Ladies! Are you tired all the time, sweaty and hot, or headachy? Do you have a range of the vague complaints (laziness, hysteria, dissolute habits, general languishing) that would have seen you committed to a 19th-century asylum? Are you lacking in joie de vivre? Maybe you’re perimenopausal!

Or maybe you’re not: being tired, hot and over everything are also symptoms of simply being alive in spring 2026. That’s not what the internet wants you to believe, though: last week, experts issued a warning about the deluge of perimenopause and menopause misinformation online and the risks that can pose to women, including unwanted pregnancies and a failure to seek a diagnosis for serious health conditions.

“Everyone thinks they’re menopausal,” said Dr Paula Briggs, a consultant in sexual and reproductive health . She’s citing the unwanted pregnancies she had seen, working in abortion care services, in “gobsmacked” women who thought they were no longer fertile. “I look at things like Instagram … and I am horrified,” Briggs added. Dr Channa Jayasena, a reproductive endocrinology expert, said there was “a risk that some women are being mislabelled as having........

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