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title: Halle Berry Says It’s Time to Talk About Menopause
description: Doctors don&#x27;t know enough about how to treat women during menopause, Halle Berry says. It&#x27;s why she launched a new health company, Respin.
canonical: https://time.com/7175855/halle-berry-menopause-respin/
author: Alice Park
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article:published_time: 2025-02-20T15:11:52.000Z
article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:50:14.802Z
article:section: Health
og:title: Halle Berry Says It’s Time to Talk About Menopause
og:description: The Oscar-winning actress and menopause advocate has launched a new health company, Respin.
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twitter:title: Halle Berry Says It’s Time to Talk About Menopause
twitter:description: The Oscar-winning actress and menopause advocate has launched a new health company, Respin.
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# Halle Berry Says It’s Time to Talk About Menopause

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<!-- video src="https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/EkBbhRuI.m3u8" -->
## Video: TIME100 Health Panel Talks ‘Medical Gaslighting’ and Investing in Women’s Health

[Watch (HLS stream): TIME100 Health Panel Talks ‘Medical Gaslighting’ and Investing in Women’s Health](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/EkBbhRuI.m3u8) (22:22)

![TIME100 Health Panel Talks ‘Medical Gaslighting’ and Investing in Women’s Health](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/EkBbhRuI/poster.jpg?width=720)

_Published 2024-05-14. Actress and healthcare advocate Halle Berry; geneticist Marlena Fejzo; and Daniel Skovronsky, chief scientific officer at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, spoke about the importance of investing in women’s health at a TIME100 Health panel in New York on Monday._


![Alice Park](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9b1ff6b12c3a4c3f/698a0b4397cdff3e366ba723/200116_Time_Headshots_Day552832-e1583529256299.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1:1)

by 

[Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)


![Alice Park](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9b1ff6b12c3a4c3f/698a0b4397cdff3e366ba723/200116_Time_Headshots_Day552832-e1583529256299.jpg?branch=production&width=96&quality=75&auto=webp)

## Alice Park


Senior Correspondent

Feb 20, 2025 3:11 PM UTC

![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltfb0c295ccfa0e478/6998c3b483ec370fd1c7a492/Halle-solo-.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=4:5)

Courtesy Respin

![Alice Park](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9b1ff6b12c3a4c3f/698a0b4397cdff3e366ba723/200116_Time_Headshots_Day552832-e1583529256299.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1:1)

by 

[Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)


![Alice Park](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9b1ff6b12c3a4c3f/698a0b4397cdff3e366ba723/200116_Time_Headshots_Day552832-e1583529256299.jpg?branch=production&width=96&quality=75&auto=webp)

## Alice Park


Senior Correspondent

Feb 20, 2025 3:11 PM UTC

Oscar-winning actress Halle Berry has a new passion: menopause, a neglected area of medicine long in need of a little love. Doctors often downplay or fail to thoroughly treat the biological changes that trigger physical, emotional, and social shifts at midlife, and Berry is asking hard questions about why the medical community doesn't adequately address this important stage with patients. 

 Berry talked to TIME about her advocacy work and [Respin](http://www.respin.health), the new company she created to provide women with reliable and comprehensive information about menopause. 

## You’ve become a vocal advocate for more research and information about women in midlife. How did your personal experience bring you to this work?

The more I started to [talk about what I was going through](https://time.com/6967234/halle-berry/), I started to realize how other women were suffering and how little other women had. I started to see the need to continue efforts in Washington to get a bill passed with substantive dollars \[for more research on midlife and more clinical trials for menopause\]. I saw the need for more education.

I had no answers, no one to turn to. I was floored to find the dearth of nothingness in this space—and how little doctors knew. I thought I had the best doctors I could have.

## How are you working to change how we talk about menopause? 

We are working on the federal level to get the bill through, and working at the state level, too, with governors and leaders. We’re talking to them about what programs they might be willing to support in their states to support women.


## Why are more doctors not talking to women about menopause and midlife?

It’s not really their fault. It’s not something that’s made important for them in medical school. But what I hold against doctors today is that now that we are out there talking about it—and screaming that women deserve better—they don’t go back to take it upon themselves to get an education. Every practitioner should know about the menopausal body. Women are living to their 80s, and menopause can start in your 40s. We spend half our lifetimes in it now.

**Read More**: [_Why It’s Time to Uncouple Obstetrics and Gynecology_](https://time.com/7031874/uncoupling-obstetrics-gynecology-essay/)

If men went through this time of life in the same horrific way we do \[with symptoms of hot flashes, night sweats, and mood changes\], there would be lots of answers, research, and a lot of money raised to fund studies to help men live their best lives. But because we are women, we suffer sexism and ageism; when we get to this time of life, we’re expected to white-knuckle it and bow out gracefully. Because society told us our primary and best years are for childbearing, and all we are meant to do is make babies. When we are done making babies, we’re left to fend for ourselves. No one cares about us any more. 


