The Menopause Movement: Who's Profiting and Who's Paying the Price

October is Menopause Awareness Month. Awareness is good—until it becomes a business model. Today’s menopause “movement” is a high-gloss, billion-dollar industry that keeps women underdosed, overprescribed, and chronically symptomatic. The result? Corporations profit. Women pay—with their health, productivity, and quality of life.

For years, menopause was treated as a quiet, almost shameful inevitability: a mysterious transition into old age where a woman’s body and mind began to unravel. Today, the conversation has shifted. Menopause is finally on the table — with celebrities, influencers, and even the FDA fueling new awareness campaigns.

There’s no denying that visibility has improved. Oprah’s highly publicized menopause special, Halle Berry’s partnership with Midi Health, Dr. Mary Claire Haver’s branding around “The Galveston Diet,” and influencers turning symptoms into comedy skits — all of these voices have made menopause more socially acceptable to discuss.

But behind the curtain, pharmaceutical companies and clinics are quietly writing the checks. Awareness is being sponsored by the very industries that stand to gain the most by keeping women underdosed in estrogen.

Even functional medicine, which prides itself on addressing root causes, fails most women here. While functional practitioners lean more toward bioidentical hormones, they too are largely trained to use low-dose protocols that keep women hormonally deficient. Whether through conventional or functional medicine, the result is the same: women remain deficient, symptomatic, and completely dependent.

The Business of Menopause

The menopause market is booming. From pharmaceutical companies to supplement brands to celebrity-endorsed clinics, everyone wants a slice of the “menopause pie.” Advertisements flood social media feeds with solutions for hot flashes, brain fog, weight gain, or sleepless nights.

But look closely and you’ll see the common thread: these products and programs rarely address the root cause — estrogen deficiency. Instead, they capitalize on managing symptoms with low-dose HRT without restoring a woman’s hormonal balance to its rightful place.

This approach guarantees one outcome: women are left perpetually hormonally deficient. They are never allowed to experience what it feels like to be hormonally whole again. Instead, they continue to suffer — and that ongoing suffering fuels an endless cycle of:

• New prescriptions (antidepressants, anti-inflammatories, sleep aids, diabetic drugs, pain meds, cardiac meds).
• Supplement sales to “support” what low-dose hormones cannot fix.
• Membership programs and packaged products that promise solutions but never reach the root cause.

It’s a system where women are kept in a constant state of “needing more.”

Who Benefits from the Current Movement?

Pharmaceutical Companies: supplying endless drugs for heart disease, diabetes, depression, bone loss, pain, and insomnia. Psychotropic drugs are the leading prescription to manage the side effects of hormone deficiency. Can you imagine what life would be like if women didn’t have to experience mental illness? The pharmaceutical industry would collapse.

Supplement and Wellness Brands: flooding women with powders, teas, creams, and vitamins that patch but never restore. Billions of dollars a month are spent on supplements women purchase to manage the side effects of hormone deficiency that otherwise would not exist if hormones were fully restored.

Celebrity Doctors and Influencers: building brands, books, and clinics around half-truths and underdosed protocols. Menopause storytelling is emotionally compelling—and it sells. Personality-driven content draws massive engagement, which monetizes into books, partnerships, product lines, and streaming deals. The business model prizes audience growth and product velocity, not clinical outcomes. A subset of clinicians has successfully built large personal brands around midlife women’s health. Many do provide legitimate education. But the incentive gradient—social media reach, sponsorships, affiliate deals, course sales—can subtly shift practice patterns toward simpler, standardized, lower-risk protocols over genuinely individualized, therapeutically dosed restoration that requires additional training, clinical practice, time, monitoring, and nuance.

Medical Systems: specializing in the diseases and conditions that estrogen deficiency creates. From cardiovascular health to mental health, every part of a woman’s brain and body is impacted. When estrogen and other hormones remain deficient, there are a multitude of diseases and conditions that need to be treated. Treatments, testing, pharmaceuticals, the Medical Establishment makes billions keeping women hormonally deficient.

