Dr. Betty MurrayHelping Women Navigate Menopause | Speaker, Author, and Advocate for Women's Health Over 40

Midlife Hormones: Why So Many Women Feel Dismissed

30 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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In this monologue Dr. Betty Murray explains why midlife hormonal changes are often overlooked. She recounts a viral clip that resonated with women who felt dismissed by narrow diagnostic criteria. Murray describes the physiological cascade of perimenopause: fluctuating and declining estrogen, concurrent shifts in androgens such as DHEA and testosterone, and a pronounced drop in progesterone. She emphasizes that for roughly one in seven to eight women—those expected to develop Perimenopausal Mood and Ocular Syndrome (PMOS)—perimenopause is not a simple transition but a complex metabolic collision of multiple hormonal systems, which clinicians frequently fail to recognize.

Chapters

So here's why this matters now. And it's actually my, one of my clips went viral when this came out because midlife women, many of us, and I'm gonna go through my own personal story, felt like there was some hormonal landscape that wasn't working quite properly. And we were often dismissed if we didn't fit this particular di— early, you know, sort of narrow diagnosis. And then when you get into midlife, because estrogen is fluctuating and declining, and therefore also you get changes in your androgens like DHEA and testosterone. Progesterone is declining, and in this case, even more so than before. All these sort of ways that we might have been looking at it back then are now hard to find. And like I said, for the 1 in 7 to 8 women that are expected to have PMOS, perimenopause is not just a transition. It is a metabolic collision of many, many things.