## You have testified in Congress on behalf of a bill that would increase research and clinical trials to better understand women’s midlife. Why is there so little funding for this work?

We refuse to understand that menopause is a thing. It's a very important time in a woman’s life when she needs to be cared for and understand what is happening to her body so she can live her best life in the next 30 years. We haven’t acknowledged that, and that’s why we never support it with money.

## How can women change the current stigma and lack of knowledge about menopause?

There are so many ideas and information and misinformation swirling around. That’s why I created Respin. It’s a community for women to talk to each other and learn from each other. But there is also a health component with health coaching, nutritionists, and experts to talk about exercise and learning how the lack of estrogen and changing hormones affect our heart, brain, bones, and entire body. I felt like there was something really missing in the market for women in midlife.


## How will Respin help women in menopause?

Women can get whatever level of support and care they need. A woman in her 30s can get educated about menopause; a woman in perimenopause can get a health coach and devise a plan for her needs, whether that includes [hormone replacement therapy](https://time.com/4936206/hormone-therapy-menopause/) or supplements, and a woman post-menopause can come for the services she needs, too. It all depends on where a woman is and what her needs are when she enters the community.

**Read More**: [_Menopause Is Finally Going Mainstream_](https://time.com/6565057/menopause-treatment-symptoms-mainstream/)

## How can the medical system change to be more supportive and knowledgeable?

That’s my next crusade. After I get the bill passed in D.C. for more research and clinical trials, I’m going to the universities and putting pressure on them, too. We need to help them understand why this is important and reimagine their curriculum to make menopause and midlife for women more than one chapter in medical-school textbooks.


And this isn’t just for gynecologists. This isn’t [bikini medicine](https://time.com/7031874/uncoupling-obstetrics-gynecology-essay/). Every doctor—every cardiologist, every neurologist, every general practitioner, every rheumatologist—should understand the effect that a woman’s loss of her hormones does to her body and every single one of her organs.

We women have to start demanding more. That’s who I am today: a woman demanding more. I am demanding more because we deserve more.


## Transcript

It is my privilege to be moderating our discussion this evening where we'll be talking about women's health. And in particular, why it's still so difficult to talk about some issues in women's health, even in 2024. So, Hally, you've been working tirrelessly to change the way we think about menopause. And this work was really inspired by an experience you had at the doctor's office. Can you share that experience with us? Oh, God. I'm afraid you were going to ask me this. Okay. Are you sure? I am sure. Okay, guys, I'm sorry to every man in this room, but you got to hear it. Very important. It is It is very important.

It was very graphic, so I'm just going to warn you. I got inspired to do this work because I was 54 years old, and I found out that I was smack dab in the middle of menopause. It was something that nobody ever talked to me about. My mother included. I my ego thought because I had weaned myself off insulin at 24 years old. I'm a type, you know, diabetic. I thought, I'm healthy. I eat right. I'm just going to skip this menopause. This isn't gonna happen to me. And by the way, I don't even know anything about it. So, I'm sure it's not gonna happen to me. Well, all of a sudden, 54 years old, after being divorced three times.

Sorry, but it's true. I meet my person, the man of my life, he's sitting right there. Van Hunt. I meet Van Hunt. And we're having the most amazing relationship, and sex was a great part of it. Everything was going fine. So, one night. We're having sex. And it's great. Seems like nothing in the world is wrong until the next morning, when I go to try to use the bathroom. I sit down, try to go, and it's like I have razor blades in my vagina. Like, Razor blade, cutting a cutting, burning feeling when I let a little bit out. Then I squeeze. Then I let a little bit more out. Then I squeeze. And it takes me like almost 10 minutes just to empty my bladder.

I think, Oh, God, what is going on? And then about an hour or two later, The most heinous substance you would think to excrete from anybody's body starts excreting. And it's all colors, and it has an odor that we won't discuss. And I think, Oh, my God. What happened in 24 hours? So, I call my gynecologist. Yeah, I got to come in. I got to see you right now. I'm having a bad problem. I go there. He, you know, does the thing. He's got me up in the stirrups. He's looking up there. He said, Oh, God. I think I know what this is. I said, Really, what? He said, You have a new partner, right? I said, Oh, my God.