Online Hormone Clinics: Telehealth has expanded access, which is a net positive. Yet the dominant subscription model depends on scalable, low-touch care: brief intakes, limited labs, templated protocols, and low-dose hormones that are easy to prescribe and renew. The revenue engine often isn’t the visit fee—it’s the recurring membership plus a high-margin product stack: supplements, creams, serums, sleep aids, weight-loss add-ons, and proprietary devices. The more a woman’s symptoms persist, the more products she buys.

Consumer Brands and Retailers: “Menopause” now anchors entire product categories—skincare, apparel, nutraceuticals, teas, gadgets. Many products are benign; some are helpful adjuncts. But none correct a central, clinical reality: if a woman is estrogen-deficient, anti-aging moisturizers and cooling pajamas don’t replete estradiol receptors in the brain, bone, vasculature, and urogenital tissues.

Profit model in a nutshell:

1. Keep estrogen levels too low to eliminate deficiency.
2. Sell additional products — supplements, creams, psychotropic drugs — to mask the ongoing symptoms.
3. Keep women miserable and dependent on a cycle of consumption rather than restoration.

Who Pays the Price?

Women: Women bear the costs—financial, emotional, cognitive, and relational—of partial solutions. Low-dose hormones can blunt a few peaks of discomfort while leaving brain fog, anhedonia, anxiety, insomnia, vaginal atrophy, and body-composition changes largely intact. Long-term consequences of sustained estrogen deficiency—bone loss, metabolic deterioration, urogenital atrophy—continue to accrue if estrogen is never meaningfully restored.

Families: Everybody in the family is affected by the mom’s hormone deficiency. Families who watch their mothers, partners, and daughters struggle through preventable suffering. Relationships with partners and children crumble when women lose their will to participate in their own lives. The inability to connect, love, and feel influences every relationship in a woman’s inner circle, down to her pets.

The “Difficult” Patient Label: When standardized, low-dose protocols fail, women are too often told they’re “sensitive,” “non-compliant,” or “complicated.” Instead of the protocol evolving toward the patient, the patient is pressed to accept the protocol’s limits. This is backwards.

Workplaces: Which lose the contributions of high-performing women at the peak of their careers. They have to make ineffective adjustments and costly “comfort accommodations” to cater to a woman’s misery just to get decent days' work out of them. Women’s hormone deficiency induced irrational behavior, irritable mood, and sour demeanor impacts co-workers and overall production.

The cost is far greater than dollars. Women pay with their health, their productivity, and their quality of life. When estrogen is left at deficient levels:

• Brains suffer. Estrogen is critical for cognition, mood regulation, and energy production. Deficiency fuels brain fog, depression, and anxiety.
• Bodies decline. Bone density decreases, muscle mass shrinks, and cardiovascular risk skyrockets.
• Lives are diminished. Women who should be in their prime years of creativity, leadership, and vitality instead struggle to get through the day.

This is not a natural, unavoidable process. It’s the result of a system designed to underdose hormones, manage symptoms, and keep women forever “patients.”

Inside the Online Hormone Clinic Business Model

Most tele-hormone platforms optimize for scale:

1. Acquisition: Compelling ads, social media posts, memes, TikTok dances, and quizzes convert curiosity into memberships.
2. Streamlined Intake: Limited histories and minimal lab panels reduce clinician time.
3. Standardized Protocol: A narrow formulary enables quick prescribing. Doses err conservative to limit callbacks.
4. Monetize the Aftermath: Persistent symptoms are routed into add-on products: sleep, mood, energy, weight, skin, libido.
5. Retention: Symptoms that never fully resolve due to hormone deficiencies keep the subscription and product cadence alive.

From a business perspective, this is elegant. From a clinical perspective, it can be a miserable, endless treadmill. If the core deficiency—estrogen and, when indicated, other hormones—isn’t restored to the pre-perimenopausal level where brain-body systems normalize, the “downstream” product market thrives while the woman’s upstream problem persists.

