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[Gilla999]

I don't think higher doses should be 'forbidden' to women if there is evidence to back up that that's what she actually needs (and the fact that there is no room to allow for that within the NICE / NHS guidelines is a huge problem). But having a blind belief that all peri symptoms are down to needing higher and higher doses of Estrogen - which is the culture that seems to exist from within Newsom - is equally a big problem.

Panorama will have had their legal teams heavily involved ensuring they're portraying it accurately, for it to get onto their radar there must be something there.

[CLKD]

Elliebee - no support from the BMS then, because they have been aware of prescribing methods for years.  They are a Charity apparently so won't have any1 associated that might 'bring down the ethics of the charity'.  In this country 1 is innocent until proven guilty though once the media get their claws in ........

It's time for more Research overall in to hormone issues from puberty upwards .  Regulated menopause clinics with Medics who know what they are doing and are prepared to go off licence when necessary.  This should then be followed up with discussion between women and medics. 

I wonder whether this  Consultant : NHS consultant that "you can get anything you want if you're willing to pay for it" : does any private work? 

[Palmtree]

I am managed by Louise Newson’s clinic. I only got relief from disabling genitourinary symptoms of menopause when I was prescribed an increased dose of oestrogen. Before that, I was unable to walk, sit, swim, work, have sex without pain, and had have to have invasive investigations for urinary symptoms. Nothing helped. Moisturisers and anti depressants did nothing except cause more issues.  All the pain and suffering of years of GU symptoms disappeared once I started on HRT. I am post menopausal and have no ovaries or uterus after hysterectomy. I am desperately worried I will have my dosage reduced and have to go back to all the old symptoms and pain.
Also it seems that there is very little reliable medical evidence about appropriate dosing of HRT so who’s to say the doses I am on are not appropriate?

[CLKD]

NICE probably ........ hopefully Panorama will be clear on this aspect of prescribing.

[Turkish delight]

Bet the Newson office can't move for lawyers atm.

Good job shes loaded.

[TheMidnightSkulker]

I was quite surprised to see one of the BBC online headline news items this morning. It looks like her clinic is being investigated for prescribing high doses of HRT. And she has lost her accreditation with the British Menopause Society.
Although on reflection maybe I am not so surprised. People were starting to speak out on Instagram etc.
What does everyone think about this?
Pretty bad timing for her as she is in the middle of a UK tour.

Even as a lay person and patient, I don't have the expertise I would need to form an opinion about this or any other practitioner. I have strong opinions about my own experience, but they are just my opinions. In other words, I don't know anything about HRT, but I know what I like.

However, the word "Panorama" immediately elicits side-eye from me. I'm still offended by the unscientific and pejorative episode they spewed out about ADHD in the 90s - one of the most extensively studied disorders, with truckloads of published research. I won't go off on that topic, but I have never taken Panorama seriously since then.

I take note of what some here have said about individual practitioners' ideological commitment to one specific approach. I'm still feeling rubbed up the wrong way by my specialist's report, because the more I read it the more skewed it seems towards representing my lifestyle as more unhealthy than it is.

(E.g. "has recently started doing some $specific_exercise", as if I'd said I made a resolution to do one sit-up every other Thursday and I've managed three Thursdays in a row!!1!! Whereas in fact, I made a very specific point about suddenly reaching a performance milestone at $specific_exercise after EIGHT. YEARS.)

But because she specializes in mental health and mindfulness, it has to be that my mental health and mindfulness aren't as good as they could be. Or perhaps I'm not being fair. Anyway... I should have read her profile more carefully, it's really on me that I got mindfulness flung at me when I'm not really in the market for that. At the same time, a market is what it is.

[TheMidnightSkulker]

I don't think higher doses should be 'forbidden' to women if there is evidence to back up that that's what she actually needs (and the fact that there is no room to allow for that within the NICE / NHS guidelines is a huge problem).

Indeed, and it's a half truth to say "there is no evidence to support x" if nobody has bothered to do any studies to prove or contradict x. (Or if they have, and it was poorly designed/taken out of context/otherwise flawed.)

Panorama will have had their legal teams heavily involved

I expect so.

ensuring they're portraying it accurately

A portrayal can be biased in ways that are not legally actionable.

[Seasidegirl]

This feels like it may be another WHI type watershed where treatment for many woman is adversely affected by what should be a discussion about a specific issue - ie off licence oestrogen. 

I am also a Newson patient,  forced to pay because my GP refused me HRT (in favour of AD's).   The GP has  taken on my prescription but refuses to prescribe at 75 rather than 50 despite me still being symptomatic at 50.

I'm now paying again to try testosterone as GP regards T inside the reference range (0.101 upwards)  as being OK, again despite me being symptomatic in line with the nice guidelines. 

This is another pop at LN after the "how dare she prescribe T" guff from a couple of months ago.

I really fear this noise is going to make it even harder for woman to access HRT going forward as it creates confusion in already under informed HP's.

[TheMidnightSkulker]

My experience of menopause doctors, having paid to see about 5 different ones over the last 5 years, is that they have their own "camp" or fixed mindset. You get those like Louise Newsom who just think ESTROGEN ESTROGEN and MORE ESTROGEN and then you have others (eg Marian Gluck clinic and Lara Briden) who think Progesterone is the answer to everything. Akin to Louise Newsom I know of places promoting incredibly worrying high doses of Progesterone daily as the answer.

I mean... there are a gazillion different kinds of hormonal birth control. Because one size does not fit all. Why would anyone, therefore, expect that there would be One HRT Regime To Rule Them All?

Incidentally I experience the same thing when it comes to women generally... people want to help and it's human nature for people to feel what worked for them will work for others.

