MENOPAUSE MYTHS

Summary: Trashing menopausal hearsays and explaining the real facts.

Menopause is as scary enough to think about for some women as it is to deal with which beliefs are facts and which are just neighborhood chitchats. There are a lot of issues surrounding menopause. Even if scientific evidences have disproved most of these claims, people are still hanging on to them as if these would one day become true. Some of the interesting misconceptions are:

Women are not interested in sex when they experience menopause.

This is by far the most believed myth of all time. Experts can not find any link between estrogen levels and sex drive. They say that while it is true that the sexual aspect of a person changes with age, it only gets better for women. A good basis for predicting a woman’s sex drive during menopause is to assess her sex drive before she had menopause. So a woman who has always been a good sexual partner will not likely turn out to be a bad one after menopause.

Menopause can make you gain weight.

This myth is so much like saying that seeing a black cat brings bad luck. Poor cat! There has been no proofs to this claim. Women experience varying symptoms during menopause, and like weight issues, there is no general rule for it. Some women may gain weight, some may lose weight, and some others simply do not have any weight changes.

Menopause may make women go insane and lose their memory.

If you consider her menopausal mood swings as insanity, then by all means, hang on to this myth. Anyway, everyone’s brain shrinks considerably by the age 30. Although this does not exactly mean we all go insane by then, this doesn’t exempt the guys from the cognitive decline either.

Menopause symptoms lasts forever.

Menopause is a forever thing. But its symptoms does not end along with the actual menopause. The length of time that a woman experience the symptoms is as varied as the types of symptoms each one may have. Some claim to experience the symptoms in as little as a few months although experts say that symptoms can stay from six to thirteen years.

Accepting menopause is like living with the fact that all women go through menstruation. Dealing with PMS and other discomforts may not have been easy but it is comforting to know that this does not happen to a select few. What you may be experiencing is being experienced by million others all over the world. Menopause may be harder to deal with because unlike menstruation which signals puberty, it signals aging. But all women go through this as well. So lighten up and age with grace!