• It has become increasingly onerous for one woman to keep up with medical advances and changes in attitude towards women's later health. There are now literally hundreds more informational sites and resources on the web than there were five years ago when I started out and the advent of fast and effective search engines have made the task of finding relevant information so much easier.
• Said changes of attitude being in the direction advocated on this site over the last five years, there is much more mainstream discussion of material only aired here earlier. In particular there is no longer wholesale kneejerk prescription of HRT and the idea of long term preventative use has been to a large extent discredited.
• Nobody should proceed from outdated medical information yet I have left such information here as evidence of what has gone before. It remains of possible use in a short-term "historical" research context just so long as nobody assumes it is still current even though checking it out may reveal that in fact it is.
• The anecdotal, older "historical" and personal opinion papers are not time limited and remain uniquely valuable especially to women who are newly perimenopausal. Somehow I doubt that anybody is going to come up with any new nondrug methods of dealing with e.g. hot flashes...
• Many of the pages developed early on are frankly a mess in terms of appearance and would require extensive reorganization to come close to present day standards for a credible site. At 69, I look at them and groan...it is time for me to "Get a Life"!

    In late 1996 a new doctor talked me into having a DEXA scan done which came back, astonishingly since I had no risk factors, showing considerable loss. The picture painted for me was gloomy indeed but being accustomed to asssembling my own information from scratch rather than seeking the prepared variety I embarked upon a search on the internet which I was just beginning to appreciate.

    I stumbled upon alt.support.menopause where I lurked for a considerable time, fascinated to see my own previous experience described in lurid detail and knew that I would have had a much less anxious time had I known these things, and had such a group to "talk" to at the time. I started to post a little and was welcomed as someone who had actually survived the ordeal and was apparently in good shape. At that time asm had some unusually creative and knowledgeable women posting to it and through them I developed an interest in both psychological and mythological constructs which may relate to the maturing of women. On a more pragmatic level, I learned how to study studies and in particular how to compare them to the press releases made about them. They pointed out conflicting viewpoints and pitfalls in apparently reasonable conclusions and as a result, after about a year, I decided that my previous consent to take HRT had not been truly informed and that now I had been exposed to additional information I would get off it. This I did, which resulted in hot flashes of a strength and frequency I hadn't previously experienced - a mini menopause all over again. Now, a year later I still get them - but of the mild variety.

   Then I decided I wanted to build a webpage - for the sake of building it, but for that I needed content. I decided that an ideal collection of content was right there on the net already in the form of the archives of asm. The same questions are asked over and over again on asm and the answers are available on Deja News [now groups.google.com], but finding them takes time and expertise. Why not make a collection of past posts (with author's consent of course) and links to other relevant sites and so provide a level of information between my own total ignorance, and the present day hype about the dire consequences of untreated menopause? This I started to do and it was greeted with relief by the posters who had previously repeated themselves over and over again.

     As time went on, it became evident to me that as women move through perimenopause their views and attitudes change - they become less and less interested in the physical symptoms (which they are either used to or have under control) and start to raise alternative viewpoints and query the status quo. Often this does not sit well with early perimenopausal people who are immersed in their physical being and inclined to blame any discomfort whether physical or psychological on "hormones" or "menopause". Resultant standoffs between the two groups led me to leave the group and begin to shift the focus of the site (now mushroomed far beyond my expectations) towards women who were looking further down the road. Much of the medical information (and misinformation) applies to any woman beyond about age 40, and it too is available for the looking. What is not available elsewhere is the personal viewpoints and discussions between intelligent, creative and seeking women who are aging effectively, who believe that life after 50 has meaning and worth and is something to enjoy rather than endure.