Exclusive | Meet the peppers women treating menopause with gray market peptides which they discuss using secret code words

Stephanie Corn was shopping for shoes in Houston when a terrifying realization stopped her cold: She had no idea where she was.Frightened, she ducked into a dressing room and called her now-ex-husband to pick her up.“He asked me where I was and I couldn’t tell him,” Corn, 56, told The Post.“I had never been so scared in my entire life.”It was the culmination of memory problems Corn had battled since doctors put her into chemically induced menopause.

Hot flashes, fatigue, low libido, aching joints and stubborn weight gain followed, compounding chronic pain from herniated discs.Months later, a Facebook comment about peptides caught her eye.Peptides are short chains of amino acids that send signals to cells throughout the body, doing things like regulating hormones and supporting tissue repair.They occur naturally, but synthetic versions have grown in popularity in recent years.Some are FDA approved as medical treatments for humans — like insulin, semaglutide and tirzepatide — but many are not.

Without that approval, some are still sold with labels that they are for “research use only.”But just because they’re labeled that way doesn’t mean regular people aren’t buying these peptides and trying them on themselves — including a growing number of women hoping they can ease the menopause transition.Corn spent two months scouring the internet and consulting ChatGPT before ordering her first peptides online.Today, she says they’ve transformed her quality of life.

“Has my depression lifted? Absolutely.Do I have more energy? Yes.

Can I go to the grocery store and follow that up by hitting Neiman Marcus because I want to go smell perfume and I’m not in pain? Yes,” she said. “I can do all of those things now, not because of my doctor, but because of peptides.”Dr.Rachel Pessah-Pollack, an endocrinologist at NYU Langone, said stories like Corn’s reflect a broader frustration among menopausal women.“I have patients come in on a daily...