Many thanks to our speakers, Phyllis Greenberger, Dr. James Simon, and Susan Wysocki, and to Disruptive Women’s Wendy Grossman for the following summary post.
Our panel this morning discussed the issues surrounding how the WHI results were interpreted and communicated to women and their health care providers. We recognize that hormones are not appropriate for all women, and look forward to hosting a future panel that highlights alternatives.
The speakers have a variety of backgrounds and experiences (and genders), and we aim to promote diversity of voices.
This was not normal breakfast conversation.
Today was a jolting – and disruptive – talk about what happens to women’s bodies when they age. (Who knew that if you’re menopausal and you don’t take your hormones, your vagina can literally dry up and shrink?)
The second in Disruptive Women’s 2010 breakfast series, today’s talk was titled, “News (Hot) Flash: Sex, Drugs & Menopause.” The breakfast at Johnny’s Half Shell, was sponsored by Medco – and we’re happy to say there were two men in the audience this month – double last time.
The breakfast started with a screening of trailer for the upcoming movie Hot Flash Havoc. (Think: Michael Moore tackles menopause.)
“It’s not available in theaters yet – but it will be,” said Disruptive Women’s Robin Strongin, introducing the film.
I’m genuinely sad that the documentary isn’t being released until October-ish. Normally, I don’t want to watch anything at 7:30 in the morning, but the little bit that was shown was so funny I can’t wait to see the whole thing. (Seriously, put it on your Netflix queue now.)
Introducing the speakers, Strongin briefly summed up a woman’s life cycle. “You start out life in this estrogen gel – like a gefilte fish,” she said. “Then you hit puberty, you’re either fertile or you’re not, then you’re pre-menopausal, then menopausal, then post-menopausal. Then you die.”
The talk today focused on the menopausal portion of the life cycle. Phyllis Greenberger, President and CEO of the Society for Women’s Health Research, started off speaking about the Women’s Health Initiative. “There was a lot of misinterpretation, some of the results reported were incorrect,” she said.
She quickly explained what they did, what was wrong, and what’s true today. The Women’s Health Initiative was a giant study of postmenopausal women, testing whether hormone replacement therapy could help prevent cardiovascular disease, cancer, and osteoporosis. The results were different for different age groups – women starting hormone therapy in their 70s had generally bad outcomes (increased risk of heart attack, breast cancer, stroke, etc.), while women starting in their 50s had generally good outcomes. But the results widely reported were the negative ones from older participants – so many women never heard about the rest of the research, or anything we’ve learned since!
The next speaker was Dr. James Simon, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the George Washington School of Medicine – and a menopause researcher. (But he will forever be remembered to me as the man who scared the crap out of me about the future health and wellness of my vagina. I may not sleep tonight.)
The Women’s Health Initiative’s results scared a lot of menopausal women into quitting their hormones cold turkey. That, is a very bad idea, he said. Going off hormones makes women unhappy and unpleasant, but more disturbing, he said, “when women go off their hormones their vaginas dry up and get smaller.”
(!)
Which makes sex painful – so women stop having it. And, he says, marriages today have enough problems without eliminating sex (or arguing about it).
“No one wants to have sex when it hurts…. You can’t have good sex with a dried-up vagina. That’s a fact,” he said. “I can give you a two-hour lecture on why the parts don’t work.”
Uhm, great. Go on.
Instead, he told a horrifying story about one of his 55-year-old patients – a prominent writer for the Washington Post, who came to his office for her annual healthy woman exam. He asked her how she was feeling, how were things with her husband, how’s their sex life? Good, good, good, she said. Everything was fine.
Then she put her feet in the stirrups.
“I couldn’t even put the speculum in because it’s too shrunk and dry and small,” he said. “I could barely fit a pencil.”
(I have heard stories about women “drying up” and that if you don’t use it you lose it – but I thought that was just, well, talk. I didn’t think it was true.)
He asked her if she was having sex.
She was silent.
Then she started crying. “She cried and cried,” he said.
Painful dried up vaginas aren’t something a lot of women talk about. “It’s grin and bear it, tough it out, or give it up,” he says.
But, being an honorary Disruptive Woman – he laid it on the table.
And Susan Wysocki, president and CEO of the National Association of Nurse Practitioners in Women’s Health pointed out more menopause-related things a lot of young women don’t know – or talk about. Like, who knew some menopausal women off their hormones are in so much pain they can’t ride an exercise bike, or even comfortably sit down.
“Here we are,” she said, “saving at least one vagina at a time.”
She also discussed the fact that some women worry about taking hormones because they don’t want to get breast cancer. She says that sometimes a woman may have a teeny tiny potential tumor that could go un-noticed for years. But, sometimes the hormones can make it grow big enough to show up on a mammogram. And that way a woman can get treatment faster.
“That can be a good thing,” she said.
For more about menopause, hormone replacement, and the WHI study, you can read:
Don’t miss the next Disruptive Women in Healthcare breakfast, “Childhood Obesity: A Big Fat National Challenge.” May 27 at Johnny’s Half Shell. Reserve your spot now!
