The Part of Menstrual Health Education That’s Still Missing. We were taught the beginning and the end — but never the middle years that matter most.

The Menstrual Health Lesson I Never Taught

Most people never picture perimenopause at all — because it was never introduced. At school we were taught that periods begin, cycles repeat, and one day menopause arrives as the end of bleeding. Nothing in between. I’m not even sure I was told about the day periods stop.

Perimenopause — the years of shifting ovarian rhythms before the final period — was never mentioned. But then again, almost nothing accurate about menstrual health was. At school we saw a simplified diagram. At A level there was still no mention of perimenopause, no sense of a menstrual health timeline. Later, when I studied Applied Biology at college, there was not a single reference to hormones at all. And the biology textbooks I first saw at 14? They are still being used today.

When I retrained as a holistic therapist in massage, reflexology, and skin care, I didn’t expect to learn about menstrual health — because I didn’t know it was missing. You don’t know what you don’t know. But looking back, I can see the difference it would have made to generations of practitioners and clients if menstrual health had been integrated into holistic training from the start.

Teaching Biology While Living It

Years later, I stood in front of GCSE and A-level classrooms teaching that same 28-day diagram: period, ovulation, repeat. It was the exact model I’d been taught as a teenager. Nothing had changed.

At the very same time, I was in the height of my own perimenopause. Relief was a game of cat and mouse — never certain, never the same from month to month. I began digging deeper into biology, searching for answers, and that’s when it hit me: what I was teaching didn’t match what I was living. The curriculum was decades behind.

What’s Missing From the Textbook

School biology lessons never mentioned ovarian aging at puberty — the fact that the ovarian reserve begins to reduce even before the very first cycle, is rarely mentioned. They never explained that healthy aging is directly related to how we move through the entire menstrual health timeline, not just what happens at menopause.

Instead, school students still see a simplified fertility-based model: ovulation, fertilisation, or menstruation. Nothing about the nervous system. Nothing about the operating systems hormones influence. Nothing about how rhythms shift as we age.

This gap shapes the way professionals and clients think about menopause today. An outdated diagram becomes the frame — and the timeline is left out entirely.

Why the Timeline Matters

When we teach only the beginning and the end, we leave out the middle — the years where most change actually happens. But when we show the menstrual health timeline as a whole, a different story emerges:

• Perimenopause isn’t sudden — it’s a shift in ovarian rhythm for several years.

• Menopause isn’t an end point — it’s a milestone within a longer journey.

• Postmenopause isn’t silence — it’s a stage of ovarian rhythm that still influences health.

That reframe alone is often a revelation. It turns confusion into clarity. It helps people see that what they’re experiencing is not random or broken — it’s part of a mapped process.

Imagine If…

Imagine if every health coach, yoga teacher, or therapist had been taught this version of biology. Imagine if they could adapt their work to support menstrual health as a timeline, not just a monthly bleed and a final full stop.

The impact would ripple through every treatment room, every classroom, every family conversation.

Because when professionals become the teachers we never had, they do more than correct the textbooks. They transform lives. And the truth is — it’s not complicated.

Training knowledgeable, client-centred professionals is the simplest, most powerful step we can take to finally change the story of menstrual health.