I finally met the man in my life. He said, I don't know if this is the man of your life. I was like, why would you say that? You don't even know him. He said, Because you have the worst case of herpes I have ever seen. I'm like, What herpes? He said, Yep. I don't think this is the man of your life, 'cause you've been given herpes. So now, the man of my life, who gave me these herpes is sitting down in the car because my vagina is so on fire. I couldn't even do the petals to drive myself to the doctor. So the man who gave me herpes is sitting in the car waiting for me. So you can imagine my fury.

I get down to the car, see the man that gave me herpes, and I'm like, Yo. You got ******* herpes? When were you going to tell me you had ******* herpes? He says, I don't have herpes. I'm like, clearly, you do because now I do, and I didn't have herpes before I met you. So clearly, you have herpes. He says, No, I don't have nobody he's ever told me I had any herpes. I said, Well, let me be the first to tell you. You've got herpes. He said, no, no, no. Well, then he's he's such an impat. He goes, Well, maybe somebody gave me herpes along the way. And I just you know, not everybody knows they have it.

They're silent carriers, you know. I said, Well, it's not so silent now. You're a carrier, and I'm here to tell you, you got herpes. He goes, Well, I I'm going to go to the doctor. I'm going to get this checked out. I'm not so sure. I said, Yeah, go, go go go, find out. You got herpes. So he goes and he gets checked out. I'm waiting for my results in three days. He gets his results first. He comes to me chest out. Guess what? I don't have herpes. I guess you have herpes. And, luckily, you didn't give it to me. I'm like, Wow. Alright, so talk about putting your tail between your legs. I'm thinking, how the **** did I get herpes?

My doctor calls me later that same day. He tells me, guess what, Hallie You don't have herpes. I'm like, I don't have herpes. I'm like, Why would you tell me I had herpes? Do you know what I just went through for the last 72 hours? He said, Well, I don't know. That's what it looked like to me. And this is the moment when I realized something was going on with my body. I was in perimenopause. I did my own research. Even my doctor then didn't say, Oh, my bad, it's not herpes. It's actually perimenopause. It's vagina atrape and your vagina is dry, and that's what it is. And if you have sex, when your vagina is dry, you can tear up the inside of your vagina, and this is what it would look like.

He didn't tell me that. I had to go do that research for myself and figure out what exactly was happening to me and what I could do for this vaginal atrophy so that I could continue to have a sex life with my partner. And that was the moment when I realized, if I had such little information and I have the best doctors in California, and he had never even brought the subject of menopause, and the The sexual part is one small part of it. There are much more health implications that go along with a woman going into menopause. But I thought, if I didn't have access to this information, how many women in the world don't have access to this and how many women are suffering in silence, how many women are feeling ashamed, how many women don't talk to their doctors about it or they get misdiagnosed.

And that was a moment that I knew I had to stand up for myself, because by standing up for myself, I'd be standing up for every other woman. And that became my second life act, my second life passion, and I'm giving my life over to it. So, sorry, I told you it was graphic. That's a graphic story. It's a vicious cycle, isn't it? Of misinformation and lack of information and stigma. Yeah, all feed stigma to itself. And it's so much more than just our sexual health. You know, it's just not, you know, bikini medicine below the waist. One of the biggest things I just would like to say, what I've learned is that, you know, women, we have hot flash.

It's so many mostly men think, Oh, it's just hot flashes. I mean, I mean, so what. You're gonna be hot for four or five years. No, some women flash for two decades. And every time you have a hot flash I've now learned, you're actually having a little mini And when you have a little mini stroke, you get these nodules on your brain. And if you study a brain of a woman in who has Alzheimer's today, it's full of these little nodules. So you find out why it's so important that we not have hot flashes. It's not just because they're uncomfortable. It's because they're doing something very detrimental to our brain with affects our health as we go through mid life in the aging process.

I think that's a very important lesson for all of us to take away this evening. Marlena, you also have a very personal experience that guided your research into morning sickness. So tell us about that journey. Yeah. So most pregnancies are affected by morning sickness, but I had something much more severe similar to Kate Middleton and Amy Schumer. Maybe you've heard of hyperemesis Scravdarm And so when I got pregnant, I was so ill that I could not move without violently vomiting. I just had to lie completely still on my back. I couldn't drink even water. And it lasted for weeks and weeks. My doctor put me on IV fluids.

Then he tried different medications. Nothing worked. Eventually, he tried seven different drugs at once, and nothing worked. I ended up on a feeding tube. And when I had the feeding tube, I started to feel a little bit better just from having energy, but it was too late, and I lost the baby in the second trimester. And through that whole horrible experience, my doctor told me that I was just trying to get attention. And I was too weak to argue with him. I actually at one point had to use a buzzer because I couldn't speak anymore. I was so weak. But after I recovered, I do have a PhD from Harvard in genetics.

