MS. TREATMENT : A Matter of Trust : Mary Jones founded a health center in Ventura to meet the special emotional and physiological needs of women.
“Gynecologists by and large find the menopausal woman an unappealing patient. She isn’t going to have any more babies or consult her doctor about fertility or other upbeat matters. Apart from a hysterectomy, there is little chance she will require surgery -- the moneymaking part of the practice -- but she can be expected to complain about vague symptoms and ask questions for which the physician has only unsatisfactory answers.”
--author Gail Sheehy
The only explanation Linda Laws could think of was that she was going crazy. That, or she had a brain tumor.
“I’m not a hypochondriac and I don’t like going to doctors,” said Laws, 43. “But I was thinking all kinds of things. I had something I just couldn’t deal with.”
Laws was dealing with what an estimated 43 million women nationwide are experiencing: bouts of fatigue, hot flashes, jagged emotions and sometimes an eerie sense that they have been turned “inside out.”
But while the number of women in menopause is expected to grow dramatically in the next decade as more and more baby-boomers head into the 45-to-54 age range, the cause of their symptoms is still a subject shrouded in silence.
Even, at times, in the medical community.
“I get the feeling that menopause is something a lot of doctors just don’t want to deal with,” said Laws, whose male gynecologist ran a series of tests and then told her that there was nothing physically wrong with her. “It’s kind of like it’s all in your head. I also don’t think very many doctors would tell you to go to someone like Mary.”
“Mary” is Mary Jones, a nurse practitioner and founder of the Channel Islands Center for Women’s Health in Ventura. A former labor and delivery nurse who went on to specialize in women’s reproductive health, Jones said she recognized the need to help women such as Laws manage their menopausal symptoms.
She also knew that beyond meeting emotional needs, there were some dramatic physiological benefits that come from proper care. According to the National Osteoporosis Foundation, one-third to one-half of all post-menopausal women are affected by osteoporosis. And studies have shown that cardiovascular disease quietly affects one in two women over the age of 50.
But the lack of information about menopause is startling.
In a longitudinal study of 500 women graduates of a Midwestern university, researchers found that the majority of college-educated women get their “facts” about menopause first from their friends, second from books or the media, and third from their mothers. The person they turn to last for information is a doctor.
Jones said many patients who come to her for help have been given hormones such as estrogen and progesterone by their gynecologists. But most, she said, have never been told why.
Whether this is due to their failure to ask questions or the unwillingness of the doctor to provide satisfactory answers isn’t clear. But Jones said the women have expressed unhappiness with the care they received.
“A woman’s body is going through dramatic changes at menopause and it’s a very vulnerable time,” she said. “That’s why it’s so important to have a good rapport” with a health-care professional. “For Linda to come in here and say she’s confused, that she feels vulnerable, takes trust.”
Trust isn’t only in demand by menopausal women. Since opening the center six years ago, Jones has also treated patients undergoing other hormonal imbalances, including symptoms associated with postpartum depression and premenstrual syndrome.
Patients are asked to log their daily moods and energy levels. Then in meetings with Jones in her office, they discuss changes and the best ways to keep fluctuations to a minimum. Discussions include modifying eating habits, the importance of vitamins and the best dosages of hormones.
“With PMS, we’ve never developed a test to see whether you have it, and so it has really ended up in a very gray area with a lot of doctors,” said Jones, who is the center’s only medical practitioner. She is able to prescribe a limited number of hormones through her affiliation with Dr. Richard Weisman of the Ventura County Ob/Gyn Medical Group.
“But a lot of women develop PMS after pregnancy or breast-feeding and some after a tubal ligation,” she said.
Levels of the naturally produced hormone progesterone drop, she explained, causing “a change in their personality, fatigue and classic symptoms” for about 10 days a month.
For patients such as Sara Carver, having a place she can go to get her medical questions answered--and her condition treated with a sense of caring--is a relief.
“I went to another doctor before, but I had a bad experience,” said Carver, 39, a business manager in Oxnard. “I know Mary really knows how I feel. She treats me as a total person. I know she cares about more than just what’s below my waist.”
