Annice Mukherjee - The Complete Guide to the Menopause: Your Toolkit to Take Control and Achieve Life-Long Health

Dr Annice Mukherjee is a hospital physician and endocrinologist with a medical career spanning almost 30 years. She trained as an undergraduate in Manchester and then worked in the South-East Thames region, based at Kings College Hospital London, later returning to Manchester. She achieved a masters degree with Kings College London and an MD thesis with the University of Manchester, which was based on quality of life in hormone diseases.

Dr Mukherjee took a consultant post at Salford Royal Hospital Foundation Trust, where she worked for 12 years. She specialises in general medicine and endocrinology with a career-long interest in complex medical illness, quality of life in hormone diseases and hormone problems in cancer survivors, including early menopause and other complex menopause issues, as well as managing chronic fatigue. She has supported thousands of women going through menopause to help them manage symptoms and safely improve their quality of life and overall health.

Dr Mukherjee prides herself on managing her patients in a holistic and innovative way. She always stresses that every single womans menopause is different and their individual solutions will vary. She is uniquely and expertly placed to advise the modern woman to achieve a successful and healthy menopause.

Dr Mukherjee felt eternally grateful to have the knowledge that she had built up when she went through a breast cancer diagnosis and early menopause herself at the age of 41. Her knowledge enabled her to embrace and live life to the full, despite her health issues, and she wants to reproduce this positive experience for every woman going through menopause.

Dedicated to my father, Amiya Pada Mukherjee

Thank you to Lorna Stockwood, Jill and Ian Mukherjee, Margaret Mukherjee, Sally Dynevor, Sally Harrison, Fairuz Awenat, Fiona Harrop, Alison Douglas, Helen Buckler, Anita Craven, Emma Persand, Julie Neville and my wonderful partner in life and husband, Simon Taggart, who all played an integral part, helping me, in different ways, to make this book happen.

Thank you also to all my very close and precious family and friends. I am not going to name you one by one, but I am truly grateful for your love, kindness and support.

S O YOU ARE thinking about menopause. Perhaps you have noticed moments of feeling emotional for no particular reason. Maybe you broke out in a seemingly unexplained sweat during a work meeting. You may have woken in the night with your heart racing and could not get back to sleep. Such unexpected symptoms or sensations may have got you thinking that maybe this menopause business needs some exploring. Of course, you may be some way down the line from those symptoms and simply want to understand more about what menopause might mean for you.

Most women know they will experience menopause at some point but, historically, this has been a taboo subject, sometimes associated with negative connotations such as getting old and life slowing down. For the mature adult woman today, nothing could be further from the truth. For the majority, midlife has become enriched, fulfilled and busier than ever. We can now expect to have more adult life after menopause than any generation before us, because we are living longer. In light of this, our choices matter more than ever before.

Virtually all the new challenges facing you, as a woman going through menopause today, can be mitigated, resulting in empowerment and renewed vitality. Menopause mastery is a springboard for you to look and feel vibrant, and enjoy improved long-term quality of life. With the right approaches you can maintain a good level of fitness, keep energised, be more productive, thrive in the workplace for longer if you choose to and maintain stronger personal relationships. Modest lifestyle adjustments will facilitate many of these improvements and they will also reduce long-term health problems, resulting in an easier menopause transition and a more contented, healthy and fulfilled future.

The Complete Guide to the Menopause aims to provide essential information and furnish you with a practical toolkit to help you take control, feel empowered, successfully prepare for and manage your own menopause, and achieve lifelong health. The aim is to thrive, not just to survive. The solutions will include some universal codebreakers, effective for all, and some approaches that you can tailor to your individual circumstances. Each and every woman has a unique menopause experience. Symptoms are very varied and each of us will choose our own path depending on our circumstances. You may pass through with few symptoms or you may struggle with a multitude of problems. Regardless of symptoms, all women are united by a desire to maintain good health, well-being and self-confidence before, during and beyond menopause. In order to achieve this, you need to recognise and understand your own menopause transition and set about mastering it sooner rather than later.

The advice, strategies and information given cover almost every menopause scenario, enabling you to cherry-pick information according to your own individual needs. You may be interested in hormone therapies or seek lifestyle adjustments such as dietary guidance, improved sleep and stress management, among other things. This book celebrates your right to choose your own menopause path without judgement.

will provide a general overview of menopause and decode it for you. This is important not only for those going through menopause, but those heading in that general direction, along with their partners and loved ones. It is really helpful for you and those close to you to understand the symptoms and how they may develop and progress as well as how they gradually settle down in time. Understanding the symptoms also helps you in implementing management strategies to overcome them. These strategies will be detailed in later chapters.

For those of you not yet experiencing menopause symptoms, it is important to keep perspective and not worry that you will experience every possible symptom. Many of you will be able to pass through menopause with modest lifestyle tweaks. But it is important to recognise that, for some of us, symptoms can escalate and become very disruptive. Medical support and treatment may be needed. For these reasons, I dont want to sugar-coat the journey. I will be candid, but I will also provide solutions throughout the book. Everyone, including those worst-hit with menopause symptoms, can overcome any storms that menopause may produce and enjoy the anticyclone that you can achieve with the right actions and management going forward.

involves empowering you with your own menopause toolkit. These chapters outline what you can do yourself without medication or the input of a doctor, as well as what can be done alongside these. They cover self-management approaches detailing how to conquer common menopause scenarios and symptoms that can hamper quality of life, with sustainable lifestyle adjustments that I describe as biohacks. These should not be difficult to dovetail into your daily routine, but when implemented can be life-changing.

provides information about management strategies that may be needed to support and complement lifestyle approaches. These chapters will help you to decipher which management approaches may be helpful in different symptom scenarios, including the benefits of HRT.