On Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., hosted actress Halle Berry in West Virginia’s capital city to hold a roundtable discussion on menopause with local leaders, healthcare professionals, and community members.
The pair are advocating for the newly introduced Advancing Menopause Care and Mid-Life Women’s Health Act, a bipartisan bill co-sponsored by Capito that would put $275 million toward research and education around menopause, the significant hormone shift women go through in middle age.
Women’s health, [the] health of West Virginians in general, is something that is exceedingly important to me, Capito said. As a woman myself, obviously, I want to see us be able to age into our years as healthily and as impactfully as we can, and happily.
The legislation calls for the federal government to spend more on clinical trials on menopause as well as the hormone therapy that is used to treat hot flashes and other symptoms.
The act also aims to strengthen education resources and workforce training on menopause and encourage public health spaces to better address mid-life women’s health issues.
My dream is to get all the female senators to come together in a bipartisan way because I think if there’s an issue that should not be politicized it is this one, Berry said. It is a human rights issue, and I think it’s long overlooked, and it’s long overdue that we get the health care, the answers.
Berry went on to share her story of experiencing painful symptoms during perimenopause, which occurs before menopause when a woman’s estrogen levels start dropping. Her doctor initially misdiagnosed her with herpes, a sexually transmitted disease that both Berry and her partner tested negative for.
I have one of the best doctors in California. If he had zero answers for me, I can only imagine how many millions and millions of women might be going through similar things or worse things, Berry said. That’s what got me on my mission, too.
Dara Aliff is an OBGYN in the Charleston area. She and others say they want to destigmatize the conversation around menopause.
I so applaud what you’re doing and giving a voice to this. You know, a lot of us can be in the trenches, but until we have the star power and the senatorial power to make the changes, it’s not going to happen, Aliff said.
Many physicians seated at the roundtable said they were barely trained in treating menopause. West Virginia Department of Health Secretary Sherri Young concurred.
Hearing all of these stories, we have to do more, she said. Sadly, these are true. With medical school training, [you receive] maybe an hour, hour and a half outside of doing OBGYN training.
According to a 2023 survey, only 30 percent of U.S. residency programs offer a formal menopause curriculum.
Nationally, 80 percent of OBGYN residents admit to being ill-prepared to discuss menopause with patients, according to the national nonprofit Let’s Talk Menopause.
The nonprofit also found that 75 million women are in perimenopause, menopause, or post-menopause right now in the U.S.
