What Acupuncture Does for Menopause

See your GP about menopause, and ask about hormone therapy specifically — the guidance has changed and for most women it is safe and effective. Acupuncture is not a substitute for it, and the trial evidence for flushes is mixed with a modest effect at best. That is the honest starting point.

What people actually come here for, usually alongside medical management, is sleep and the sense of being wound up. A course is typically weekly for four to six weeks and then reviewed. A session runs about an hour, mostly lying down; if flushes make lying flat under a blanket unbearable, say so, because the room and the positioning can be changed and most people do not think to ask.

There are two things about this transition on the Northern Beaches worth naming. The first is that a lot of women here are very active — ocean swimming, the coast walk, tennis — and the joint aches of perimenopause get read as an injury, then as getting old, when they are neither. Knowing that they are part of the picture changes how people respond to them. The second is heat: a Sydney February with night sweats is genuinely hard, and practical things — the bedroom, the bedding, the timing of exercise — do more than they sound like they should.

We are in Freshwater, ten streets from Balgowlah and about twenty from Manly. Bring your cycle dates, even if they have become unpredictable, because the unpredictability is itself the information.