By Melissa Smith, outreach & communications officer

Despite menopause being a completely natural life stage for women, it’s long been a bit hush hush – until recent years. Today menopause is a ‘hot’ topic and big business. Globally the menopause market is estimated to reach $24.4 billion by 2030 as women become more empowered to discuss their journeys and demand more support.

Think of menopause, and the public mind now jumps to synthetic hormone replacement therapy (HRT), as menopause is increasingly presented as a disease to be medicated. Young women are becoming more scared and apprehensive of the journey ahead of them as they’re bombarded with messages alluding to the dreadful effects of menopause that can only be combatted through HRT. Yet they’re not told that synthetic HRT brings with it a swathe of potentially adverse effects and that there are alternatives that are healthy and natural. They’re also not told that not every menopause journey is a challenging one, or of the menopause bounty that is bestowed on a woman who embraces this deeply creative and portentous life stage.

>>> World Menopause Day takes place on the 18^th October each year as part of Menopause Awareness Month. This year’s theme is hormone replacement therapy (HRT) or as it’s known in some circles, menopause hormone therapy (MRT).

The power to erase menopause…

It could be the increased, largely manufactured, dread of menopause — or more likely, the size of the market to be capitalised (kerching!), but researchers are now looking at ways to delay or erase menopause. All done in the name of safety, like so many other health travesties that have been perpetrated on people these past 4 years. Getting rid of this natural stage in a woman’s life is ostensibly to protect her health from the deprivations of menopause and potentially extend her child-bearing years.

A team from Columbia University in the US is studying the effects of rapamycin, a key target for anti-ageing practitioners, on extending ovarian life to avoid menopause. But —and this is a big but — messing about with such integral and complex pathways in a woman’s body can also increase the risk of disease and the rate of ageing. If it ain’t broke…

Meanwhile, a US biotech company, Oviva Therapeutics, is investigating the role of anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) in preserving egg stocks by increasing levels of AMH. It’s also considering using gene editing to engineer women’s bodies to permanently create higher levels of AMH. A far more terrifying prospect than the menopause for those of us that understand the body …

There will undoubtedly be some who jump at the chance of erasing or indefinitely delaying menopause. Yet hasn’t the state of our health and the planet’s health taught us anything?

Working with nature, not against it

If the past 70 years of pharmaceutical development have taught us anything, it’s that there’s no magic bullet. No matter how companies may scramble to find it. Diet and lifestyle interventions are still our most powerful medicine for creating health and mitigating chronic disease. So too are they powerful mechanisms to make the journey through menopause a lot less rocky.

As someone who has made this journey and supported others through it, I’d offer that rather than being something to be feared and fought, menopause should be a celebration of a woman’s transition to revered elder, grandmother and sage. A keeper of wisdom for the community.

With that in mind below you’ll find our top picks from the ANH archive offering a wealth of information with which to make properly informed choices about how a woman may wish to navigate her individual menopause journey. Let’s celebrate and support this natural life stage, rather than create fear and resistance to it.

	Celebrate, don’t medicalise, menopause! Should women be helped to embrace, rather than be made to fear, this natural life stage?
	Is there such a thing as the ‘menopause brain’? Read on if you're menopausal and think you're losing your mind. Find out why you’re actually not, why your brain, like the rest of your body, is going through an important transition—and what you can do naturally to get back on track.
	Guest Feature: Bio-identical hormones vs HRT – read this before you decide! We ask leading hormonal expert Dr Nyjon Eccles PhD why this therapy which has benefited many thousands of menopausal women is under attack

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