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'm absolutely delighted to introduce to you Professor Jim Simon, who is a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology and also reproductive endocrinology at the George

Washington University in Washington, ZZ. And he also

runs a very busy private clinic with the largest independent research in women's health in the

USA. So I connected with him at the British Manipause Society meeting a couple of years ago

and quizzed his brain a lot and

wouldn't leave him alone because I wanted to get as much information as possible from him while

he was there. So I'm absolutely thrilled and honoured that you've agreed to do a podcast today.

So thank you. It's my pleasure to be here really and I'm glad we have an opportunity to reach your audience.

Brilliant.

So what I wanted to do in the next half an hour is really talk about HRT, that three-letter word that scares so many people, so many women, so many healthcare professionals.

And it is only three letters, isn't it, hormone replacement therapy.

So I wanted to talk about the different types and about the risks I want to get right out there at the beginning

and talk about the breast cancer risk because this is the thing that women and healthcare

professionals are mainly concerned about when it comes to prescribing. So before we

launched straight into that, could you just talk a little bit about your phenomenal background

and your medical career, just to put us in the picture about what you do? Sure. I started out

in a more traditional way of looking at reproduction and infertility

and was around for the conception of Louise Brown in the UK,

which makes me old and gray,

...