Photo by Ctorrear via Wikimedia Commons
OB-GYNS receive little to no medical training about menopause. Or at least that’s what recent research results show. Results of a web-based survey of 258 OB-GYN residency training directors across the country suggest that about one in five doctors receive any training on menopause, but that as many as seven in ten would like to receive that training. Residency training directors were asked to forward the survey to their residents, leading to a sample of 510 residents responding to the survey. Of the residents who responded, only 20% (100) reported any formal curriculum on menopause and only 78 residents reported participating in a hands-on “menopause clinic” as part of their residency. News articles reporting on this study suggest that this is a major problem considering how many women (as many as 50 million by the year 2020) are entering menopause in recent years.
My reaction to this is simple: of course there is little to no medical training on menopause. Of course. Anyone who has ever been to the doctor (for a simple cold, for a reproductive reason, or anything else) knows that doctors are easily stumped and that their training is often surface-level. If you present anything besides a “normal” case, the likelihood is that doctors will not have in-depth knowledge of your condition (regardless of whether that condition means you’re “healthy” or “sick”). In addition, if your body or your reproductive system represents something besides the norm then you should just brace yourself for doctors’ lack of knowledge about your body. Individual doctors are not necessarily at fault for this since they do not get training on aging bodies, disabled bodies, reproductive bodies that do not behave according to textbook info — let alone the fact that the male body is really the norm and so women are already at a disadvantage since their reproductive bodies already represent an abnormal case. I’ve interviewed menopausal women who’ve talked about going to the doctor and having those doctors not really know much about their symptoms. I’ve also interviewed women who have had hysterectomies but then are not told anything about what effect that hysterectomy might have on long-term health or menopause. I have a student who just completed a dissertation on the reproductive experiences of women with sickle cell disease, and it is clear from her study that doctors have no idea how to deal with the reproductive needs of women with a congenital disease. I’m also working on a project about women with spinal cord injuries who can’t even find a doctor who will give them a proper pelvic exam because doctors have no idea how to handle a body that does not neatly fit on an exam table.
Women who really want answers learn to strategize about how to cobble together knowledge about their health or illness by seeing multiple doctors, going to alternative doctors as well as mainstream doctors, consulting others who have the same health or illness, doing their own research outside of medical institutions, and to some extent just putting up with their bodies and life stages without medical help. Women learn these strategies over time as doctors remain unable to help them. This is not a new situation by any means, rather it is just what women have learned (or have to learn) to expect over time. As much as biomedicine would like to declare doctors as the experts on women’s health and health or illness in general, in practice we know that doctors are not these experts. They are probably trying the best they can most of the time, but just have little training and knowledge in anything specific. Unless an individual doctor becomes extremely proactive and wants to seek out extra knowledge by themselves, the likelihood is that they will only have cursory knowledge of specific women’s health conditions or life stages. This means that women have to be ready to be their own experts and know their own “normal” in any life stage, because we cannot rely on doctors to have any training that might help us. Yes, on one level, this is a serious problem but, on another level, this is just reality.
