The conversation around menopause is growing.  

After all, every woman experiences this natural process, albeit at different times and in different ways.  

In everyday conversation, we tend to use the word menopause to mean the period of transition a woman experiences in her 40s and 50s – with hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings – that marks the end of her reproductive years. As in: 

‘My aunt’s going through menopause’ 

‘Women experiencing menopause may feel isolated without proper support’ 

‘The worst part about menopause is the hot flashes’ 

What We Mean When We Say “Menopause”

In reality, menopause is a milestone, a single point in time marked by 12 consecutive months without a period. Perimenopause, on the other hand, is the transitional period leading up to it – hormonal changes, hot flashes, mood swings – everything we think of when we think of menopause.  

So in popular discourse, we tend to use the term menopause, essentially, to refer to perimenopause. We conflate the two. 

This sort of linguistic imprecision isn’t unique to this topic of women’s health. We (the collective we of popular discourse) have this habit.

For instance, people often say they ‘have TMJ’ to mean they are experiencing a painful clicking or grinding of their jaw. TMJ stands for the temporomandibular joint, so technically everyone has TMJ (and you don’t want to get rid of it!). 

We’re not so precise in our everyday language, but when it comes to medical terms, we expect our doctors to be more exact. The question is…are they? 

What We Hear In The Exam Room

Our collection of over 250,000 HCP-PT conversations offers us a window into the exam room. When we examine conversations between perimenopausal women and their OB/GYNs, we find that doctors, too, leave menopause and perimenopause undifferentiated in their language.  

Among the 144 conversations collected over the past year between OB/GYNs and women ages 40–49, the term “perimenopause” appears in just 17% of conversations. Even less often do OB/GYNs clearly explain how perimenopause differs from menopause. 

In fact, they often echo the language of popular discourse, conflating the two terms and using menopause to refer to the transition broadly: 

“It takes one to three years to go through menopause”  

“It could be the beginning of menopause”  

“One of the things we always ask about is menopause symptoms”  

When Precision Breaks Down in Practice

The in-office reality is that doctors generally do not distinguish perimenopause from menopause. And rarely does the former even enter the point-of-care conversation. 

The result? If your messaging is employing language around perimenopause, it may not resonate with your audience; it may even confuse them. If these women are not hearing about perimenopause from their OB/GYNs – the medical experts – it’s likely that they are not hearing it at all. 

Turning a Black Box into Insight

If you were to interview OB/GYNs, they may tell you they define and explain perimenopause to patients (i.e., social desirability bias). And if you were to interview patients, they may say they don’t know what perimenopause is. You might ask yourself, “So what’s the disconnect—are doctors not explaining it, or are patients not absorbing it?” The communication breakdown becomes a black box.  

Therein lies the value of the point-of-care conversation. It surfaces the gap between intention and comprehension—turning a black box into a source of actionable insight. 

Mia Shang
Verilogue Researcher, Strategic Services