Welcome to the Newsome Health Menopause podcast.

I'm Dr. Louise Newsom, a GP and menopause specialist,

and I run the Newsome Health Menopause and Wellbeing Centre here in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Today on my podcast, I'm very delighted and pleased to have John Hughes with me, who is a fertility and endometriosis specialist. He's a consultant who works with me and works near to me.

And it's been really interesting talking to him

over the last few months about the sort of patients that he sees in his clinic with fertility problems.

And there's a big overlap with some of the young women we see in our clinic who have problems

with the perimenopause and menopause and have reduced fertility. So welcome, John. Thanks for

joining me today.

Honestly, thank you for inviting me. It's such an important subject and this is a great way of

I think raising people's awareness. You don't know where to look at for what is to you. Absolutely. No.

And I'm not a fertility expert. I'm a GP. I've got a lot of hospital medicine experience and

I'm really keen to just explore various issues.

So before we get started, just tell me a bit about you and how you developed your interest

in fertility and endometriosis.

With the endometriosis side of things is the surgery. It's keyhole surgery. It's quite complex

surgery and I've always found that

quite rewarding. The fertility side, a bit of a personal journey, actually, my wife and I, we went

through five cycles of IVF before she became pregnant twice naturally to give us our two children.

Right.

And so I got quite a lot of insight into what IVF involved. And it was after that, I realized what was good, what was bad,

how I'd like to see things done. And I really developed my interests from there. And so this is

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