If you have been feeling off, exhausted, or anxious, struggling to sleep, or experiencing headaches or digestive issues with no clear cause, and every specialist you have seen has cleared you from their end, Dr Kajal Parikh wants you to hear this.
Dr Kajal Parikh is a Mumbai-based gynaecologist and minimal invasive surgeon specialising in reproductive endocrinology at NuHer. In this conversation, she breaks down what perimenopause and menopause actually are, when the phase begins and why so many of its symptoms go unrecognised for years.
Perimenopause, she explains, is not a single event. It is the long hormonal transition that begins years before periods stop entirely. Sleep disruption, cardiac stress, anxiety, fatigue, gastrointestinal problems, migraines and tinnitus can all be symptoms of declining hormones that frequently get investigated by neurologists, cardiologists and gastroenterologists before anyone thinks to look at the hormonal picture.
Dr Parikh also addresses the lifestyle factor honestly: two women of the same age going through the same hormonal transition can have very different experiences depending on how well they sleep, eat and move. While symptoms are not inevitable, she suggests managing them by understanding what is actually driving them.
She also demystifies Menopausal Hormone Therapy (MHT), explaining the difference between substitution and replenishment, who it may be appropriate for, and who should approach it with caution. It is one of the clearest, most accessible explanations of a topic that remains widely misunderstood and often, unnecessarily feared.
This is the conversation most women are not having with their doctors and the one Dr. Parikh believes they should be.