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Article URL: Article appearing on FLORIDA TODAY Women Have New Menopause Choices
The signs are everywhere: Women of a certain age fan themselves in offices, shops, concert halls and cafes.
Drugstores stock a confusing assortment of vitamins, herbal mood enhancers and soy supplements, all marketed as female-friendly.
Actress Lauren Hutton, in a prime-time TV commercial, touts hormone replacement therapy to fight osteoporosis.
A California travel agency offers women-only "Menopausal Tours" on the Internet.
They're all harbingers of menopause, that hormonally imbalanced, transitional time of life - average age 51 - that signals the end of a woman's childbearing years.
And while many in previous generations endured virtually in silence the hot flashes, mood swings and other unmentionable symptoms of "the change," today's unprecedented millions of baby boomers are bringing their midlife menopause concerns into the open and researching treatment options.
"In the past, it was a closed issue, women didn't talk about it," observes Dr. Jerrold Weinberg, who changed his general obstetrics and gynecology practice to the Birmingham (Mich.) Menopause Institute a few years ago.
"Nowadays, it's a movement. This is the same generation that, 25 or 30 years ago, wanted to know more about labor and delivery, more about natural childbirth, than their mothers ever did. These women are now 50 years old, and they know change is happening in their bodies and they want to have information so they can deal with it."
With U.S. women living much longer (generally into their 80s) and destined to spend about one-third of their lives beyond menopause, its not surprising that new products and information are everywhere, from a spate of "Not Your Mother's Menopause" magazine articles to such Internet sites as http://www.power-surge.net and the North American Menopause Society's http://www.menopause.org. But choosing a treatment for pre- and post-menopausal symptoms remains confusing.
Low-dose estrogen patches and even birth control pills are now standard treatment for some women in their 40s whose symptoms start as much as five or more years before actual menopause, defined as 12 consecutive months after the last menstrual period.
Yet doctors say not all women need hormone replacement therapy. Certain women get symptomatic relief with such supplements as black cohosh, red clover, chasteberry and soy, combined with better diet, exercise and other lifestyle changes.
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