Overview

Every woman will eventually make the journey through menopause. For most, menopause occurs around around age 50. Those women are lucky, because they can access the plethora of books that will help guide them through every phase of menopause. But for at least 1 in 100 women, menopause can occur as early as age 35, sometimes younger. And thousands more women will experience premature ovarian failure due to other medical conditions and treatments, such as cancer treatment. Whatever the cause of early menopause, women going through it are left in a vacuum, where finding a healthcare practitioner experienced enough to treat them is difficult, let alone finding suitable information. Until now. With Menopause Before 40: Coping with Premature Ovarian Failure, Karin Banerd adds an important voice to menopause literature, addressing the distinct needs of the woman in premature menopause, as they are quite different from those of natural menopause. Banerd's personal experience and knowledge of premature menopause offers a unique perspective, as she shares her intimate, treacherous and painful journey that started at age 35. In the book, Banerd describes the warning signs of hormonal decline and the havoc these unexpected changes wreaked on her life. She also highlights the unique context of premature menopause, how it necessitates a different set of responses from doctors, and what she feels those responses should be. She goes on to explain exactly what premature menopause is and how it differs from natural menopause. And finally, she details various strategies for maintaining optimum health during the menopausal years. The last section, in particular, demonstrates how premature menopause can be a wake-up call for making nutritional and lifestyle choices that have far-reaching effects into the senior years.

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9781412034647

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"Those of you familiar with feminist terminology may have heard the phrase: ""The personal is political."" This means that within one woman's story are the stories of many women, and often, the collective female health story. Karin Banerd first contacted me in 2001 by email. Karin had read the first edition of The Gynecological Sourcebook (now in its fourth edition) and was frustrated by its limited treatment of premature menopause and premature ovarian failure. At the time of Karin's email, I was developing my on-demand publishing company, which was designed to cater to ""orphan"" or stigmatizing conditions that traditional health publishers ignore. Karin was correct; there was certainly a dearth of material in this area, and my book was no help at all to women going through premature menopause. Karin had been through premature menopause in the 1980s, when there was no Internet access, and no information to find. Women like Karin had only nuggets of often incomplete or inaccurate information. Shuffled between specialists and sent off to a psychiatrist to deal with very real, physical discomforts, thousands of women like Karin were lost in the health care system. Premature menopause is not just one event, but a process that changes the lives of women experiencing it. It's not just about flooding, irregular cycles, and hot flashes. Early menopause dramati y impacts women's relationships with their lovers or spouses, friends, children, colleagues--and most of all their relationship with themselves. A woman's identity is so entangled with her natural cycle, it's impossible to experience premature menopause in body only-- it affects our emotional and spiritual health. Some of this is also ""iatrogenic"" or ""doctor-caused"" trauma, in that recurring themes of incomplete information and an absence of informed consent and respect for persons dominate many women's experiences with premature menopause. I replied to Karin by email that perhaps she ought to consider writing about premature menopause rather than wait for someone like me to get around to it. I told Karin that if she wrote the book, I would publish it. Through my work as a feminist sociologist and bioethicist, I recognized the need for women's health books in women's voices--books about women's health issues written by the women going through the health problems, not just an objective medical voice (or mine, for that matter) describing the processes in detachment. In bioethics, we call this ""patient narrative"" and in philosophy, it's known as ""phenomenology."" More folksy language might term it ""herstory."" Whatever you want to call it, this new work by Karin Banerd is an example of bravery. It was a difficult and emotional book for her to write, and an equally difficult book to edit, as we toiled over how personal the personal needs to be in order to tell the story. Karin shares with us not just the symptoms of her premature menopause but her life experience with it, which I know from my own research echoes the life experiences of thousands of North American women. The women's health movement, which produced works such as Our Bodies, Ourselves, exists because of the recognition that women heal through their health storytelling. In 1988, the popular drama thirtysomething was deluged with mail after running a storyline involving the character ""Nancy,"" whose ovaries were removed because of cancer. Nancy described her early menopause to a television audience in poignant detail, and it so touched women that the producers could not handle the volumes of mail triggered by the episode. Women routinely live with the changeable effects of their hormones-- the many physical discomforts and shifts in moods and emotional responses women experience during a normal cycle are one thing; but factor in pregnancy, breastfeeding, and menopause, and women's lives can be shaped in fundamental ways by their reproductive lives. We're also living in a world that was not built for us: Our economy and the buildings we work in, for example, were designed for males--not for bodies that menstruate, get pregnant, breastfeed, and go through menopause--especially premature menopause. There are also unfair power arrangements in both our working and intimate relationships that predispose women to depression, a subject I cover in depth in my book Women and Depression. So it's important to recognize there are other things going on before and during our reproductive life cycles and cornerstones; there are social causes for mood swings, and social causes that exacerbate the normal physical discomforts that we go through during the various stages of our lives. Karin's story will show you how one woman's body affected one woman's life; but by publishing her story, other women will know that they are not alone and will see themselves in Karin. I'm proud to bring you the first of a long line of ""women's voices health books"" on topics traditional health publishers ignore."

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