15 minutes with: Sharon Malone discusses the future of menopausal care, incorporating midlife and health tips from Michelle Obama

Sharon Malone, MD, is the Menopause Whisperer.

You may have heard her talk about all things perimenopause and menopause on Oprah’s podcast. Or Michelle Obama’s podcast. Or your favorite morning show. Or your own podcast.

But Malone doesn’t just talk. As a board-certified gynecologist and menopause doctor, Malone has more than 30 years of practical experience treating women and promoting menopause awareness before it became mainstream.

Malone’s unique combination of expertise and BFF style of performance has made her a leading voice in women’s health. These days, Malone works to expand access to menopause care through her work as a senior medical advisor for digital health company Alloy. She recently tackled important topics like healthy aging and addressing health care disparities in her book Grown Woman Talk: Your Guide to Getting and Staying Healthy, and added New York Times bestselling author to her resume (presumably under her title as health adviser to Michelle Obama).

We sat down with Malone to chat about the important Ms of life: menopause, midlife, and Michelle.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Healthy women: Conversations about perimenopause and menopause are more mainstream these days, but what is the biggest misconception about menopause that you would like to correct?

Sharon Malone: The biggest misconception is that the transition from perimenopause to menopause is short and that you just have to go through it for a few months and then you’re over it – because you’re not over it.

The transition takes years and once you make the transition from perimenopause to menopause, you remain in menopause forever.

HW: How are digital health companies promoting menopause care?

Malone: This is a very important question because for 24 years we have faced a deficit of clinicians and doctors who know how to treat menopause because anyone trained after 2002 really has no experience in treating menopause.

We have lived in the post-Women’s Health Initiative world, where the general perception is that hormone therapy is dangerous and women should not take it. The problem is that it has disadvantaged not only a generation of women who have never talked about hormone therapy, but also an entire generation of doctors who don’t know how to treat women during menopause – or don’t feel comfortable doing so.

So we’ve raised awareness and patients are much more educated about how to enter this area. But where do you go then? It’s still a problem when women see doctors who still give them information about 2002. All the misconceptions are still there and even if we started training all doctors today, it would still take five to six years for it to permeate into the general medical profession.

Digital health is unique because we can leverage the expertise of a few patients versus many, many patients. A doctor can treat far more patients than he or she could physically treat in a day. This is where digital health comes into play. And I think we’re going to see more of digital health, not just in menopause and perimenopause, but in many areas of healthcare – the things that don’t require in-person physical visits – a lot of that will be done in the digital space.

Additionally, digital health does two things: It increases access, because what happens if you don’t live in an area where you have a menopause-trained specialist? What happens if you can’t afford the specialist? What happens if you lose your insurance?

The digital health space will help bridge the gap between the ideal – that every woman should have access to menopausal treatment – ​​and the reality that there is no specialist to go to.

Read: 9 Tips for Using Telemedicine During Menopause >>

HW: You’ve said that midlife is a time of empowerment for women. For those of us who need a little reminder, please explain.

Malone: I can say this not just because I’ve observed it, but because I’ve lived it: Once you hit menopause and beyond, this is probably the most important time in women’s lives when it comes to self-actualization because we spend so much time taking care of others, pursuing careers – you’re doing all these things that really take your focus away, especially when you’re raising small children or caring for aging parents.

Once you hit menopause and beyond, this is the phase of life that I think you’ve never experienced so much. You have more experience. You are able to cut through the nonsense and you truly take responsibility for your life and the direction of your life.

The most important thing is to take care of yourself in midlife so that when you get to the point where you can finally focus on yourself, you feel good enough and healthy enough to be able to do it.

This is my goal for women. Longevity has its place – it really does – but it’s not just about living longer, it’s also about living better. So if you’re 65, you’re still doing the things you want to do.

I think we’re seeing more and more women discovering new things at this age. At 62, I’ve taken a whole new direction in my career – I’m now 67. I want to be better role models for women and tell them not to view menopause and aging as something to be afraid of or feared. This is something to really look forward to. It’s like I’m free. I can just do it now.

HW: Her editorial, “America Lost Its Way on Menopause Research,” sparked a nationwide movement to advocate for increased funding and policy reform in women’s midlife health. What are you seeing today in terms of politics that you want women to be aware of?

Malone: It’s hard to believe, but we wrote this commentary four years ago as we neared the 20th anniversary of the Women’s Health Initiative study. And almost everything we have asked for is at least being discussed, if not actually implemented.

I was lucky enough to be in the Maryland State House just yesterday when Governor Wes Moore signed a menopause bill that requires training for doctors. It also provides that physicians who provide menopausal treatments are insured and compensated. Several states have enacted menopause laws, and this is where the measure comes in. At this point it’s not coming from the federal government, it’s happening in the states and all I care about is that it’s happening. And we actually keep some of these promises.

I think that now that we’ve raised awareness, it’s time to change policy and legislate some of these things because women’s health has been greatly neglected – particularly women in midlife and beyond.

HW: Her podcast, “The Second Opinion with Dr. Sharon,” features a wide range of topics and experts on women’s health. Usually you are the expert. So tell us what you learned about women’s health from a guest.

Malone: I have with Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, and she is one of the researchers at the cutting edge of GLP-1 and obesity medicine. When I stopped practicing, GLP-1 no longer existed. I have not had any patients receiving GLP-1. I had no experience with them and didn’t know what they were used for.

After our conversation, I was able to understand how GLP-1s work, who they are suitable for and what their long-term health benefits are. This was probably the most eye-opening for me because it’s so new.

HW: In your book, Grown Woman Talk: Your Guide to Getting and Staying Healthy, you talk about losing your mother to colon cancer when she was just 57 years old. What should middle-aged women know about colon cancer?

Malone: Get checked early. And when I say early, I mean at 45, and that’s for women who are only at average risk.

If you have a family history of colon cancer, you should have your first colonoscopy 10 years before the age of diagnosis. So if your mother or father was diagnosed at age 45, you need to start screening at age 35.

I think those numbers stick in our minds when it comes to screening – for a long time it was 50 for a colonoscopy – and now we’re seeing younger people being diagnosed with colon cancer and we’ve realized that screening needs to happen earlier.

There also needs to be a public education component where people know what the early warning signs are – even if you are under 45 – as you can always have a colonoscopy for symptoms regardless of age. But to use this information, you have to know the symptoms. We need to educate the public more.

HW: Michelle Obama wrote the forewords to your book and said that you were the first person she turned to about a whole range of problems, particularly her health. What is the best health advice you received from the former first lady that you can share with us?

Malone: So much has happened! It’s a case study in resilience and how to keep going in the face of negativity. It helps me drown out some of the noise because when you live in public you just have to decide that you can’t listen to everyone there because there’s so much negativity in that space. As someone who lives half in the public eye and through my husband [former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder]you see negative comments and you take everything very personally and she helped me with that.

The advice I get most often from her is to not read the comments when looking at social media or posting. Usually they will upset you.

HW: You have said that your dream job is to become a DJ. What would be your DJ name?

Malone: You know what? I’m pretty annoyed that D-Nice took that name because my middle name is Denise and it was supposed to be a mix of the Key & Peele sketch Dee-Nice. So I’ll have to find someone else…maybe DJ Doctor or Dr. DJ instead of Dr. J.

HW: If menopause were a song, what song would it be?

Malone: “The best is yet to come.”

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