“Women continue to look for answers outside the health system”

For decades, the menopause It has been a topic relegated to the private sphere and, too often, silenced in medical consultations. Given the lack of accessible clinical information, the Internet has become the great refuge for many women who need to resolve their concerns and do not know where to turn. However, what search engines return has changed drastically: health has given way to marketing.

What has been seen. A new study published in JAMA has put figures on this phenomenon by analyzing search patterns in Google Trends over two decades in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. Based on all this information, researchers have detected an increase of between 15 and 20 percentage points in searches aimed at commercial products and services.

That is why the internet is no longer just a place to search for the meaning of a symptom; It is an immense showcase of payment solutions.

The health system. This commercial shift in search engines does not occur in a vacuum, but, as Nuria Marín, a menopause specialist, points out, in his analysis for the Science Media Center Spain, the massive increase in these searches reflects a worrying reality: there are fundamental needs not covered in the traditional health system.

Women turn to the Internet because they do not find the time, specialized management or comprehensive answers to their routine consultations. However, the study of JAMAdespite being published in a high-impact journal, has a methodological limitation that Marín highlights: Google Trends is an algorithmic and “blind” tool. It does not tell us the age, biological sex, or exact menopausal status of the person typing, which prevents us from establishing direct cause-and-effect relationships at a clinical level.

The misinformation. The real problem with seeking answers to questions about our own health is that the algorithm rewards economic profitability over scientific rigor. This means that when a patient searches for information about menopause, she enters a digital ecosystem full of interests.

Here is a 2025 study published in B.M.J. revealed that 77.2% of online content on hormone replacement therapy to ‘treat’ menopausal symptoms presented commercial conflicts of interest. But even worse is that 67.2% of the medical claims on these pages They openly contradicted official clinical guidelines based on medical evidence.

The quality of the information is quite doubtful, since it was seen that 35% of the websites on menopause had some type of medical quality certification, and more than half required a level of reading comprehension much higher than that recommended for health dissemination.

Side B. Not all of the technological landscape is negative, but we have tools that, when designed based on scientific evidence and not aggressive marketing, prove to be a great support for women.

Here we have, for example, mobile apps to monitor symptoms which point out that women can see their physical symptoms reduced due to the very fact that the patient structures what is happening to her. That is why the challenge we have ahead of us right now is to offer access to this type of tools and to destigmatize menopause in society.

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