Let us start with some numbers, because the numbers make it very difficult to look away.

Ninety-three percent of women feel dismissed when seeking medical help. Not occasionally, not in certain circumstances, but as a documented, consistent, cross-demographic experience of what it is like to be a woman in a clinical setting.

Forty-six percent of women experiencing perimenopause or menopause have had their symptoms questioned or dismissed. Specifically. Not women in general. Women going through the most significant hormonal transition of their adult lives, presenting to doctors with a range of documented, physiologically explicable symptoms, and being sent away without adequate investigation, explanation, or support.

Up to one in three women have had menopause symptoms misdiagnosed, with many requiring between two and five medical appointments before receiving a correct diagnosis. Thirty-three percent waited over a year.

Forty percent were prescribed medication without a full investigation into their symptoms. Most commonly, antidepressants, for what were clearly hormonal symptoms.

And the most common thing women are told, by doctors who should know better, by colleagues who mean well, by other women who have absorbed the same cultural messaging without realising it, is some version of this: it is normal. It is part of being a woman. Women in worse situations manage without complaining. You should be able to as well.

This is the piece about that. About the medical dismissal of perimenopausal and menopausal women in the UK, about why it happens, about what it costs, and about the quiet, collective fury that has been building for a very long time in the waiting rooms, the forum threads, and the private conversations of women who were told their experience was not worth taking seriously.

The pattern has a name

Medical misogyny is not a new concept, and it is not a fringe accusation. It is a documented, researched, and increasingly acknowledged feature of how women’s health is managed across healthcare systems worldwide. In a survey of 5,100 women in the UK published in The Lancet in 2025, more than half felt that their pain had been dismissed or ignored. The researchers described what they found as a pattern of misdiagnosis, contempt, and medical misogyny that has left women suffering, frequently without adequate support, despite actively advocating for themselves.

For perimenopausal women, this pattern takes a particular and particularly damaging form. Symptoms that are documented, physiologically explicable, and directly traceable to hormonal change are consistently attributed to stress, anxiety, depression, or simply getting older. Women who present with joint pain are told to take ibuprofen. Women who present with cognitive changes are told they are tired. Women who present with recurrent urinary tract infections are questioned about their hygiene, their underwear, their post-sex habits, their personal cleanliness, before anyone thinks to ask about their hormones.

One woman, quoted in a UK mixed-methods study on perceptions of menopause healthcare, was told by her GP that menopause is a natural process that the majority of women go through with no need for support, and that women in developing countries manage without medication, so she should be able to as well.

Read that again. A qualified medical professional, in a consultation paid for by this woman’s taxes, told her that the appropriate benchmark for her care was the absence of treatment rather than the presence of it.

This is not an isolated incident. It is a pattern.

Why this happens

The reasons are structural as well as individual, and understanding both matters for anyone trying to change them.

At the structural level, menopause has received inadequate research attention and funding as an aspect of women’s health and wellbeing. This is not an opinion. It is the conclusion of multiple peer-reviewed papers published in 2024 and 2025, including in The Lancet. The Women’s Health Initiative study of 2002, which produced deeply flawed conclusions about hormone replacement therapy and terrified an entire generation of doctors and patients away from a treatment that could have helped millions, set the field back by approximately twenty years. The recovery from that single piece of poorly interpreted science is still incomplete.

When clinicians are not trained in menopause, they cannot treat it. A respondent in the UK healthcare perception study reported that their GP was unable to answer questions about the effects of hormones on their symptoms because she did not have enough knowledge herself. This was a GP. About one of the most common health transitions in women’s lives.

At the individual level, the bias is real and it is pervasive. Women’s pain and discomfort are consistently rated as less severe and less worthy of intervention than men’s presenting with equivalent symptoms. Women are more likely to be told that their symptoms are psychosomatic. They are more likely to be offered mental health treatment rather than physical investigation. They are more likely to be told to come back if it gets worse, rather than being given the information they need to understand what is happening to their bodies right now.

The research on racial disparity compounds this further. Access to menopause-related services is demonstrably unequal across ethnic groups in England, with Black women facing decreased odds of accessing care for menopause-related symptoms even when controlling for age. The dismissal is not equally distributed. It falls hardest on the women who already carry the heaviest structural disadvantages.

Feelings don’t pay, I suppose

There is a phrase that cuts through all of the careful, measured language of clinical research and gets to the heart of why this has been allowed to continue for so long.

Feelings don’t pay.

The pharmaceutical industry has invested extraordinary resources in conditions where the treatment generates revenue. Erectile dysfunction. Cardiovascular disease. Conditions with measurable, marketable, patentable solutions. Menopause is a natural transition. It produces a diffuse, varied, difficult-to-standardise range of symptoms in a demographic that the medical establishment has historically treated as less urgent, less valuable, and less worthy of sustained attention than the male body it was largely built to serve.

