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.

Today I have Saska Gravel from Mpoweredwomen.net, who I'm not sure how I met actually.

We'll maybe talk about how we met, but I've been liaising and frantically emailing to over the last few months so hi Suska hello I'm really pleased that you're here I'm very pleased to be here so up until probably a couple

of years ago before I started my clinic I had very little contact with journalists and I've played a

little bit with the media on and off in the past about various GP related issues.

But when I sat in a conference two years ago, it was a big International Menopause Society conference, I sat there listening to very clever people, far more clever than me, talking about the ins and outs of menopause care, talking a lot about how safe

HRT is. And I sat there thinking, actually, I don't think women are hearing these stories and I wonder

why. And there is a lot of scaremongery going on and there still is about HRT. So I thought, rather

than being another clever doctor doing lots of research, which I'm not, I thought, right, I'm going to try and play with the media and empower women through getting really good journalists on board.

So Saskia is one of those journalists who I have met and engaged with and she's been doing some really inspirational work

for women which we will discuss. So before we talk about what you're doing now, Suska, just talk a bit

about what you've done in the past and your background. I was the deputy editor at Red Magazine.

I've been a journalist all my career, always worked in magazines and newspapers.

And when I was at Red, I'm ashamed to say we never wrote about the menopause.

She's quite something, isn't it? So I remember buying it as a student thinking it was quite

grown up because it was not quite Mary Claire, different to cosmopolitan.

And I thought, wow, this is really grown up.

And, but it was, it's, what was, what's its target?

So it's, it's aimed at what it calls middle youth, which is this idea of women in their 30s and 40s and older.

Yeah.

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