Welcome to the Newsome Health Menopause podcast. I'm Dr Louise Newsome, a GP and menopause specialist,

and I run the Newsome Health Menopause and wellbeing centre here in Stratford-upon-Avon.

So today I'm very honoured to be sitting with Professor Geoffrey Hackett, who's a professor of sexual medicine at Aston University. He also used to be the President of the British

Society of Sexual Medicine, and we are very flattered that he is working here in the clinic sometimes as well in my menopause clinic, seeing men rather than women.

I hasten to add, so welcome, dear.

Thank you very much, too.

So I really wanted to spend a bit of time talking about men rather than women.

It's a bit out

my comfort zone because as you know, all I do is see women in my clinic here, but I have seen

a lot of men in the past. So can we just start by maybe talking about your journey to where

you came from being a GP to being interested in men's health? Yes. Well, I was a primary care physician for 30 years,

and I always had an academic interest because I'd trained to medical registrar level in hospitals.

And I started to do research into sexual problems because I noticed I was seeing a lot of men

with hypertension, heart disease, who complained about erectile dysfunction.

This was really before leaders like Graham Jackson identified the link.

So I actually did a research project involving three practices where we screened the population

with rather primitive inventories at that time and we found strong links between physical

diseases and sexual dysfunction. And soon after I published that, trials were being developed

for Viagra and they came to me to do

some of the trials and the rest, as they say, is history. It's very interesting. But even in

hospital medicine, were these men volunteering the fact that they had problems with sex or were you

actually directly asking them? I had to directly ask them.

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