Why Midlife Women Feel Dismissed In Healthcare
It's a sad truth that as a midlife woman seeking medical help, you’ll likely be dismissed before you can find that help.
I don’t mean dismissed as in you’ll be “kicked out” of a medical practice. I mean you’ll be told "It's just aging" or given an anti-depressant without any discussion of hormone replacement therapy (HRT).
We’re all aging, that's undeniable. An anti-depressant may be helpful in certain situations.
But that's not the whole story.
I’m not here to make excuses for medical culture treating you this way, but I’m offering my opinion on why it’s the sad truth and how I can help.
Paternalism still exists
You would think this had fallen by the wayside but it hasn’t. I'm not anti-man. Not at all. I've worked with many fantastic male doctors, truly. They exist. But there are still some who are just dicks. They think the birth control pill is an easy fix to your symptoms because it shuts down the system rather than supporting it. They don't listen, they don't check labs, and they don't prescribe bio-identical HRT.
2. Training didn't cover midlife women
This isn't an excuse but the fact is: most clinicians just do not know the answer to your midlife questions. They don't know the symptoms, the reasons behind them, or what to do about them.
That's because menopause and perimenopause are not covered in medical school or even obgyn residency. In my four years of residency training as an obgyn, I had one hour of informal lecture on menopause. That's it.
Once I got into practice, I realized how unprepared I was to care for this population and how unacceptable that is, so I changed it on my own. I studied and I learned (and continue to do so) to better understand the physiology, the current research, and how to help you.
3. Lacking humility
It's one thing to not know the answer, it's another to actually say it. It takes humility to acknowledge our shortcomings, both personally and professionally. But instead of admitting this, the status quo for medical culture has been to skirt the issue. Act like there's nothing more to know or do for midlife women.
I still need the humility to say, “I don't know”. I have patients come to me with strange side effects that I can't always explain. I continue to listen, learn, and adjust. Some of this is trial-and-error because each woman is an individual and there’s no playbook for this in medicine.
We are aging. We are stressed. We want to age well and manage stress. But it's not just aging. It's not just stress. You are having symptoms. Birth control isn't the solution.
You just have to find a doctor who listens, gets it, and can adjust for you.