It's basically a day like any other, but you still feel different. There's this nagging feeling of heat rising through the roots of your hair. There's tiredness bordering on the edge of paralysis. Even the things you do in your free time are exhausting and not particularly enjoyable... Not even the night yields relief. You might wake up two or three times, drenched in sweat, and can't get back to sleep for what seems like ages... And there's something else: Your period has been increasingly irregular before stopping completely...

...if this sounds familiar, you're probably going through menopause - a phase of life that still causes many women anxiety and insecurity, not least due to a lack of information about what's going on in their own bodies...

This text is by no means new, but surprisingly timely, taken from an article I wrote in the early 1990s for the then health magazine "Anima" (Zeit des Wechsels, text by Regine Ahner ). As a young doctor, I worked in a specialised outpatient clinic at the University Women's Hospital in Vienna, the so-called “Wechselambulanz”. The clinic was founded to provide advice and better support to women during this phase change in their lives.

But even as the medical profession entered into a veritable "menopause boom” three decades ago — closely coupled to the availability of hormone replacement therapy for the first time – broad social recognition of the life phase known as the climacteric is often treated as taboo.

Many women know too little about the processes in their bodies, rightfully feel abandoned, and then obtain their knowledge exclusively from social media.