I was already focused on women's health issues. I found the first gene for uterine fibroid tumors. So I decided to. So I decided to work on finding what the real cause of hyperemesis was. And I didn't have it in my family, so I didn't know if it was genetic, so I had to start from the very beginning and see if it ran in families and do a familial aggregation study. And then I spent the last 20 years searching for the cause, finding the gene, and the latest paper that just came out in nature figuring out how that gene works. And now we're on the pathway towards a cure. Dan, we've just heard about two issues in women's health that really don't get a lot of attention and really two women who were dismissed, you know, from the medical system.

You represent a big pharmaceutical company. Tell us a little bit about how we can ensure that women's voices are heard, and the issues that are important to them are part of the drug development process. Yeah. Thank you, Alice. It's great to be here with both of you and hear your remarkable stories. Thank you for sharing them. Of course, at a pharmaceutical company, we want to help all patients that are suffering. Unfortunately, there's a number of diseases that disproportionately affect women. And so oftentimes our focus does turn towards What we can do to help women. Maybe I quickly talk about two diseases that you may not think of as women's health issues, but actually, they are.

Starting with the disease I've worked on my whole life, which is Alzheimer's disease. Most people don't think of that as a women's disease, but in fact, two thirds of people with Alzheimer's disease are women. Simply because fortunately women live longer. And unfortunately, Alzheimer's is an age related disease. So as you get older, more likely to get it. Not only does it disproportionately affect women as patients. It turns out that the vast majority of people who are caregivers for Alzheimer's patients are also women. So when we think about the cost of Alzheimer's disease to our society over the next couple of years, it will be $5,000,000,000,000 in lost productivity and direct costs, of which 75% will be borne by women.

So it's incredibly important for our Alzheimer's trials. For example, that we have women participate in the trials. With two thirds of the Alzheimer's population being women, you would think it wouldn't be a problem. But it quickly turns out it is. Although we are able to get more than half of the patients in our trial as women, it's more difficult than you would expect to find them. One of the reasons why is that women are often diagnosed later, probably for some of the same issues that both of you spoke about, that the medical community sometimes is less likely to take symptoms seriously. In women.

Probably also because women have what we call, perhaps a higher cognitive reserve. They're better at things like verbal memory, which is one of the first signs of Alzheimerisease. So for women, the signs show up a bit later in the disease course. And so by the time they come to trials, they may be too advanced. So we've done a lot of things, for example, in this field to encourage participation by women patients, including trying to make our trials less onerous on the patients, having them able to be conducted from home, Trying to, to the extent possible decrease the requirements around caregivers to come because men who have Alzheimer's often have a female caregiver, women who have Alzheimer's may have less of a good support structure.

So that's one disease that we're working hard on to help women. The other is a disease you've heard a lot about in the press. It's obesity. It affects men and women, both, of course, but it affects women differently. It turns out obesity and women is more driven by food cravings and by hunger. Women are more likely to seek treatment for obesity, but also less likely to be taken seriously by their doctors. Even so, in our clinical trials for obesity, we have the opposite problem, which is that women preferentially enroll in our trials. We have to cap their participation to make sure we have some men in the obesity trials, and men often wait until they have other symptoms of disease before they come to get treated for obesity.

So we're looking at diseases that are common across the population, but trying to understand specifically how they affect women, how we can hear women's voices in our clinical trials and address it with treatments. And recently, President Biden has issued an executive order to prioritize and more seemly integrate women's health issues across the federal research spectrum. Marlene, I wonder if you could just briefly tell us how much of a difference is that going to make, for example, for a scientists like yourself and the work that you do? I hope for scientists like myself, it will make a big difference.

I did apply for an ARPA H grant. So we'll see in the next month or so. But yeah, I mean, one of the reasons that I'm the world's researcher in hypermesis gravi Darm is not because I'm so great, but just because there is no other researcher, and it's so hard to get funding in this field. So putting that money out there is going to inspire other people to think about women's health issues and fit them into their whatever they're studying so that we can get more progress in that area. So yes, I think it's fantastic. And on the subject of governmental support, Holly, you have been working with some Congress people and proposed legislation to focus a little bit more on research for menopause.

Yet, Congress is 72% male. Is that a problem? That's a problem. Yes. So that's why my approach was to go to all the females in the Congress and hope that I could get them to come together in a bipartisan way and put us first for once because this lack of study on the female body in mid life is long overdue. So I right now have 18 of the 25 that are sponsoring or co sponsoring the bill. There's a few that are still holding out, you know? And if we can get all 25, I think I feel like with some House members, and there are some great men on the Senate side that are very much behind this, but there's still some women that are holding out.

