| Map | Core question | Typical unit of care | How it talks about heat | What they tend to do | Watch-out |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Biomedical / NAMS-style | What is the mechanism, the risk, the option? | Person + clinician; sometimes a guideline | Vasomotor symptoms; thermoregulation; oestrogen withdrawal | Assess, name options (nothing / lifestyle / nonhormone / MHT), follow risk | Can shrink a life into a symptom score |
| Lifestyle medicine | Which daily levers can I actually move? | Habits: food, move, sleep, stress, connection, substances | Often secondary to sleep, weight, fitness | Move the six daily levers; no detox-speak | Can become moralising (“if you tried harder”) |
| Mind–body science | How much does this bother you, and can attention change that? | CBT, clinical hypnosis, yoga, mindfulness | Interference and bother, not always frequency | CBT, clinical hypnosis, yoga/mindfulness as skills | Must not imply flashes are “all in your head” |
| TCM | Which pattern of disharmony is this (yin, heat, Heart–Kidney)? | Pattern, not a disease name | Empty heat from yin deficiency; Liver yang rising | Nourish yin, settle spirit, food temperature, acupuncture/herbs in licensed hands | Websites diagnosing “your Kidney yin” |
| Ayurveda | Which guna/dosha season is unfolding, and how do we rhythm the day? | Daily routine, digestion, tissues, rejuvenation as living | Pitta heat on a vata-dry background, in some pictures | Opposite qualities: warm/regular/oily or cooling; dinacharya; rasayana as living | Dosha quizzes as entertainment-as-diagnosis |
| Konenki / Kampo | What is this season of renewal, and which Kampo picture (sho)? | Culture + (in Japan) Kampo inside ordinary medicine | Imbalance of a long midlife season; formula families exist | Season framing, cuisine (not pills), bathing, Kampo sho inside ordinary medicine | Soy-pill reductionism; copying Kampo without a Kampo prescriber |
| African indigenous (plural) | How does this body sit in family, food, language, elderhood? | Community, pot, story, local plants as part of a whole | Varies; not always the centre of the story | Pot, belonging, elders, local plants as household practice; clinic when trusted | Extractive herb lists; one-Africa myth |
| Native / some Latin American | What status, duty, or relief arrives with the end of bleeding? | Kin, ceremony, elder role — when those structures still hold | Hot flushes appear in some ethnographies; meaning varies | Kin, ceremony, elder role when those structures hold; two-system use | Romantic “women of wisdom” that erases silenced sexuality or poverty |
| Mediterranean / Nordic food culture | How do we eat and live together for the long heart? | Pattern of meals, movement, daylight, social infrastructure | Not primarily a hot-flush theory | Shared meals, walking, daylight, sauna if the body consents; folk plants with a shrug | Diet-culture in a linen shirt |
| Unani / West Asia | What temperament and life-stage drying/cooling is this? | Mizaj, food, season, conduct — plus empty chairs for local women’s words | Heat as a quality of temperament, not only oestrogen | Food, sleep, season; clinic Unani where it is taught — no souk flattening | Using “the Middle East” as one waiting room |
| Pacific / Oceania | What would this people say if we asked them, not a brochure? | Kin, land, elder authority — when those still hold | Not honestly summarised from Dublin | Empty chair until a culture-bearer writes | Inventing a paragraph to look complete |
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