Never forget, menopause has great commercial potential!!!

The pharmaceutical manufacturers have changed menopause from a natural life transition into a disease requiring treatment by labeling all aspects of normal aging and midlife problems as menopausal.

Naturally the drug companies have no concern for anything other then their profit columns and if this causes anguish and pain to millions of women why should they care?

Making menopause something that has to be “cured” does two things.

Firstly it encourages an unnaturally pessimistic view of menopause that will have repercussions for all women.

Secondly it leads to menopausal women being stereotyped as neurotic, unstable and not in complete control.

This makes us seen as women who cannot make rational decisions. And it can be used against us to dismiss legitimate grievances! (”She’s going through the Change you know”). It can also be freely used to discriminate against mature women in areas such as employment.

Straight out misogyny

The defining of a normal bodily state as diseased, the suggestion that women become worthless with the loss of childbearing capacities, the ideas behind the importance of sexual attractiveness are all based in pure unadulterated misogyny. Nothing else.

Sandra Coney exposes the profit line behind the whole mess.

I’ve read her work before, she was the co-author of the investigative report which outlined an unethical study at the premier womens’ hospital in New Zealand.

Coney exposed earlier unethical study

This study, started in 1966, involved following women with major cervical abnormalities without treating them - by 1987 many had developed cervical cancer and some had died. These women were not treated for their cancers, the cancers were studied!

The lives of women meant nothing as male doctors charted the development and progress of cervical cancer and, incidentally, greatly advanced their own careers.

The revelations led to a Committee of Inquiry, called the Cartwright Inquiry after the presiding judge, Judge Dame Silvia Cartwright (later New Zealand’s Governor General). Her report was a blueprint for patients’ rights in New Zealand and recommended a National Cervical Screening Programme.

Ever since then, I’ve picked up whatever Coney has written.

Yes, Sandra Coney is definitely good value. In this book she challenges the management of menopause by modern medicine. By labeling middle-aged women as estrogen-deficient, male medical professionals and pharmaceutical companies have intervened by creating a pathology of midlife. Then they happily (and profitably) manufacture therapies to ‘cure’ it.

The book includes some blatant examples of the sexism involved in the advertising of hormone therapy.

My favourite (!) is the misogynist slogan, “Menrium treats the menopausal symptoms that bother him the most,” and brace yourself for Coney’s quotations from doctors’ descriptions of the ‘physical unattractiveness’ of the postmenopausal female body.

This book is a few years old now, but the information is even more relevant to us today as more and more women reach that ‘certain age’.

Highly recommended

The Menopause Industry: How the Medical Establishment Exploits Women : amazon.com : amazon.ca

Tags: books