My mission is to educate women and health professionals that HRT is safe

Dr Louise Newson is a GP and menopause specialist who runs a clinic in Stratford-upon-Avon. She is also founder of Balance, a women’s health app, and the Dr Louise Newson podcast. She has 540k followers on Instagram and is determined to improve women's health in menopause.

Every day, in my clinic in Stratford-upon-Avon, I see women who are depressed, anxious and even suicidal who have been refused HRT without any clear evidence or explanation as to why. They have, in my view, been failed by the medical profession. That’s why I have made it my mission to help educate and raise awareness about the benefits of HRT to the medical profession and the general public.

I started out as a hospital doctor around 25 years ago but then moved into general practice when we wanted to start a family as the hours were more manageable. I’ve always been happy to prescribe HRT but I realised that many of my colleagues in the medical profession didn’t feel the same way.

This reluctance to prescribe HRT dates back to a very misleading 2002 study – which was, I would say, the biggest car crash to women’s health that ever happened. The study, which came out a few years after I qualified as a doctor, claimed there was an increased link between HRT and breast cancer.

One of the reasons it was so misleading was that the women in the study were 10 years post-menopause and had a high BMI, meaning that their baseline risk for breast cancer was already higher than average.

Yet even when you take the top line from that study, it still shows that oestrogen alone can actually reduce the risk of breast cancer. We need more evidence-based research on the benefits of HRT. That’s something that I hope to help address in the UK Government’s Menopause Taskforce, which I’m a member of. It aims to improve awareness around the menopause.

Women being denied HRT

The fact is, many women who are in desperate need of HRT, are being denied it. I recently took on a new patient after her sister reached out to me on social media. This lady had five children and post-natal depression after every child. She had also suffered with pre-menstrual syndrome (PMS) and bad periods since her teens and then, in her 40s, she became suicidal and ended up being sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

They had given her antipsychotics and electric shock therapy and were about to start her on lithium. Her sister came to me and said, "I just wondered if any of this might be related to her hormones."

She had also had night sweats, palpitations, flushes, a change in periods and had become very anxious yet no one had thought to check her hormone levels. We know that hormones play a huge role in women’s health and they can also affect the brain. I worked with her and got her on the right dose of HRT and testosterone – she’s now lowered her dosage of medication and is feeling much better.

These sorts of rewarding stories are the reason I can’t slow down and have to keep doing what I do.

My own menopause journey

The irony is about eight years ago, when I was 45, I had a major blip and didn’t even know why. I was supposed to be going to a lecture at a local university which I was feeling really enthusiastic about but I woke up not wanting to go. I felt very low in my mood, had no energy, was having night sweats and my migraines, something I’ve always suffered with, had become increasingly worse.

I thought maybe it was because I was stressed, or maybe because I’ve got three children or am working too hard, that I was feeling so tired all the time.

It wasn’t until one of my daughters asked if I was due to get my period and complained that I was always so grumpy that I put two and two together and realised I hadn’t had a period in months.

So I went to a specialist and got some HRT. Then my mother-in-law, who is now 88 and has been on HRT for 50 years, came over and asked if I was feeling better. I said no, not really and she suggested I up my dosage. So I went back and had a blood test which found that my oestrogen levels were still low and that I wasn’t absorbing the HRT. When I upped my dose, I saw a massive improvement. I sleep better, have more energy and I know I wouldn’t be able to work this hard if I wasn’t taking HRT.

HRT myths

I became really interested in HRT and the menopause after the 2015 NICE guidelines came out, which ultimately showed that, for the majority of women who take HRT, the benefits outweighed the risks.

My eldest daughter, who is now 21, was a teenager at the time and suggested I start posting about it on Instagram, so I began helping to educate women through social media.

Lots of the work I do now, in between running my clinic which I still love doing, is around education and research about HRT. We should be thinking, 'What are the risks of not being offered HRT?' The risk to a woman’s mental health, their wellbeing and their working life. Instead, we always focus on the risks of HRT rather than the risks of not taking it.

Empowering women

I started posting every day and realised quite soon that there was a big appetite for information. I wanted to help women make their own minds up about whether they wanted to take it rather than be dictated to by the medical profession. As the mum of three daughters – my girls are 21, 19 and 12 – I also want to change things for them.

Only last week, I was speaking at a conference and found some slides from the 1950s which showed menopausal women being given electric shock treatment and put in straitjackets. It was easier to label them as 'mad' rather than menopausal, even after doctors had found evidence that suggested hormones can play a huge part in women’s health.

Even though that was around 70 years ago, I would say that misogyny and gaslighting is still rife in the medical profession and it’s one of the main reasons I’ve made it my mission to help educate people about the benefits of HRT.

Women should be able to make their own minds up as to whether they take it or not. And that's what I'm determined to help them do.

For more information, see Newsonhealth.co.uk.