How to Cope Successfully with Menopause by Dr Joan McClelland

The menopause is an event to welcome, a stimulating new chapter in your life. You can say goodbye to period pains, water retention, PMS together with a host of psychological problems including irritability, depression and chronic tension.

The menopause is a vantage point from which to take stock, reviewing your earlier life and looking ahead to new interests, deepening relationships and fresh goals. You are entering an important and fascinating time in your life and to get the best out of it you need to work in harmony with nature, this book aims to help you achieve this aim.

• What is the menopause and why is it so important?
• Know your way around
• How the system works: The controls
• Symptoms and signs: Local
• Symptoms and signs: General
• Psychological and emotional effects
• Osteoporosis
• Heart and artery disease
• Hormone replacement therapy: Why should you take it?
• Hormone replacement therapy: How to take it
• Hormone replacement therapy: Side-effects
• Exercise as treatment
• Treatment other than HRT
• Alternative therapies
• Herbal medicines
• Sex and the menopause
• Contraception
• Eating for health in the change

How to Cope Successfully with Menopause

Disclaimer: The aim of this book is to provide general information only and should not be treated as a substitute for the medical advice of your doctor or any other health care professional. The publisher and author are not responsible or liable for any diagnosis made by a reader based on the contents of this book. Always consult your doctor if you are in any way concerned about your health.

How to Cope Successfully with Menopause

Introduction

The menopause is an event to welcome - the opening of a gateway into fresh, new, stimulating chapter in your life. At last you can be your own person, uncluttered by what used to be called 'the curse' - the monthly physical and emotional disturbance that always seemed to come at the wrong time. You can say goodbye to PMT, water retention, period pain and a host of psychological symptoms - irritability, depression and chronic tension. You will no longer be at risk of becoming anaemic from the monthly loss of blood.

Nor are you, at this stage, caught up in the frenetic drive to compete for men and jobs that bugged you at 30, the niggling worry about contraceptive failure, nor the balancing act between family and career. Your children still need you, but more often now as a wise counsellor than a workhorse.

This exciting stage in your personal development comes plumb in the middle of the most productive period of adult life, the two decades from 40 to 60 - currently the peak age for the menopause in the UK is 50 years and 9 months. Three-quarters of scientific advances are made by 50 to 60-year-olds, while novelists' output is running at a high, and career women, like men, are reaching their highest earning capacity. It is a time of opportunity or for consolidation - whichever attracts you.

The menopause is a vantage point from which to take stock, reviewing your earlier life and learning its lessons, and looking ahead to any heights you want to scale, or the quieter achievement of new interests and the deepening of your relationships. There is plenty of time -30 or 40 years, minimum - to fit in all you want. On the personal front, which as a woman is always with you, whatever your other work and responsibilities, you are at a crucial stage. Among the items you may have to cope with are:

1. Teenaged and newly adult children in serious need of guidance and support—whatever they might say!
2. Marriage: the fabric has often become dangerously threadbare at this juncture, and running repairs are urgently needed - or a divorce achieved without bloodletting.
3. Your sex life may be at crisis point, too, having become no more riveting than cleaning your teeth. It will need a fresh infusion of magic.
4. Your own parents are beginning to act their age, and the balance of power, or at least of responsibility, is shifting from their shoulders to yours. You will find them looking to you for help and advice - for instance with the intricacies of the internet.
5. You may have been turned, willy-nilly, into a grandmother, perhaps with hands-on involvement, producing a conflict over your job and your inclinations.

It would be impossible to cope successfully with all of this, plus have some fun and satisfaction for yourself, if it were not for the menopause. This is the time to off-load inessentials, like your periods. For your partner as well as yourself, this is the time to rejig your lifestyle, for long-term health and efficiency. Enlarge the slots for exercise and, especially, rearrange your diet. It is deadly to your figure, your joints and your arteries to continue with the food intake you needed at 20 and 30.

Don't be misled by the downbeat pronouncements of the pessimists, many of them men, who write off the menopause as made up of decline, deterioration and loss. Our grandmothers' phrase, 'the change of life', is more accurate, since the essence is change rather than loss. The only thing you have lost is the ability to have babies - and hopefully you will have done this already, if you wanted to. It is only in the West that the menopause has negative connotations. In much of Asia and Africa it is regarded as an achievement and a boon. In sub-Saharan Africa and Ethiopia women greatly increase in status when they pass the change, while in Rajasthan they are released from purdah and may mix freely with the opposite sex for the first time. They are considered wise enough now to guide younger people.

Men, who age faster than women, make a big thing of celebrating their half-century. This is not the way of women. We are far too wise to be constrained by dates and ages. If we want to stop counting at 49 - why not? Better still to ignore the crude and meaningless numbers and live as you feel. Middle age is a state of mind - don't fall into it.

Meanwhile your body is making some sensible adjustments to fit itself for your new life, and while this is happening you may get some tiresome symptoms. Not everyone is affected, but if you are among the unlucky 80%, you have the consolation of knowing that this stage is temporary. No one is menopausal at 90! Besides, if your enjoyment of life is being impaired, there is HRT - hormone replacement therapy - to rescue you, or a range of other treatments if that does not suit you.

You are entering an important and fascinating phase in your life, different from anything you have experienced before. To get the very best out of it you need to work in harmony with what nature is trying to do, and for this you need to understand your own body. Together, in this book, let us examine the interesting and useful facts about your body and how it functions and adapts to your needs. Your feelings, too, need special understanding at this turning point in your life.

Recent research has shown a new use for oestrogen patches, these have proved useful in some cases for treating men with advance cancer of the prostate. These patches have shown a lower risk of side effects than the tablets previously prescribed. Women too may have side effects with oestrogen, the implication of the male studies is that women may also benefit from these patches. Trials are currently under way.

About the author
Dr Joan McClelland studied medicine in London, Glasgow and Birmingham. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1982 and obtained diplomas in the history and philosophy of medicine in 1996 and 1998 respectively. Her particular interest is the relationship between physical and psychological illness.