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womenMenopause Can Be Challenging — It’s Even Harder For Women With Intellectual Disabilities
Some health care providers are oblivious to their needs, or downright dismissive, at great cost to their health
No one was really sharing stories about being a menopausal woman when I was in the thick of it more than a decade ago, but women are finally starting to not only talk about it — an upside of social media and the fact that Gen-X women are just now hitting midlife and well on their way to perimenopause and menopause — but to do things about it.
That said, there are many women who are not part of the conversation — intellectually disabled women.
Of course, this isn’t all that surprising given that menopause in general has been basically ignored (despite the fact that about half of the world goes through it!). According to a survey by Dr. Stephanie S. Faubion, director of Mayo Clinic’s Center for Women’s Health and medical director for the North American Menopause Society, most residency trainees, including OG-GYNs, say they had about one or two hours — total! — of education about menopause, and some 20 percent said they’d had no menopause education at all. None!
