World Menopause Day: why Vive Tu Balance exists

Have you woken up drenched at three in the morning? Lost a word halfway through a sentence? Left an appointment with an "it's just your age" and more questions than you came in with?

Today, 18 October, is World Menopause Day, the date the International Menopause Society (IMS) dedicates to this stage of life every year. It's a good day to tell you why we exist.

Why Vive Tu Balance was born

Vive Tu Balance was born from lived experience. One of our founders, Dr Alma García, went through menopause and found how hard it was to get clear, reliable information in Spanish, even with a healthcare background. Together with Alba Roca, a specialist in health marketing and communication, she decided to create the space they would have wanted to have.

The data confirm it wasn't an isolated case:

• There's a lack of information and of training. The World Health Organization recognises that access to menopause information and services is still a challenge in most countries, and that many health workers are not trained to recognise its symptoms (WHO, 2024).
• Even among young doctors. In a survey of 177 family medicine, internal medicine and gynaecology residents in the United States, only 6.8% felt prepared to care for women in menopause (Kling et al., Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 2019).
• It has real-life consequences. In the UK, one in ten women who worked through menopause left their job because of symptoms, and almost half never spoke to their GP (Fawcett Society, 2022).
• It isn't a short stage. The transition can begin years before the last period (Harlow et al., Menopause, 2012), and in the SWAN study frequent hot flashes lasted a median of 7.4 years (Avis et al., JAMA Internal Medicine, 2015).

And we're talking about a great many women: in 2021, women over 50 made up 26% of all women and girls worldwide (WHO, 2024).

What we do (and what we don't)

Vive Tu Balance is an information and support platform for perimenopause, menopause and postmenopause. Specifically:

• We explain what's happening to you. Articles by symptom, such as hot flashes, insomnia, anxiety, vaginal dryness or joint pain, based on studies and guidelines from medical societies. We also cover oral health, a topic almost nobody links to hormones.
• We help you organise your symptoms with the Balance Check: seven questions and a result sent to your inbox, so you walk into your appointment knowing what to say.
• We connect you with professionals who know this stage well. More on that below.
• We select supplement and self-care brands with the same criteria as our articles, with discounts for the community. If you buy with our codes we may earn a commission, and we always say so.
• We share free resources, such as our nutrition guide in PDF (in Spanish).

What we don't do:

• We don't diagnose or prescribe. That's for your doctor or gynaecologist.
• We don't sell miracle treatments or promise results in two weeks.
• We don't tie you to anyone. The information is freely available and you decide who to see.

Why 18 October is our day

The International Menopause Society (IMS) dedicates every 18 October to raising awareness of this stage. For us it's a chance to say out loud what many women go through in silence, as our mothers and grandmothers did.

This year the IMS theme is chronic pain at midlife. Joint and muscle pain is common during the menopause transition, and some authors now speak of a musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause (Wright et al., Climacteric, 2024). Others are almost never linked to hormones, such as temporomandibular joint pain.

Three things to do today

• Note your symptoms for a week: which ones, at what time and how intense. Take it to your next appointment.
• Take the Balance Check to get your symptoms organised.
• Talk about it with a friend, your sister or your mother, and share this article with #WorldMenopauseDay.

Coming soon: Vive Tu Balance Professionals

We're finishing Vive Tu Balance Professionals, the space on our website where you'll be able to meet the specialists in our network and book a consultation with them directly.

Each professional will have a profile: training, what they can help you with, languages and way of working. There will be gynaecology specialised in menopause, pelvic floor physiotherapy, sleep medicine, psychology, medical sexology, sport and holistic wellbeing. Consultations will be online, whether you're in Madrid, Bogotá or San José.

We built it around the question you ask us most: so who do I go to with this? Subscribe to the newsletter and you'll be among the first to know when it opens.

Today and every day

18 October comes and goes, but menopause doesn't fit into a single day. We'll still be here tomorrow, with information you can trust and people who know how to listen. Happy World Menopause Day.

Vive Tu Balance

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