The women navigating perimenopause right now are doing so with significantly less research support, significantly less clinical training directed at their care, and significantly less cultural permission to take their own symptoms seriously than they deserve. And many of them have internalised this so completely that when their doctor dismisses them, they leave the consultation wondering whether they were overreacting, rather than whether their doctor was underperforming.

They were not overreacting. Their doctors were underperforming. There is a meaningful difference, and it matters enormously which story a woman tells herself about why she left the surgery without the help she came for.

What women are doing instead

Women have not waited for the system to catch up. They have found each other.

In forums and comment sections, on social media and in WhatsApp groups, in the kind of frank, unglamorous, detail-specific conversations that the medical system has historically been too embarrassed to have, perimenopausal and menopausal women are sharing what works. What their doctors did not tell them. What they pieced together over months and years of trial and error, of reading studies at midnight, of trying different combinations of supplements and local hormonal treatments and lifestyle adjustments until something finally helped.

They are spending an average of 2.3 hours a week on what researchers have called menopause admin, the time spent researching symptoms, seeking second opinions, finding specialists, and managing a transition that should have been explained to them clearly and completely by the healthcare professionals they trusted to do exactly that.

That 2.3 hours a week is not a quirk of curiosity. It is the direct consequence of a system that has not provided what women need, which means women have had to provide it for themselves.

This is, incidentally, why the content of this series matters to us at Birch & Wilde. We are not pretending to be a medical resource. We are not replacing clinical care, and we would never suggest doing so. What we are doing is adding our voice to the growing number of voices that are refusing to keep the conversation polite, small, and contained to the parts of menopause that are socially comfortable to discuss.

What needs to change

There are practical things happening that deserve acknowledgment. Updated NICE guidelines published in November 2024 now clarify that HRT should be offered as first-line treatment for vasomotor symptoms, which represents a meaningful shift from the post-Women’s Health Initiative era of reflexive caution. The British Menopause Society maintains a directory of accredited menopause specialists for women whose GP consultations have not provided adequate support. UCL’s InTune programme is developing the UK’s first national menopause education and support initiative. These are not nothing.

But they are not enough, and they do not address the years, sometimes decades, that women have already spent being dismissed.

What needs to change at a systemic level is the way medical training treats menopause, which is currently inadequate, the way research funding treats women’s health, which is currently inequitable, and the way the cultural conversation treats the experiences of perimenopausal women, which is currently a mixture of silence, condescension, and the occasional joke about hot flashes.

What needs to change at an individual level, for every woman reading this, is the story she tells herself about whether her symptoms are real enough, severe enough, and worth enough to take seriously. They are. She is. And the next time a doctor tells her otherwise, she is entitled to a second opinion, a referral, and a consultation that does not end with her leaving the room wondering whether she imagined it.

She did not imagine it. None of it.

A note from B&W

We sell supplements. We want to be transparent about that in a piece like this, because transparency is what makes everything else we say credible.

What we also do, and what we believe matters, is show up consistently in the spaces where women’s health is being discussed honestly and without apology. Ashwagandha for cortisol regulation and nervous system support. The Vitamin B Complex for energy, mood, and the neurological demands of a changing hormonal landscape. Marine Collagen for the structural changes that oestrogen withdrawal quietly drives in skin, joints, and connective tissue. These are considered, evidence-informed supports for a body doing something genuinely demanding, and they are offered in that spirit.

But the most important thing we can offer in a piece like this is not a product. It is this: you are not making it up. What you are experiencing is real, documented, and not your fault. And you deserve a medical system that treats it with the same seriousness it would bring to any other condition affecting a comparable proportion of the population.

Until that system arrives, we will keep talking.

Sources

The Lancet Obstetrics, Gynaecology, and Women’s Health. Misdiagnosed, Dismissed, Ignored: The Women’s Health Crisis. thelancet.com, November 2025.

Medichecks. 93% of Women Feel Dismissed When Seeking Medical Help. femtechworld.co.uk, March 2025.

Holland and Barrett and Menopause Mandate. Nearly 1 in 2 Women Have Their Menopause Symptoms Dismissed. huffingtonpost.co.uk, 2026.

Higgs LLP. Misdiagnosis: The Overlooked Crisis in Women’s Health. higgsllp.co.uk, 2026.

Nature. Perceptions of Healthcare Provision Throughout the Menopause in the UK: A Mixed-Methods Study. nature.com

University College London. The Time Has Come for a UK-Wide Menopause Education and Support Programme: InTune. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, September 2024.

The Online GP. Navigating Menopause in 2025: What Every UK Woman Needs to Know. theonlinegp.com