Doctors Can’t Treat What They Were Never Taught

The real reason menopause care is broken (hint: it’s not your doctor’s fault)

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Every time I see a comment like this: “We need a whole field of doctors like you”, my heart swells… and then breaks a little.

Because I know what the person writing it really means:
“I’ve never felt heard like this before.”
“I’ve been dismissed for years.”
“No one ever explained it to me this way.”

And because I also know the painful truth: I wasn’t always this doctor.
I had to unlearn much of what I was taught.
And even more painfully, I had to confront what I wasn’t taught at all.

Let me walk you back to the beginning.

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The Day I Was Taught to Dismiss

It was my first day seeing patients as an intern on the gynecology service. A midlife woman came in, anxious, overwhelmed, struggling with symptoms she couldn’t quite name: fatigue, brain fog, trouble sleeping, weight gain, irritability, and low libido. All her labs were “normal.” Her physical exam was fine. I didn’t know what to do, so I asked my chief resident for guidance.

He gave a half-smile and said quietly, “She’s a WW.”

I blinked. “A what?”

“A whiny woman,” he said, almost kindly. “Don’t write that in the chart. But women around this age? Lots of complaints. Not much we can do. Just reassure her.”

I’d never heard the term before, and I’d certainly never seen it in a textbook. But I took the cue. And in that moment, I learned the lesson that so many doctors absorb without realizing:

Middle-aged women’s symptoms aren’t real. They’re emotional. They’re annoying. They’re unfixable.

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This Was Never About “Bad Doctors”

Here’s the part that matters most: that chief resident wasn’t evil. Neither were the faculty who never mentioned perimenopause. Or the professors who emphasized OB and fertility but skipped over most of what comes after.

They were just passing down what they were taught.
And I was trained in that same system.

It took me years and a profound shift in my own practice to realize how much I didn’t know about women’s health after reproduction ends. Eventually, I stepped away from full-time clinical work, dove into the literature, got certified through The Menopause Society, and rebuilt my entire medical practice from the ground up.

But here’s the catch: Most physicians don’t have that option.
They’re overworked. Under-supported. Practicing under the weight of insurance constraints and RVU targets. They care deeply. But they were simply never trained in comprehensive menopause medicine.

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The Science Tells the Real Story

This is a systemic failure. Not a personal one.

In 2022, a landmark study published in Menopause found that:

• Only 31% of U.S. medical schools include any curriculum on menopause.

• Only 6.8% of residents felt “adequately prepared” to manage menopause care.

• Over 70% of internal medicine residents received no formal menopause training at all.

• Among OB-GYN residents, fewer than 20% reported feeling confident managing menopausal symptoms.

In another survey of over 900 internal medicine residents, only 7% correctly answered questions on hormone therapy safety, despite seeing hundreds of midlife women per year.

Let that sink in. These are the physicians seeing women in their 40s, 50s, 60s every single day, and they haven’t been taught what to look for or how to help.

This isn’t because they don’t care.
It’s because no one taught them to.

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Why We Need to Rethink the Whole System

Let’s stop pretending this is about heroic individuals. What we need isn’t “more doctors like me.”

We need to rebuild the system that trained us all.

That means:

• Requiring comprehensive menopause education in every medical school and residency program—not just OB-GYN.

• Updating the LCME (Liaison Committee on Medical Education) and ACGME (Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education) standards to reflect the realities of women’s health across the lifespan.

• Increasing NIH funding for menopause research, which currently receives less than $20 million of a $48 billion annual budget.

• Including menopause training in continuing medical education for primary care providers, internists, psychiatrists, cardiologists, and more.

• Demanding that insurance reimburse for menopausal symptom care—so physicians have the time and tools to treat it.

Because here’s the truth: 1.2 billion women worldwide will be postmenopausal by 2030. And right now, the medical system isn’t prepared to care for them.

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What Gives Me Hope

Women are speaking up. Doctors are listening. And slowly, I see a shift happening. But we can’t lay this burden on individuals alone—not on women to self-educate and not on doctors to figure it out on nights and weekends.

We need policy. We need institutional reform.
We need a generation of clinicians trained to understand the whole arc of a woman’s health—not just her reproductive years.

I am one doctor. But I am not special.

I just had the chance to stop, look around, and ask: What have we missed?
And then I had the privilege—and the support—to do something about it.

The system must make that possible for everyone.

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🧠 Want to dig deeper into what medicine missed—and how we fix it?

🔗 Visit thepauselife.com for free guides, hormone education, and evidence-based resources.

📘 The New Menopause is available everywhere books are sold.
📘 The New Perimenopause releases April 2026.

🧭 And don’t miss the free Menopause Empowerment Guide, created to help you understand what’s happening—and what you can do about it.