HRT: the politics of the menopause
It’s hard to recall that until recently, discussing “the change” was taboo, said Eleanor Mills in The Daily Telegraph. Today, you can scarcely move for firms boasting about their menopause support schemes, or for headlines screaming about the shortage of hormone replacement therapy (HRT).
“Even Rod Stewart is banging on about it.” It’s a welcome development. Thanks to the efforts of campaigners – in particular Davina McCall, who made a “groundbreaking” documentary on the subject last year – everyone is better informed about possible menopause symptoms: hot flushes, brain fog, anxiety, depression, insomnia. And greater awareness is leading many more women to seek effective treatment.
These campaigns have fuelled an amazing rush on HRT, said Ben Spencer and Zoë Crowther in The Sunday Times. The therapy, first introduced in the 1960s, hasn’t always been popular. Use of the treatment fell off a cliff 20 years ago after studies found it increased the risk of cancer. But HRT is now back in favour as a result of research showing that those risks were greatly overstated. In the past five years, demand for HRT has doubled, said The Observer. Around a million women in Britain now take it, via gels, patches or pills, and supplies are failing to keep up with demand. This has led some women to procure supplies on the black market, meeting in car parks to buy and share medicines. The Government responded to the crisis last week by appointing a “tsar” to tackle the problem, but it should have acted far sooner. These shortages “are not new or unexpected”.
The belated response is further evidence of the low priority given to women’s health concerns, said Alice Thomson in The Times – but things are slowly getting better on this front. There’s now an all-party parliamentary task force on the menopause, set up by Labour MP Carolyn Harris, that has successfully campaigned to cut the cost of repeat HRT prescriptions. “Harris’s goal is to get Jacob Rees-Mogg to say ‘vaginal dryness’ in the House of Commons.” But there’s still a lot of room for improvement. It’s wrong, for instance, that medical students are still barely taught anything about the menopause, and that pharmacists aren’t allowed to dispense substitutes if a prescribed HRT product is out of stock. Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, recently said that she was anxious about reaching “the foothills of menopause”. But provided she can get HRT, she has no need to fret. It’s politicians who “don’t take menopausal women seriously who should worry.”