Don’t be fooled by the narrower topic focus of Amy Alkon’s new book, GOING MENOPOSTAL: What You (and Your Doctor) Need to Know about the Real Science of Menopause and Perimenopause. Amy’s latest book gives readers a highly entertaining journey through her personal experiences in dealing with her own menopause arc, and offers plenty of good advice and actual science that women should know. However, the real core issue at the heart of Going Menopostal is the exposure of how little science actually makes it into health care — and what everyone needs to know when dealing with life cycles and serious health issues.
I spoke with Amy on Friday about her new book, and why at this point it should even be necessary. Modern medical science has warehouses of research specific to menopause and perimenopause at this point, which Amy confirms — but only because she had to do her own research. Doctors and other practitioners simply do not keep up with the science, Amy discovered — and we all discovered during the pandemic:
Amy: Now, there might be the rare doctor who does read science, is able to, but generally, not only are they not trained in how to read and evaluate science, they don’t have time. I go to an HMO, they see patients every 20 minutes, chop, chop, chop. They have electronic medical record keeping requirements. And I’m a little bit of a psycho, I read science day and night, but people wanna go home and have a family and go out and do things and celebrate holidays instead of staying home, pouring over science.
And so, this is something that needs to be fixed by medical institutions and medical education and they’re just not fixing it because nobody really knows. Nobody knows to scream about it, except I do that in this book because, frankly, I had to have a chapter on this because people don’t believe, they don’t want to believe how little evidence is behind much of our medical care. In fact, I’m gonna read you a quote from the back of the book, that more than half of the medical care we get in the US may not be based on or supported by adequate evidence, not great evidence, rigorous evidence, adequate evidence.
This is according to the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, and that’s from 2011. So medicine grows in complexity. So it’s surely much more now, and certain fields, I mean, the whole idea of the cholesterol, the lipid hypothesis that cholesterol causes heart disease, I mean, this is not proven, yet they treat us all on that. They give all these people statins that are very harmful drugs. And just every area of our if you don’t personally know the science, buyer beware, because it’s likely your doctor doesn’t either and goes by practice standards that are not evidence-based.
Ed: It’s very easy to convince people of this after the last five years, right? You know, with COVID and how much of what we were told turned out to just be either wrong or completely unfounded, like these six foot social distancing rule.
Amy: Oh my God, no science behind that. None. There’s so many things like this. There’s a lot of stuff in medicine. Doctors prescribe based on clinical habit. That means we do what they do because they do it. That’s not science.
The main point behind Amy’s book comes in its fourth section, which urges women to take agency for their care and to do their own groundwork on the science. As I point out, that’s a message that applies universally, especially in an industry whose providers consider their consumers inadequate to the task:
Ed: Some doctors have this idea that you’re one of the lab creatures in terms of agency. And that’s gotten better over the years. But I’m telling you, if you don’t follow what Amy Alkon talks about in part Part four, you are never going to get the care that you need and deserve.
Amy: You have to demand agency. And this is something I wrote about in my last book, Unf*ckology, which is that, OK, so say that you’re timid, you know, and you don’t want to go over and talk to that person over there. Well, OK, what does it take? What’s going to happen if you do that? You’re going to feel a little uncomfortable. Can you feel uncomfortable for like a minute? Are you able to do that? Are you able to survive that?
Yeah, you are.
Put it another way: Can you live with a moment of discomfort and unease to ensure you survive whatever health crisis you face? And can you stand up for yourself by arming yourself with the facts and the data and dealing with reality? As the pandemic demonstrated, the medical establishment won’t do that work for you — especially in a crisis. They resort to pack mentality and the paths of least resistance.
Amy has plenty more to say in our interview, and her book is stuffed with great advice and empathy for the women who are journeying through these passages. Just don’t think for a moment that the book or Amy’s advice is limited to them.
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