(NewsNation) — Despite the fact that more than 168 million Americans will experience or have experienced menopause, we don’t know a lot about it.
We do know it can cause debilitating symptoms such as hot flashes so severe that you sweat through your clothes, brain fog so extreme you can’t focus at work, sleepless nights, anxiety and depression.
News anchor Tamsen Fadal turned her crisis into her cause. Now, she’s raising awareness for the 1 billion women living with a condition long neglected by mainstream medicine and the mainstream media — until now.
Fadal had made it.
She was living her dream as a prime-time news anchor in New York, but one night in 2019, while she was on air, her body nearly called it quits.
“That feeling of I’m going to black out, so I said kind of jokingly — I work in a studio of men, and I’ve never had an incident on the set before — I said if I fall over, someone catch me. There’s something wrong,” Fadal said.
She landed on the floor of the bathroom, half-conscious and perplexed.
“First, I thought, did I have food poisoning? Did I have what was going around? Why am I so anxious leading up to that for several months?” Fadal said. “I’ve been having problems with the teleprompter, and it really knocked my confidence.”
Fadal was seeing words that she knew but couldn’t get them out of her mouth and would have to skip them.
She headed to her doctor and had bloodwork done to make sense of the medical mystery. The answer was another “m-word.”
“I got a note in my patient portal that said, ‘In menopause, any questions?’”
Like any journalist, Fadal had plenty, and she found her doctor’s answers unsatisfactory.
So she turned to social media and discovered a platform on TikTok to talk about her symptoms and struggles.
Although women were starting to speak out about their symptoms on social media, the news media wasn’t covering it. In part, that’s because for decades — or centuries — menopause was rarely mentioned in public unless as a punchline.
Despite the fact that the condition impacts millions and the symptoms are often severe, menopause has been treated more like an orphan disease. Medical schools are still playing catch-up, trying to teach students how to treat it.
“I think it’s fallen out of the curriculum of most of these educational programs,” said Dr. Stephanie Faubion, Mayo Clinic women’s health director. “And so you have a whole generation of providers that really has no idea how to manage menopause.”
Even more troubling, the most effective known treatment, hormone replacement therapy, fell out of favor in 2002 when a single study connected it to breast cancer.
“These women heard, ‘Oh, I’m going to get breast cancer and die,’ and literally they went to their toilets and flushed down any estrogenic substances in their house,” said Yale University School of Medicine gynecologist Dr. Mary Jane Minkin.
Overnight, the use of hormone therapy went from 40% to 5%, and for years after, women suffered silently.
Things mostly stayed the same until 2022, when the North American Menopause Society confirmed that hormone replacement therapy is safe for most women.
“For those women who are under the age of 60, within 10 years of the menopause onset and are having bothersome symptoms, and who are relatively healthy, typically the benefits outweigh the risks,” Faubion said.
Hormone therapy can also help with cognitive decline, protect bones and guard against cardiovascular disease, said HerMD co-founder and chief growth officer Dr. Somi Javaid.
As more women are coming forward to make the topic less taboo, menopause is being acknowledged as the life-changing condition it is. A leading physician is even pushing Congress to pass legislation to restart government-funded research.
“I think one of the other things that this bill is (trying) to do is to really task the NIH to examine the gaps in our knowledge to figure out what are the things don’t we know,” said Dr. Sharone Malone, OB-GYN and Chief Medical Advisor of Alloy. “And that to me has been the travesty that we have lost 21 years of pertinent data that we could have had. And now it’s time to answer those questions.”
For Fadal, her experience has turned into a call to action. She is encouraging many others to speak out and educate women about what menopause is and not be embarrassed by it.
“It’s often been a punchline, and I think that’s what the problem is, and I really aim to shatter that silence,” Fadal said.