‘When Ovaries Retire’: Contrasting Women’s Experiences with Feminist and Medical Models of Menopause

Western biomedical paradigms tend to treat health as the absence of disease and the appropriate functioning of biologic and psychophysiologic processes in the individual. Non-biomedical or lay concepts of health often focus on ability to function, or on social or spiritual well-being evidenced by physical fitness, energy, vitality, absence of pain, feeling healthy and the ability to maintain social relationships (Calnan, 1987). Differences between biomedical and lay concepts of health and illness are most pronounced when symptoms are amorphous and ambiguous. Scholarly works on menopausal syndrome traditionally treat the symptoms profile as nonspecific and psychological or psychosomatic (Kaufert, 1982), thus suggesting that there will be little agreement in lay discussions of the experience of menopause. Support group discussions suggest exactly the reverse. Members demonstrate remarkable consistency and agreement in their notions of symptom clusters, cause, and relief, but symptom profiles frequently are presented in highly subjective terms more in keeping with folk medical under-standings of health and illness. This article hopes to demonstrate the importance of using self-help groups to understand experientially constructed notions of health and illness and to argue for greater biomedical attention to lay understandings of menopausal syndrome.