Menopause is having a moment.
From congressional hearings to celebrity tell-alls, women in midlife are making it known that they're done with previous generations' tradition of keeping quiet about the changes their bodies experience in perimenopause and menopause.
But not all of the information about menopause that's floating around is accurate.
"A huge chunk of my patient load are these midlife women, so I feel like I'm having this conversation more and more, every day," said Dr. Sasha Hamdani, a board-certified psychiatrist and health content creator with more than 1 million Instagram followers. She sees constant misinformation about perimenopause and menopause on social media, she said, including false guidance to get on antidepressants and inaccurate
links between hormone replacement therapies and cancer.
Amanda Yarnell, senior director of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health's Center for Health Communication, is working to shape the national narrative on menopause by providing training for social media influencers who talk about women's health. Connecting influencers with health experts and evidence-based information, she believes, will help women going through perimenopause and menopause get better care and thrive in the workplace.
"Simply giving creators better access to evidence can improve the quality of information that's available on social media," she said. She's seen success by providing influencers with training on other wellness topics, including mental health and parenting.
Her project, "Influencing the Influencers: Menopause at Work" is one of 18 awardees getting a piece of the $60 million Workplace Innovation Now Challenge prize money from Aspen Digital, a program working to uncover new innovations in technology and community empowerment. The initiative is supported by Pivotal, a Melinda French Gates foundation, and its aim is to build better workplace opportunities for women. The program received nearly 900 applications from organizations across the United States, and the winning solutions address myriad issues affecting women including workplace flexibility and caregiving needs.
"Workplaces have changed dramatically in recent years − but in many ways they’re still shaped by the past," French Gates said in a news release first shared exclusively with USA TODAY. "We see it in everything from harmful biases about women's capabilities to outdated practices that make it impossible to balance raising a family with building a career. But these extraordinary innovators are proving that these problems can be solved. They’ve brought forward a bold set of ideas to remove barriers that prevent people from accessing economic opportunity and reaching their full potential − and finally bring our workplaces into the future."
The pros and cons of getting medical information on social media
Yarnell has led the influencer program at Harvard since 2023, and said more than 1,400 creators have signed up so far. The program was an extension of Harvard's Center for Health Communication 1980s initiative to "inject health messaging into popular entertainment." The most successful, well-known example of the center's work is the designated driver campaign. If you've heard of "designated drivers," Yarnell said, it's because of that campaign, which tapped media companies and Hollywood television studios to include drunk driving warnings in their storylines.
Similarly, the influencer program, which is free for participants, provides information and training for online content creators who talk about health topics, whether they have medical backgrounds or not. Some of these creators have massive followings, and social media users take their words to heart "either actively or just passively" all of the time, Yarnell said.
"We're not all watching the same TV shows anymore," Yarnell said. "Instead, now we're all watching TikTok."
Hamdani considers herself "an accidental influencer." When she started correcting medical misinformation online several years ago, she said, she never expected her following to grow to one million.
She joined Harvard's pilot influencer program in 2023 with about 20 other influencers. At that time, the program's focus was mental health. Flying to campus for a two-day retreat, Hamdani said, was so powerful that "it changed, No. 1, how I practiced and, No. 2, how I presented data and content online."
Through the program, she said, Hamdani learned that influencers like herself who provide health content online "have this duty to present it in the correct way," including sourcing information and making sure everything they say is research-backed and evidence-based.
"I definitely think more carefully about what I'm saying and what kind of claims I'm making," she said. When she talks about new information online, she makes sure the sources she's citing − articles, research studies, etc. − are easy for her audience to access themselves.
Her direct patients are better informed now, too, Hamdani said. She knows a lot of her patients get medical information online, and she's glad they bring their concerns to her so she can dispel any misinformation directly. And even when content creators get things wrong, she doesn't always think it's a bad thing − as long as patients bring their concerns back to their doctors.
She's excited to get more guidance about how to talk about perimenopause and menopause and thinks the cultural conversation around these topics are long overdue.
"There is so much noise constantly going on and it's difficult to know who to trust," Hamdani said. "What I've seen is, sometimes, you get this very, very clickbait-y information that's oversimplified, it's like 'If you do this one thing that's going to cure this.' And all your Spidey senses go off."
The creators in Harvard's program really care about their online communities, Yarnell said. By providing the infrastructure to information access and training, she said, she hopes to see the already burgeoning menopause conversation spread even further and provide relief to the women who need it.
Other winners
Yarnell's menopause project is expected to launch in early 2027, she said. The other 17 Aspen Digital solution winners are described on the program's website. Other winners include:
- WorkLife Law, an organization working to train women's health care providers and provide free help line assistance to reduce barriers pregnant women face in the workplace.
- Costal Enterprises, Inc., an organization working to aid rural child care deserts.
- Opportunity Work Inc, an organization amplifying inclusion in hiring systems that use artificial intelligence.
- American Journalism Project, an organization working to support full-time local news coverage that will expose women's workplace inequities.
Madeline Mitchell's role covering women and the caregiving economy at USA TODAY is supported by a partnership with Pivotal and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.
Reach Madeline at memitchell@usatoday.com and @maddiemitch_ on X.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: They're helping influencers combat misinformation about menopause. Is it working? | Exclusive
