In the past year, I noticed a change in the advertisements I was being fed on social media. Something in my algorithm must have detected that I was a woman entering my mid-40s, because I started getting nonstop ads for perimenopause and menopause-related vitamins and supplements.
These ads tended to mention nonspecific symptoms — “brain fog” and trouble sleeping were big ones — and then offered a cure in the form of a supplement or “nutraceutical” to regulate my hormones and fix all my problems. Sometimes the creator would put #ad in the caption to signal that these were advertisements. But often it was just influencers breathlessly promoting how ashwagandha fixed their perimenopause “cortisol face” without any disclaimers about who was paying them to say so. Though influencers are supposed to disclose if content is sponsored, most do not.
I have a healthy skepticism of everything advertised to me, but after a while, the repetition started to do its work. While I did not purchase anything, I did ask my gynecologist at my annual visit if she thought I was starting perimenopause. “Do you have any symptoms? Any changes in your menstrual cycle?” she asked. As soon as she asked those questions I realized that I had no symptoms beyond the tiredness associated with being a working mother of two.
From my own reporting on the topic in 2021, I already knew that it’s difficult to test for perimenopause. Because there may be as many as 34 symptoms related to the transition to menopause, and many doctors feel they do not have the appropriate training to support perimenopausal women, it’s a prime target for Big Wellness to fill the void.
We live in a country where the rising cost of deductibles, for those who have insurance, means that many day-to-day maladies are self-treated. The majority of Americans now seek health information on social media (and even when we don’t seek it, it is dumped into our eyeballs). We are left to separate a world of unproven, exaggerated and sometimes false claims from the truth.
This is largely because of the interaction of two regulatory agencies in the United States that are supposed to protect consumers from low-quality supplements and false claims about them — but which are held back by laws on the books that are both toothless and poorly enforced.
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