Harris, who works in IT, tried to white-knuckle these symptoms until one night in October 2022 when, while she was making pasta for dinner, her heart started pounding. Her father had died young of a heart attack; she feared she was having one too. At 39 she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, her first indication of any heart condition, prescribed a cocktail of drugs and eventually implanted with a pacemaker. She was baffled. In a few years she’d gone from a healthy, happy woman to someone in a perpetual state of distress. Then her periods went haywire, lasting for weeks at a time. She began to suspect all those disparate symptoms weren’t random. When she typed them into Google, the results suggested she was in perimenopause. “It all came together,” she says.
Harris’ doctors disagreed. She was too young, they said. A doctor prescribed birth control to regulate her cycle and sent her on her way. So Harris did what many frustrated patients do and turned back to the internet for ideas. She sought solace from Reddit and advice from ChatGPT. She drank more water, ate less sugar and went for walks. She got a prescription for a compounded hormone therapy cream. In the course of about a decade, she forked over thousands of dollars, including for all kinds of supplements that popped up in ads on Instagram and TikTok: black cohosh, ashwagandha, something called Steel-Libido. “If I saw it, I tried it,” she says. If only any of it had worked.
Although women around the world live longer than men, they spend more of their years in poor health. This is partly because of differences in biology and partly because doctors and scientists just don’t know enough about how a woman’s body works, especially as it ages. That includes many medical specialists: A 2023 survey found that roughly 70% of responding OB-GYN residency programs in the US didn’t include any menopause curriculum.