Thank you for taking the time to post on this contentious thread Dr Currie.
That members of this forum wish all other women the very best of health and especially leading up to and following menopause, including HRT treatment if necessary that enables her to have the best quality of life ? is an absolute given.
That at the moment treatment provision can be patchy and inconsistent even among the expert menopause specialists both NHS and private is also true and extremely frustrating for us all. So pleased to read the consistency amongst some of the well-known advisers and specialists GypsyRoseLee.
That we all would like to see a wider range of progesterone preparations, doses, delivery methods has also been said many many times on here.
However this overall does not mean that anything goes and that we should promote absolutely anything to achieve this purpose. What I'm really concerned about reading some of the responses is that the treatment that is being promoted on here is tempting women at their most vulnerable to look upon this as their only remaining choice, to follow a very expensive and unregulated path and in any case in addition as I (and Mary G herself) points out is only actually suitable for those on low doses of oestrogen otherwise the progesterone dose would be inadequate.
In addition the issue of monitoring has been pointed out several times ? but this is not a justification for going down the route of cBHRT! Firstly if you pay for any private treatment - you will be monitored ? so if you are going to pay (and are in the very fortunate position to be able to afford it) for private treatment far better to go to a recognised BMS approved menopause specialist where you can be prescribed an individualised regime using regulated bio-identical hormones (?rBHRT? in the BMS statement) so you will also have (and of course pay for) the same monitoring.
That's the thing ? several issues are being conflated here ? private vs NHS and regulated hormones vs compounded. Because of inadequacies in the NHS this is being used as justification for using compounded hormones.
As for the cost ? please do not be misled by the figures put out on here. I have looked up one VERY WELL KNOWN clinic that prescribed this sort of stuff and the costs are
CONSIDERABLE and
ONGOING:
Initial consultation ?300
Follow-up consultations (if within two years of first) ?140
Blood tests ? ?295
required by every new patient, and thereafter every 6-12 months and maybe more frequently in the early stagesPelvic Ultrasound scan ( TVS) ?320
required by every new patient, and thereafter annually+ cost of prescriptions
+ travel costs to London
So if at the very minimum you have 2 sets of blood tests in the first year, with your initial scan with an initial and follow-up consultation then at the very least this will cost ?1350 but it sounds like you might need additional scans or blood tests on top, + the cost of your actual prescription, which at the place Mary G goes to she says is ?1 per day so another ?360 on top of that so comes to at least ?1760 ? a long way from a possibly affordable ?200 or so that some women pay for a private consultation followed up by a letter to their GP to enable them to get their future prescriptions on NHS.
Please don't get me wrong ? I sincerely wish you all well and have every sympathy for your situations. This is not about private vs NHS, it's about choosing to go down this very expensive route of unregulated hormones. Of course it's a free choice in a free world ? for the privileged few that is ? and we have to make up our own minds but I feel so strongly about this (did you guess?!
) that I feel I have to continue to speak up and I make no apology for doing so.
Have a good day everyone
Hurdity x