Indeed. You get a lot of that flung at you when you're greasy (I mentioned elsewhere that I used to be greasy, which is why I was on BCP for so long). First my greasiness was proof that I wasn't washing my hair often enough. Then it was proof that I was washing my hair too often.

Well - when I decided that I needed to wash my hair twice a day, at one point, I made that decision based on experience of washing my hair once a week, then twice a week, then every three days, then every other day, and then every day. There must be some point where I crossed the line from washing too little, to washing too much, but nobody seems to be able to tell me what that point was, despite their strongly expressed opinions.

(And once I had been back on BCP for 9-10 months I was able to scale it back to once a day. In case anyone is reading this and doing the scream face on behalf of my poor abused follicles.)

(There's another story there about how you're expected to just *be* clean, but you're not supposed to actively clean anything in order to attain the state of cleanliness. But that's off topic.)

[Whitewitch1965]

I can't comment on Newson in a personal sense as I'm not under her care.

She has stuck her neck out very far publically, and now they are coming after her and want to chop it clean off.

I'm not even a fan of hers tbh but she should be allowed a fair hearing.
I'm more pssd off that Basins have dodged a massive bullet. In my eyes and many others' opinion, they altered/watered down the formula when the Davina effect took off and demand outweighed supply. They have never accepted this but did I believe admit that some bottles were not dispensing the correct
metered dose, causing many of us to raise the amount taken to get the same payoff.

Obv some women saying their symptoms returned after being stable for a long period are anecdotal, but some who had bloods done had hard evidence of big drops in estrogen with no other explanation than a change in formula or metered doses being lowered to meet demand.

I guess we will have to wait and see if Newson is hung out to dry or "cancelled" none of which I wish on her or anyone for that matter, but I think the panic highled by this programme will have a ripple effect on us all and probably set the whole hrt movement back.
In an ideal world, it would result in more studies into the effects of higher than the licenced dose, but I don't think we are there yet.

TD

They definitely changed I noticed it straight away with the change of dispenser but then felt it within a couple weeks. I had a blood test which my Dr didn't want me to have as he said they don't mean anything?? And I was lower than when I first went into menopause fully and I had been having an extra pump for a few weeks bf I got the test🤷

[Gilla999]

Having now watched the documentary, which wasn't any better or worse than I expected/already felt, the one big thing I think it was missing - that a couple of others have raised on this thread already - is how bloody difficult it is to get decent care from your GP. It was an extremely important and relevant issue about why people are going private in the first place, that I felt was completely missed out. In fact the only related bit I heard said something like everyone was now getting much better care from our GPs than previously.........

[CLKD]

 . 'previously' than when I wonder.  30 mins cannot cover many topics.  I will watch with DH later who can sit on my hands in case I throw something at the laptop 

[K45]

The 15 menopause supplements that have no scientific evidence was an eye opener!

[CLKD]

Supplements aside - a couple of years ago a Consultant - can't remember his speciality off the top of my head - wrote in the Telegraph that with a health, all round diet 1 shouldn't require supplements other than VitD.

[joziel]

I'm so incensed by this Panorama show, I don't know where to begin.

There is an absolute witch-hunt against Louise Newson going on behind the scenes - which extends to kicking her out the BMS. There are people in this thread saying 'but she has been kicked out the BMS' [shock horror] as if this is now proof that she is a dodgy doctor - rather than realising that the BMS would have us all dissing HRT and has been dragged screaming away from the WHI study, never really refuting it with any explicit statement to equal the intensity of their initial support of it. The BMS is ultra-conservative and relies on research which is outdated and incomplete (there will never be funded research of the sort which is needed because this is women's health and we are not talking about new drugs here, but cheap hormones). That doesn't make it any more 'right'.

Secondly, I can 100% guarantee that for every woman interviewed in that Panorama programme with some scary story about high doses of estrogen, they could, IF THEY'D WANTED, easily have found as many women - actually even more - who would have told stories of NEEDING those doses and not having symptom resolution on lower doses, besides having no side effects from this dosage. (Newson herself is just one such case. Me being another. Hundreds of thousands of other women all over social media who are her patients, being more.) The fact that they only interviewed women touting this one angle was incredibly one-sided and unfair and I really hope Newson has got her lawyers on this for sure. That is not neutral and unbiassed journalism, it's professional assassination and a take-down and slander - to present such a one-sided view.

Thirdly, there was no mention in the programme of the distinction between the dosage applied to your skin and the serum estradiol levels. How some of us (with dry skin, with thick skin - who knows?!) just don't absorb very well transdermally. My levels on 6 pumps (and also on 12 pumps of gel - it was the same) was 330pmol. That is not astronomically high. 12 pumps of gel is 3x the max licensed dose. Read that again: I took 3x the max licensed dose and my serum estradiol was the same as many women on 2-4 pumps of gel. Yet this programme was all about the DOSAGE and not at all about the amount absorbed, which wasn't mentioned even once.

Doctors in that episode - like Dr Chatterjee - are actually really ANTI HRT. Until recently they were dissing it and promoting all kinds of other crap supplements to take instead. She is biassed against it as she herself had BC and couldn't take it. And THAT'S who they chose to interview? With no one to present the other perspective?? This is just the establishment (ie the BMS) ganging up on Dr Newson.

My own experience of lying in bed awake through the night, shaking so much the bed seemed to be moving under me, with my heart going at 95bpm (normal rate in my sleep is 40bpm), and hypnic jerks constantly - all of which has got hugely better since I got my estrogen up by taking now almost 4x the licensed dose - with zero signs of high estrogen, no unscheduled bleeding, no sore boobs, nothing - is that I would probably have killed myself by now if I hadn't had access to higher doses of estrogen via Dr Newson's clinic.

So.... I am really f553cking angry.