And to my dismay, their trepidation is that they feel like the money that's already allocated from the NIH should be just shuffled around. But we know, and I've learned through my research that menopausal women and women in mid life never get the money. There's always something more important. So my goal is to have new appropriations and have $265 million. That's what's the teeth of our bill. Have that money be allocated towards menopause and, you know, women's Mid Lfe health? And I think then we'll have real dollars to do real research so that scientists can do all the trials, you know, that they'd like to do.

And I think that's the only way we're really going to start moving the needle is to make sure we have money allocated just for us at this time. And, Dan, one of the reasons why we still have so much stigma around certain women's health issues is lack of information, right? And for historically, women have not been included in clinical trials, for good reason, for issues of safety, especially women of childbearing years. Can you tell us about what can be done or what is being done to address that and include more women? Is there technology? We've got great science now? Are there ways to get those answers without putting women's health at risk?

Yeah, I think the scientific challenges around conduct of clinical trials in women are largely addressed. I think with the exception of women of childbearing potential. It is really about educating physicians, mainly that we have to spend more efforts there so that we can have better participation in women. I think we can often overcome it in clinical trials, but then when we come to launching a new medicine or making a new technology available, again, we face the kinds of ignorance or discrimination that both of you spoke about. One example is our work in migraine, another disease that much more commonly affects women.

Because it's subjective, a lot of times women present to their doctor with migraine and the doctor ignores them or says, you're just seeking attention. There's all sorts of these behaviors that we talk about as medical gas lighting where doctors are actually disbelieving their women patients. And so we have to do a lot of work to educate them because, of course, we want these great medicines that we've created to be used to help patients. So that's also part of the role of the pharmaceutical company is to change medical practice. Um, one of the ways that we can do that is by working with female doctors disproportionately in our clinical trials because we know that they are more likely to offer more equitable care to women patients.

And part of our bill, our Senate bill will be also to allocate dollars so that doctors can go back and be, you know, further educated and retooled, because I was horrified when I found out that in medical school, doctors only spent there's only one chapter on the menopausal body, and this is something every single woman will face if they're lucky enough to live that long. And there's one chapter, and most of them don't even remember it, you know? So that's also what our bill will be for to get doctors further educated so they can be retooled. I think that's critically important. I was going to say that, you know, this gas gas lighting dam that you mentioned, it does seem to be an embedded issue.

And Marlina, if you want to comment on whether you've seen since your experience, has the needle moved at all? You know, we're in 2024, and it's still astounding that we're hearing doctors tell women these things. I mean, I wish it was moving a little more than it has. I did get a tape from a medical student who had hyperemesis, and her professor, who was a female, doctor OBGYN professor told her and told the class. So this is the whole next generation of doctors that when patients are hospitalized with hyperemesis, it's usually because there's something going on at home or they just don't want to get better.

That's really what she taught the students. So there's a whole next generation of doctors that are learning this. So we really need a re education. It's really important. One thing that I think we've seen that help sometimes is when there's a new treatment that's introduced. Then people understand that what they actually saw as, you know, maybe the patient's fault is actually a disease. Historically, this happened with diseases like epilepsy or even tuberculosis, where it was blamed on the patient. More recently, it was depression, where doctors would say, you know, chin up, think positive thoughts until we had medicines for the disease, and then doctors changed.

Today, we're seeing it in front of our eyes happen with obesity, where we used to blame the patient. Soon as there's medicines available, doctors start understanding that it's really a disease that can be treated. Well, and my doctor also told me when I told him, I've diagnosed myself. I realize I'm in perimenopause. He said, Just deal with it. Like, you know, white knuckle it. It's only gonna last five, ten years, if you're not lucky. Okay. Not good enough. Not good enough. Good enough for sure. So, in closing, and this is one of the things that I love about time 100 is I get to do this. Hally and Marlena, you have here sitting right next to you, Dan, who is at a major pharmaceutical company.

Thought of that. He's mail I volunteered for this. Yes. But he's also pretty influential from what I hear at the company. So here's your opportunity. You have his ear. What advice would you give him about finding ways to prioritize and ensure that women's voices are heard. I know believe them when they tell you something's wrong, and that they're not making it up. Look, I think you do. And I mean, you have a drug actually that would help for hypomeesis that you guys are not it's kind of shelved, you just told me. So I have a very specific request. I'm ready to test it to desensitize women. I'm sure we'll find a way to work together.

I think you just got your marching orders, Dan. What? Thank you. Well, Hally Dan, Marina, thank you very much for joining us in this dialogue. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

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