What doctors see

My own doctor is an awesome guy who is willing to think outside the box. He still has some modern-doc-reflexes, but on the whole he is impressively open-minded.

This is a rare thing.

In ages past, doctors had fewer tools to reach for, and proper diagnosis became a professional goal and the focus of their training. Observation and deduction was the motto of the famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, because his creator, doctor/author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, had been trained to diagnose disease with these same methods.

Only finding what we are looking for

Now, it's a matter of running tests in the hope of showing enough deviation from the norm for them to arrive at a diagnosis. Then they prescribe a drug which often does not address the problem so much as it masks the symptoms. But when the symptoms are suppressed, the patient stops complaining.

That's a medical term, you know: "The patient complained of ..." I don't know when the medical profession's goals shifted from curing to the patient stopped complaining, but it was not progress. Because now, when the patient keeps complaining, the overwhelming tendency of doctors is to decide the patient is not physically ill, they are mentally ill. And should be taking a psychiatric drug.

There's all the difference in the world between actually having a mental health problem, and only having your medical personnel decide for you that you have a mental health problem. People absolutely should get help with any medical issue they have.

Getting help for a medical issue we don't have is a prescription for disaster.

Yet, this is exactly the position of women who go to their doctors for help with issues that doctors don't know how to help with. But they don't say that. They look at lab results and pronounce them "normal" and tell the person there isn't anything wrong with them. The woman goes away feeling dismissed and frustrated, and the more she tries to get help, the more she gets seen as A Problem.

It's not entirely the fault of the doctor; he or she is simply doing what they have been trained to do... and so often, they don't do any more than that. This is what keeps them from seeing their middle-aged woman patient as a person with a real problem who is trying to get real solutions. Because the woman's hormone dysfunction problem is not one they are trained to see.

Adjusting their lenses

When a woman's problem falls into an area that wasn't covered in their training and doesn't show up on the usual lab tests, it's like the doctor's brain (that overly busy and highly trained and not-encouraged-to-be-creative organ that it is) shifts gears. They actually look at the patient in a different way, as in the study, below, where people were distracted while evaluating what a person was saying. If they could not follow what the person was talking about, they fell back on emotional cues:

But those who were kept mentally busy came to a very different conclusion about this woman’s personality. Regardless of what situation she was in, they concluded that she was indeed an “anxious person.” For these people, acting anxious equaled being anxious.
Mixed Signals: Why People Misunderstand Each Other

As a woman journeys from doctor to doctor, vainly trying to get someone to take their symptoms seriously, they inevitably come across as somewhat less than calm, cool, and reasonable. Often, the hormone dysfunction itself prevents someone from easily keeping their grip.

this is the same woman, seen through different lenses
comparison by rpavich

Quickly exhausted, fuzzy-headed under stress, and often at the end of their rope already, it becomes even more challenging to get across a complicated concept that doesn't even have a name except "menopause," and that is a label that is shrugged away as "not much of a problem."

Time itself is now how the cautious doctor prefers to handle their mid-life women patients, with the disaster of previous Hormone Replacement Therapy protocols echoing in their minds.

As I discovered when I tried to get cortisol, it's easier to get what that chemistry teacher was cooking in that camper in the desert. Doctors don't want to give women hormones that aren't birth control. And forget any hormonal help after the age of thirty five. At all. Ever.

Thyroid insufficiency is one of the least treated illnesses out there. And it's so easy to fix!

Ignoring the No-Hormone Disaster

In fact, it was this very medical mindset that catapulted me into menopause -- abruptly and disastrously. My endometriosis had been making my life difficult during my teens, but upon getting birth control pills, it miraculously stopped the pain and monthly difficulties. I was happy taking birth control for years, until I got into my late thirties. And the medical profession took them away.

"What about my endometriosis?" I kept asking. And they kept dismissing me, telling me that I would be in menopause soon. Sure enough, that is just what happened. I got a terribly painful cystic ovary that had to be removed with surgery and then I was dumped into menopause like falling off a cliff.

It was something like being tied to the railroad tracks, and hearing the whistle in the distance, and everyone around me all agree the train's coming but they don't think they need to untie me.

It's now a bit difficult for me to to be calm and reasonable with doctors when I think they are screwing up.

Because I've seen the train that hit me.