A new book, Spring 2026
The Indian Woman'sHormone Companion
A modern gynaecologist's guide to hormones, weight, and wellbeing after thirty-five.
By Dr. Anagha Karkhanis · FRCPI
The premise
“Indian women reach menopause, on average, five years earlier than their global counterparts — and an entire generation has been navigating perimenopause believing they are too young for hormones to be the explanation.”
From the Author's Note
Inside
The conversation she would have with you, if you were sitting across from her.
It isn't in your head
Brain fog, broken sleep, weight that won't move, joints that ache, libido that vanished — each has a hormonal or metabolic explanation, and most have a treatment.
The science, corrected
Why the 2002 WHI study set women's medicine back by two decades — and what the evidence on HRT actually says today, in 2026.
Calibrated for India
Tests, dosing, nutrition and movement reframed for the Indian woman's body, kitchen, and climate. Not borrowed from a global average that was never hers.
The language she was never given
Forty-plus recognised symptoms, organised by where they show up — so she can finally name what's happening, and stop blaming herself for it.
An excerpt
Chapter OneThe Body That Stopped Cooperating
She came in on a Tuesday morning in March, the way many of them do — apologetically, in a hurry, half-convinced she was wasting my time. She was forty-three. A senior marketing executive. Two children. A husband she described as fine. She had not had a full night's sleep in eleven months.
She had gained nine kilos in two years despite walking every morning and eating, by her own description, less than her teenage daughter. Her periods had become erratic. Her hair was thinning at the temples. She cried in traffic. She did not recognise herself in photographs.
She told me, almost as an aside, that her previous gynaecologist had run a thyroid test, said it was borderline, and sent her home with a prescription for an antidepressant. She had not filled it.
She was not depressed. She was exhausted of being told it was nothing.
This story — or some version of it — walks into my clinic almost every day. Every woman experiencing it has been told some version of the following: that she is stressed, that she should try yoga, that this is what happens with age, that she should eat less and walk more. She is told, in other words, that the problem is her.
It is not.
Table of contents
Fifteen chapters. One overdue conversation.
- 01The Body That Stopped Cooperating
- 02Why Nobody Told Your Mother
- 03The Symptom List Nobody Hands You
- 01Perimenopause Is the Long Goodbye
- 02Hormones, Without the Jargon
- 03The Tests That Tell the Real Story
- 01HRT — The Treatment Half of India Has Been Denied
- 02The Weight That Won't Move — and the Medicines That Finally Help
- 03Eating Like an Indian Woman Over Forty
- 04Movement That Actually Matters
- 05Sleep, Stress, and the Cortisol Trap
- 01Sex, Skin, and the Bits Nobody Talks About
- 02The Brain Fog Is Not You Losing It
- 03Talking to the People in Your Life
- 04The Next Twenty Years Are Yours
The author
Dr. AnaghaKarkhanis
FRCPI · 17+ Years in Practice · Mumbai
A gynaecologist for over seventeen years, Dr. Karkhanis has delivered babies, treated infertility, walked women through cancer scares and held hands through more first appointments than she can count.
Somewhere along the way she began to notice a particular kind of woman returning to her clinic again and again, and being failed by the very system meant to help her — tired, in her forties, told she was stressed, depressed, ageing, or imagining it.
This book is the conversation she would have with each of them, if there were enough Tuesdays in the world.
Spring 2026
Coming soonin 2026!
Update shortly for when you can pre-register.