hotflash inc.: how tiktok is helping us go through menopause

flash forward almost two years and menopause has become a full-fledged genre, and people are noticing. take this bloomberg headline from august: the $15 billion menopause industry’s next target is tiktok.

one person i have watched blow up to more than 250k followers on the subject is toronto-based nutritionist andrea donsky . (full disclosure: we became tiktok friends some time in 2020, and although we’ve never met in person, we hosted an online summit together earlier this year).

tiktok is the perfectly imperfect antidote to years of instagram

donsky was one of the creators featured over the summer in the first #menopausetok campaign , organized by new york city’s pix11 evening news anchor tamsen fadal.

when is it time to monetize your platform?

of course once you have enough followers, the next natural thing to do is monetize your platform. one of the tiktok personalities featured in fadal’s campaign, barbados-based carol king , offers an ebook and one-on-one coaching. donsky and her business partner are launching a line of supplements, morphus. and the biggest tiktok menopause success of all so far may well be texas-based ob-gyn and culinary medicine specialist dr. mary claire haver . since joining at the urging of her daughters, she’s blown up to 1.8 million followers, becoming tiktok’s unofficial menopause expert. she has also opened a private clinic — all of which has helped to propel her forthcoming diet book to the no. 1 spot on amazon.

sometimes i wonder if tiktok will ever get tired of watching women act out walking into a room and forgetting why, or going to bed covered in ice packs. but then i see british mum therese ryan rapping along to nicki minaj’s super freaky girl about her menopause woes (700k views) and realize there’s a pretty big runway. the diminishing and fluctuating hormones we experience in perimenopause can impact almost every bodily function, they can be scary and they can make you feel very, very alone.

so if it makes me feel better when i make a tiktok about my ever-tingling fingertips and someone comments, “me too!” then it’s completely understandable when brit kate beavis goes viral talking about her itchy ears .

ann marie mcqueen is a journalist with 25 years of experience covering health, wellness, science and more, and when she realized she was in perimenopause five years ago, she decided to make this transition her beat. she has since become a global expert on the subject through her platform hotflash inc. , where she helps people navigate the gap between transitional and holistic treatments with evidence and experience-based research. she will be writing regularly on all things related to menopause and mid-life.