When Doctors Dismiss Your Symptoms As Perimenopause
named after the nearby town. She was put on a two-week course of antibiotics, but it wasn’t sufficient, and her symptoms worsened; she had excruciating pressure headaches, constantly dilated pupils, and a quickening heartbeat. That was when she sought out an infectious-disease specialist.. Katy was stunned. “It was scary, because untreated Lyme can be very dangerous, and it looked like she might not give me more antibiotics,” she says.
This story is not an isolated one. “Sometimes there is a tendency to over-attribute everything to the onset of menopause,” says Nanette Santoro, M.D., chair of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Since perimenopause can last years, if your doctor seems to feel that perimenopause explains everything, she says, “you should be suspicious.
Some women start perimenopause in their mid-30s, others in their mid-50s, with 49 the average in the U.S. Women who begin the process early tend to have a longer perimenopause—up to a decade, research has shown. Such research, though, hasn’t been extensive. In fact, in the two decades since the first major studies about perimenopause began, there have been surprisingly few studies on a condition that affects fully half the population. Enter “menopause” or “perimenopause” into the national database of research studies and you get roughly 69,000 combined entries. This may sound like a lot until you realize “” has more than a million hits.
This can be confusing for both doctor and patient—which can lead to significant problems. Sallie Sarrel, 45, of Millburn, NJ, thought it was reasonable when her functional medicine gynecologist promised that her massive bloating, weight gain, exhaustion, and intense breast pain would disappear once she addressed perimenopause by balancing her hormones. Sallie did a year of hormone treatments, but they didn’t help.
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