Overview from Diana...

Nearly 20 years ago, I began working with women who told me about symptoms that seemed to recur around the time of menstruation, distressing symptoms that compromised their ability to function and the quality of their lives. Back then, few clinicians took these cyclical symptoms seriously; many of these women were simply referred for psychiatric treatment. Moreover, researchers have tended to seize upon one possible solution—usually drugs—and investigated that exclusively or they’ve conducted studies that weren’t well controlled. What was lacking was an integrated view of how to treat premenstrual symptoms—a big picture sense of treatments that might be effective and practical for women.

At the time, there were so many untested treatments and home remedies. Women wanted and needed scientific evidence about which remedies were merely folk cures, whether dietary changes work better than exercise, and whether there could be a one-size-fits-all treatment, as many other researchers have suggested. That’s where I began my research. First, I collected information on all the non-drug treatments that had been recommended for PMS in the published medical literature. Then, I spoke to hundreds of women about these and other treatments they’d tried. What worked or didn’t work for them? Which treatments were easier to sustain over the long term? What approaches made sense in the context of their lives?

These were among the questions I investigated while developing the Premenstrual Symptom Management Program, a regimen of non-pharmacological strategies that involves self-monitoring, personal choice, self-regulation, and environmental modification. Over the years, more than 500 women have been studied and treated in my PMS Symptom Management Programs, and it was a real education for me to guide them toward various interventions, keep track of their progress, and examine what worked for them. In the process, the program evolved as the stories and solutions of real women who suffered from PMS shed light on the steps that actually make a difference. On average, participants in the program at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), have experienced a 75 percent reduction in the intensity of their symptoms and a 30 to 54 percent drop in feelings of depression and general distress in the premenstrual phase. And these were women with severe PMS, which suggests that women with mild to moderate PMS will obtain even greater results. In other instances, the program has helped women discover other health conditions that worsen premenstrually or that exist in conjunction with PMS and exacerbate it.

Rather than being a broad survey of PMS strategies from which women can randomly pick and choose, the program outlined in Taking Back the Month is a science-based protocol that has been proven to work for hundreds of women. This is not a cookie-cutter approach to curing PMS, as many other programs are. In our book, we help women identify the symptoms that are most bothersome to them and provide a guide to figuring out which lifestyle modifications or remedies are likely to work best to alleviate their discomfort. This way, women can discover the tools to help experiment and see what works to relieve premenstrual symptoms; in the process, women will be enhancing their overall health physically, emotionally, behaviorally, and socially. With our guidance, women should be able to select the strategies that make the most sense for their lives, which will help them custom-tailor a solution for their particular premenstrual distress and take back their life.

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