Menopause is a silent epidemic affecting the health and well-being of millions of women. This film confronts this neglec | dG1fUm1yTXdCaDdsOHc
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Short filmTranscript
00:00I felt myself trawling into yourself and away from everyone because nobody understands.
00:14I'm a board certified OBGYN, right, at an accredited program in this country.
00:25I got less than a month of training of menopause and some of my colleagues don't even get that.
00:44We're looking at the 20th anniversary of the reporting of the Women's Health Initiative
00:50and taking stock of what has happened in those 20 years, very little.
00:55You go through puberty and everybody's happy and excited and you can't wait and then you
00:59go through pregnancy and it's parties.
01:03You go through menopause and nobody wants to hear about it.
01:11When I went to the doctor and told them that I diagnosed myself and I think this is happening,
01:16they said, well, we'll see, let's just wait and see.
01:19Women who have early menopause have not only an increased risk of cardiovascular disease
01:23but also of dementia.
01:25So if something is bothering you and someone says it's in your head, it's like, of course
01:29it is.
01:30Everything is in my head.
01:31And hormones affect your brain.
01:33Our brains run on estrogen starting at puberty and they keep doing that until the end of
01:41our lives.
01:44If you think about the impact of growing up in a racist society on your body, the trauma,
01:55it makes sense to me like as you get older, that trauma impacts your hormones.
02:02All of a sudden you get like heart fluctuations and I thought, okay, it's just that I'm having
02:11a panic attack, you know?
02:12And so then that messes with your mental psyche, you know, all of it.
02:17Brain fog is a very weird phenomenon that doesn't even actually have a term in medicine.
02:25It's that these changes can be so severe to prompt fears of either going crazy or being
02:33developing dementia.
02:35Women say, I just don't feel like myself anymore.
02:39I feel like a completely, I'm just a different person.
02:42I'm like, who is this person?
02:43I've lost myself.
02:44And so I lost a lot of the confidence in the one thing that I knew how to do.
02:47If I can't read the teleprompter and the words that are in front of me, I can't be a journalist.
02:57We have the cost of lost work productivity, women with lost wages.
03:03This is an enormous loss of human capital.
03:11A lot of that was breast cancer.
03:13A lot of that is pregnancy related conditions.
03:17How much of that really is dedicated to women over the age of 40?
03:22You know, I mean, we can't even find it.
03:25They don't even keep records on how much research is done on menopausal women.
03:30That's how little has been done.
03:32I think one of the most damaging things we did to women is that we made them afraid of
03:37something their body naturally makes.
03:39I think it's devastating.
03:42Is the last third of my life not as important as the middle third in my reproductive years?
03:48I think that there is at least an understanding and awareness that women are not going to
03:52stand for it anymore.
03:54Women are waking up and saying, what?
03:56No one ever told me this.
03:58Well, we should all know.