Ladies! Are you tired all the time, sweaty and hot, or headachy? Do you have a range of the vague complaints (laziness, hysteria, dissolute habits, general languishing) that would have seen you committed to a 19th-century asylum? Are you lacking in joie de vivre? Maybe you’re perimenopausal!
Or maybe you’re not: being tired, hot and over everything are also symptoms of simply being alive in spring 2026. That’s not what the internet wants you to believe, though: last week, experts issued a warning about the deluge of perimenopause and menopause misinformation online and the risks that can pose to women, including unwanted pregnancies and a failure to seek a diagnosis for serious health conditions.
“Everyone thinks they’re menopausal,” said Dr Paula Briggs, a consultant in sexual and reproductive health . She’s citing the unwanted pregnancies she had seen, working in abortion care services, in “gobsmacked” women who thought they were no longer fertile. “I look at things like Instagram … and I am horrified,” Briggs added. Dr Channa Jayasena, a reproductive endocrinology expert, said there was “a risk that some women are being mislabelled as having perimenopause when they have other things that are wrong”. It’s something the campaigning gynaecologist Dr Jen Gunter has also warned against.
That’s the worst case; it might just hit us in the wallet. In the US, doctors recently warned about the “very aggressive” marketing of meno-washed products and supplements that make big promises without good scientific evidence.
I barely notice this stuff now, I realise. It’s the online water in which I, a midlife woman, swim: dire warnings about depleted bone density and “menobelly”; surprising symptoms; targeted ads for collagen and creatine; influencers flogging supplements; “support” services offering hormonal testing and online testosterone prescriptions; menopause “cool moments” tea; menopause chocolate; “moisture-wicking” meno-friendly nighties. A frustrated menopause specialist pharmacist posted her own, only slightly more absurd, version on LinkedIn: a meno-pen; meno-tape, for when your life is falling apart; meno-water (“same product, higher price”).
But all that meno-messaging can influence your appraisal of what’s happening in your brain and body. Things I have attributed to hormonal depletion recently include repeatedly losing my keys and headphones, an inability to focus on an article about the US political adviser Stephen Miller, hiding pecan nuts from my husband, aching hips and a pervasive sense of: “What’s the point?” Maybe it’s perimenopause; maybe I’m just human?
The thing is, women are used to having to help ourselves when it comes to our health. Centuries of medical misogyny (the kind that saw women put in asylums for “uterine derangement”) meant our health concerns were dismissed and minimised, and, dismally, that continues. Endometriosis sufferers struggle, often for years, to get a diagnosis and report feeling they are “gaslit by doctors”. The recent “rebranding” of PCOS as polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS) sought to address a history of poor support, confusion and struggles with diagnosis for sufferers.
Women’s postnatal health concerns are neglected by “dangerously underfunded” services in the UK and elsewhere (a doctor recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about struggling to find treatment for serious postpartum issues). A Mumsnet report drawing on a decade of users’ posts from the site paints a picture of a system where women fail to get the healthcare they need, with symptoms “brushed aside, treated as psychological, or simply not believed”; in a survey published with the report, 64% said they had been explicitly told pain or symptoms were “normal” or “in their head”.
So women become, by necessity, detectives and DIYers, relying on word of mouth, tipoffs, trial and error, and alternative remedies when the medical establishment fails them. Maybe the fatigue and pain your overstretched GP doesn’t seem worried about, or particularly interested in, is perimenopause? It might be; you can see why women decide it’s at least worth investigating, maybe trying a supplement or shelling out for an online consultation.
And for unscrupulous or at least unbothered online entrepreneurs, that also makes us easy marks. This menopause gold rush is capitalising on women’s health not being taken seriously – at best it’s cynical and at worst, actively harmful. It’s enough to make any woman hot under the collar – though of course, there’s a £15.99 “Menopause & Me wearable neck fan” for that.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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