What a Better Model Looks Like

A forward-thinking, clinically rigorous approach puts outcomes before optics and restoration before retail. While exact protocols must be individualized and physician-directed, a higher standard typically includes:

1. Root-Cause Framing
   Perimenopause and menopause are fundamentally estrogen-deficiency states (often with contributory progesterone, testosterone, and thyroid dynamics). Treat them as such.
2. Therapeutic Dosing Aimed at Function
   Use evidence-informed, physician-supervised strategies that meaningfully replete estrogen and, when appropriate, other hormones—titrated to clinical indicators (sleep, cognition, mood, vasomotor stability, urogenital health, menstrual regulation in perimenopause) rather than “just enough to blunt the worst symptoms.”
3. Structured, Ongoing Assessment
   Replace “set-and-forget” with a repeatable framework: baseline mapping → careful initiation → scheduled check-ins → dose optimization → maintenance. Track both subjective outcomes and objective markers aligned to the woman’s goals and risk profile.
4. Protocol Flexibility
   Women are not templates. The plan must allow for formulation changes, rhythmic or cyclic strategies, delivery routes, and combination approaches to achieve stable, sustainable results.
5. Minimalism in Adjuncts
   Use adjunct products sparingly, with a clear clinical rationale. If a basket of add-ons seems necessary to keep a woman functioning, re-examine the core hormone plan.
6. Education and Clinical Hand-Holding
   Women need to understand the “why” and “how” of dosing, expected transitional effects, and what constitutes a normal adaptation vs. a red flag. Clinical hormone coaching and access matter.
7. Ethical Economics
   Align financial incentives with resolution, not dependency. Memberships and monitoring are fair when they accelerate outcomes; they’re predatory when they substitute for them.

The Paradigm Shift: Full Hormone Restoration

The truth is that menopause is not just a “life stage” to accept — it’s a state of hormone deficiency. And the good news is, the deficiency can be corrected.

Traditional definitions frame menopause as a life stage marked by the anniversary of 12 months without a menstrual cycle. Alongside this definition comes a laundry list of “inevitable” symptoms: hot flashes, brain fog, weight gain, mood swings, joint pain, loss of libido, insomnia, and declining cognition.

But what if these symptoms aren’t menopause itself — but the side effects of profound estrogen and progesterone deficiency?

That’s the reality. Menopause is not a condition women must accept. It is a side effect of extreme hormone deficiency. And when estrogen is restored to therapeutic levels, those “inevitable” symptoms don’t appear.

A 60-year-old woman with healthy, restored hormone levels is not “menopausal.” She is vibrant, sharp, and hormonally balanced — proof that decline is not destiny.

A Better Way: Advanced Hormone Restoration

Advanced, therapeutic-dose HRT protocols are designed not to suppress symptoms, but to fully restore hormones to optimal, youthful ranges. This approach:

• Restores brain clarity, energy, and mood stability.
• Rebuilds muscle, bone, heart, and vascular strength.
• Protects against dementia, cardiovascular disease, and osteoporosis.
• Gives women their brains, bodies, and minds back, slowing down the living decaying process.

This is not fringe science. It’s a matter of training, education, and clinical experience. Unfortunately, most physicians are not trained in therapeutic-dosed protocols — which leaves women cycling endlessly between “symptom management” and “acceptance.”

A Movement Worth Having—If We Change Its Direction

Women do not need another era of silence. But they also do not need a glossy commercialization of suffering. The current menopause movement has succeeded at making symptoms speakable while building profitable ecosystems around managing them. The next (and necessary) evolution is a patient-centered, outcomes-driven standard that makes restoration the goal and ethics the operating system.

That means celebrating awareness and demanding accountability:

• from celebrity storytellers who should pair influence with evidence,
• from influencer clinicians who must match their reach with rigor,
• from online clinics that should reorient to therapeutic dosing, robust monitoring, and clear outcome metrics,
• and from all of us who refuse to normalize avoidable suffering.

Women aren’t asking for miracles. They are asking for the right amount of the right hormones, delivered the right way, with the right oversight, until their brains, bodies, and lives fully come back online. When the movement prioritizes that, everyone wins—except the business models built on keeping women chronically, profitably under-treated.

Menopause does not need to be a life sentence of decline. With the right approach, it can be prevented, reversed, or transformed into a season of vitality, health, and happiness.

The choice is clear: continue funding an industry built on suffering, or demand full hormone restoration and reclaim your life.

Listen to the podcast episode: The Menopause Movement 

If you want a structured path to full restoration, explore the Hormone Sweet Spot^™ Program and our advanced female hormone balancing clinic.