Dr. Sarah Bonza

Sarah Bonza, MD, MPH, FAAFP, MSCP, DipABLM, HMDC, NBC-HWC, is a board-certified family physician with more than two decades of clinical experience and a Menopause Society Certified Practitioner. She practices in Upper Arlington, Ohio, and by telehealth through her women's midlife health brand, Bonza Health, which she founded.

She earned her medical degree at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, completed her internship at Cleveland Clinic Fairview Hospital, and finished her family medicine residency at Ohio State in the research and academic track, earning a Master of Public Health from the OSU College of Public Health concurrently. Her residency research examined gestational weight gain and racial disparities in maternal outcomes — work that brought her to an Institute of Medicine workshop on pregnancy weight in Washington, DC, at a time when national guidelines were being reexamined. During her training, Dr. Bonza received the American Academy of Family Physicians Arnold P. Gold Award for Humanism in Medicine.

Her perspective on midlife women's health is shaped by having seen the full arc. She has cared for patients in the clinic, on hospital wards during acute illness, and as a certified hospice medical director at the end of life. That last vantage point is unusual among clinicians writing in this field, and it is decisive: she has sat with women whose final years were shaped by bone loss, cardiovascular disease, and cognitive decline that began accumulating decades earlier.

Her own perimenopause began in her forties, when a physician trained in the traditional model developed symptoms she could not explain and was told repeatedly that she was fine. That experience sent her back into training through The Menopause Society, Wellcoaches, and the American College of Lifestyle Medicine.

Perimenopause, she argues, is not the end of anything. It is the highest-leverage decade in a woman's medical life, and medicine is currently spending it badly.