Dr. Mary Claire Haver

You know, they called them whiny Guineas.

They called them Madame Dolores, like in Mexico, you know, in Florida, where we have a lot of Hispanic patients.

There were colloquial names for this type of patient all over the U.S.

And then when I went to Australia, I pulled some clinicians aside and said, did y'all have something similar?

And they said, absolutely.

So I think

Because medicine in general worldwide was built, at least the way we practice, you know, in Western society was built by men for men, anything different, anything unusual, anything that doesn't follow that male construct.

So when you talk about things like perimenopause and menopause, it is going to be considered to be abnormal.

And I was taught to dismiss these women.

Right.

And it really took years of practice becoming friends with my patients, living in a small town, you know, doing everything outside of the office with these women, raising children together, doing book club, running marathons, going to church together for me to realize she's not crazy.

Like this is actually happening to her.

This is real.

This is not a psychological problem that she's manifesting with somatic symptoms, which is what I was taught women tended to do.

So we have to go back to kind of basic biology and endocrinology, but I'm going to, you know, but once you understand it, it's going to make so much sense to you and you're going to be, oh, okay.

So females...

versus males, females are born with our entire egg supply.

Men after puberty until death, as long as they're healthy, will make their genetic material fresh every day, okay?

We are stuck with a set amount of eggs that we're born with.

So at birth, a woman will have, a female will have one to two million-ish eggs.