Menopause Marketing Relies Heavily on Fear: The article argues that media, influencers, and industry messaging portray menopause as a widespread crisis of unmet needs and suffering, driving demand for hormone therapy (MHT/HRT) and other products while downplaying known risks such as breast cancer, blood clots, and strokes.

Industry Influence Shapes the Narrative: Pharmaceutical interests, medical societies, and commercial campaigns (including the removal of FDA black-box warnings and promotion of both hormonal and non-hormonal drugs) are accused of medicalizing a natural life stage for profit, with the global menopause market projected to grow significantly.

Empowerment Through Agency Over Medicalization: The author advocates treating menopause primarily as a normal transition rather than a disease requiring default pharmaceutical intervention, favoring accurate information, respect for individual variation, and non-drug approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy where symptoms need management.

Well, well, look here. In its June 2026 update the venerated OED or Oxford English Dictionary, finally added the ‘new’ word, fearmongering. It explains fearmongering as “the action or an act of spreading fear or alarm among the public, esp. by exaggerating the dangers associated with a political, social, or economic issue; alarmism.”

Thank goodness, the dictionary has caught up to our society’s most pernicious habit; that is, using fear to sell anything. Especially when it comes to our health. 

Here we find the most destructive aspect of fearmongering, ie: trying to convince normal, healthy people we are “abnormal” or “sick,” and fundamentally changing the way we think about ourselves. The marketing of fear often drives people to their doctors, and to the inevitable prescription pad, with predictable results: people getting unnecessary, sometimes harmful drugs for natural, normal phases of life. 

The grift goes wide and deep. Many influencers and physician-educators have financial ties through sponsored content or brand partnerships, sometimes pushing lines of supplements, telehealth services, books, or their appearances on the speaking circuit. Sadly, information about who funds them to say what they say is not always straightforward and the top social media posts about certain drugs or therapies often obscure their potential conflicts of interest (e.g., selling related products/services).

We know that many of these campaigns are backed by medical specialists or social media influencers, wedded to their theories and pushing whatever to cash in on all the fear. Those campaigns are about ‘moving product’ by subtly convincing millions of healthy people that their bodies are broken, dysfunctional, deficient, and decaying. I’ve written these words before but they are worth repeating: fearmongering is an assault on our collective soul and the theft of wellness for which we all pay a high price. 

Full-On Menopause Mongering

We can see fearmongering everywhere, but the most brazen current example is the full-frontal assault on menopause. If you’ve read a newspaper or scrolled through social media lately you might be asking yourself: Why the heck is everyone getting worked up about menopause? Are hot flashes taking over the planet? Are women really as angry as the media portrays them to be? And the drugs: who do you believe about whether the drugs will help or harm you? 

These are good questions, focusing on a condition that every woman—our mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and so on – went through, back to the dawn of time. The fearmongering today bypasses the fact that most women who arrive at the end of their periods get through this phase without serious discomfort or suffering. For some, it’s a big “meh.” Others might be helped by what’s on offer but they have to swim through a sea of corporate-sponsored fearmongering messages to get there. 

The key theme in most of the media stories is that women’s needs are unmet, many of them are deeply suffering and they all need to be considering MHT (Menopausal Hormone Therapy) in order to live their best lives. By the way, MHT is the new way hormones are branded, which used to be called HRT (hormone replacement therapy). Same stuff, different wrapping, carrying less baggage of the HRT horrors of the past. 

In the mainstream media you’ll find oodles of journalists in love with a story like this, featuring female........

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