Women’s Health Resources: Menopause

With government health care information becoming spotty at best, or altogether missing at worst, especially as it relates to women’s health and individuals who are LGBTQIA+, it can feel overwhelming to try to find accurate medical information without making an appointment with your doctor, just to ask questions. Though staff are not medical professionals and therefore cannot offer any medical advice, the Library does have a plethora of resources to help. From databases like ConsumerLab.com, which provides scientific information from independent labs on a wide variety of consumer products, to our Health & Wellness database, which makes medical reference texts, journals, and articles available to the public for free with a Library card, the resources found at the Library can be an excellent place to start finding answers to questions.

The Library also, of course, has books! Books upon books of information that now feels more vital than ever before. In the past few years, more and more books have been published on a topic that I find myself ill-informed of: women’s anatomy and menstrual cycles, including and specifically menopause, something I never learned about in school, yet will be and already has been an indelible part of my life. In honor of Women’s History Month, I wanted to highlight some recent books that demystify menopause and all of the attendant changes that accompany this phase of women’s lives.

The Menopause Manifesto by Dr. Jen Gunter offers plenty of up-to-date scientifically accurate information on the various aspects of menopause, including the role medical racism plays in accurate diagnoses and treatment for women of color (for a comprehensive analysis of the enduring racism in American medicine that systematically exploited Black women for scientific advancement in gynecology, read Diedra Cooper Owens’ harrowing Medical Bondage). Dr. Mary Claire Haver’s The New Menopause aims to be comprehensive in scope and authoritative on the science of menopause. Haver also contributed the forward to Award-winning actor Naomi Watt’s recent memoir Dare I Say It, which offers a more personal entry to exploring the realities of menopause. Though it’s lighter on the medical side of things, Watts shares relatable stories about the complicated emotional aspects of menopause and the challenges she faced as a woman in her 30s going through perimenopause, including the disbelief she faced from male doctors due to her age.

TikTok darlings Carol King and Dr. Ashley Alexis, co-authors of Are you there, God? It’s Me, in Menopause, offer a more wry, humorous take on the trials and tribulations of experiencing menopause while still offering practical suggestions for dealing with the symptoms. What Fresh Hell Is This? by Heather Corrina, long-time sex educator, founder of queer sexual health information website Scarleteen, and contributing editor for the landmark Our Bodies, Ourselves is at the top of my reading list just for the title alone, but this is truly a book about menopause for every body, including the bodies of people usually left out of this discussion: queer, trans, non-binary, gender diverse, and those with disabilities are welcome and will see themselves in these pages. For a truly comic(al) take on menopause, editor MK Czerwiec (cocurator of GraphicMedicine.org) showcases the work of more than 20 diverse creators who share their personal experiences in Menopause: A Comic Treatment. No matter what your relationship to menopause is –  whether you’re in the middle of it, it’s on your horizon, or you have someone in your life who is or will experience it – the information and stories in these books can help you make sense of these changes and reaffirm that you are not alone in dealing with them.

~Posted by V.

  With government health care information becoming spotty at best, or altogether missing at worst, especially as it relates to women’s health and individuals who are LGBTQIA+, it can feel overwhelming to try to find accurate medical information without making an appointment with your doctor, just to ask questions. Though staff are not medical professionals and … Continue reading “Women’s Health Resources: Menopause” 

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