and BHRT is much safer than previous versions.
Without long-term testing, we don’t know. Many products in the market are under-tested. Reading product inserts (which are also available on the internet) is often a shocker when one discovers the tiny trials carried out and held up as safety testing.
In addition, different medications react differently in different women. Populations are also far more medicated than in previous generations and interactions with other medications are under-researched. Even the supposedly less synthetic BHRT causes immediate negative side-effects in some women.
The push to encourage women to take testosterone is particularly worrying as there is no long-term safety data. #firstdonoharm
Myth #9: Pushing more women to rely on government and corporate supply chains to supposedly feel better in perimenopause and menopause will end well.
Women cannot be granted health and empowerment; both are inside jobs!
For women to thrive throughout their lifecycles we need to embrace our sovereignty and be free to choose our path. We also need accurate information from unbiased sources.
Tying a woman’s experience in menopause to government whims, corporate supply chains, financial and corrupt interests has never worked out well for women. #knowyourHRThistory
Myth #10: As soon as we reach menopause, it’s downhill from then on.
Many women experience a second spring as they move beyond their reproductive years. They find the energy and time to pursue passions that had remained suppressed and untended to for often most of their adult lives. Despite the doom and gloom of the dominant narrative, it’s quite possible that the best is yet to come!
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