101 - Dorothy Byrne: Speaking out about the menopause at work

The Dr Louise Newson Podcast

Dr Louise Newson

Health & Fitness, Medicine

4.7 • 935 Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2021

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Dorothy Byrne is the Editor at Large at Channel 4 and was Head of News and Current Affairs for 17 years at the channel. In this podcast episode, she speaks with Dr Louise Newson about her own experience of speaking up about the menopause at work. Dorothy gave a MacTaggart lecture at the TV industry's biggest event of the year, The Edinburgh Television Festival, and received an overwhelming response for talking about the menopause in such a setting.(The lecture is available to watch in full on Edinburgh Television Festival's YouTube channel). Dorothy and Louise also discuss the debilitating effects of some of the long-term consequences of the menopause such as a lack of sleep and osteoporosis, and the challenges of getting testosterone prescribed on the NHS. Dorothy's 3 top tips:

Go and see your doctor if you're suffering. Tell them you need to know more about your treatment options and get advice. Ask them to discuss HRT with you rather than it being quickly dismissed.

Not sleeping is a serious lifestyle and medical issue. Don't put up with it, the long-term effects on your health from a lack of sleep are considerable.

Going through the menopause and being an older woman can be great. You can be more confident, you receive less unwanted attention from men, you don't have to worry about getting pregnant, there are so many upsides. Don't accept the consequences of menopause when you can have another 20, 30, or even 40 years of a great life ahead of you.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Neuson Health Menopause podcast. I'm Dr. Louise Newson, a GP and menopause
0:15.8	specialist and I'm also the founder of the Menopause charity. In addition, I run the Newston Health Menopause and Well-Being Clinic here in Stratford-upon-Avon.
0:31.4	So today on this podcast, I'm really delighted to introduce to you Dorothy Byrne,
0:36.3	who many of you will hopefully have heard of.
0:38.9	She's the editor at large for Channel 4. She was the head of news and current affairs for Channel 4 for 15 years.
0:45.9	And she's also the president-elect of Murray Edwards College, which is a women's college at Cambridge.
0:52.5	So welcome Dorothy to the podcast. Thank you very much.
0:56.4	It's great to be here talking to you. So we were introduced actually by Kate Muir, who many of you know
1:03.3	I've done a podcast with her and she was the Times film critic for many years and she's written
1:09.1	and produced the most amazing documentary on Channel 4
1:13.1	that will have been produced by the time this podcast comes out and what it would have been
1:17.2	available for people to watch and Kate said to me a while ago you really need to meet
1:21.4	Dorothy and I'd really like you to talk to her. She doesn't really think much that she's
1:26.9	suffering in a much way about the
1:28.7	menopause, but she's been talking about it. And she actually spoke about it at the
1:33.4	Mataget Lecture in Edinburgh. And people then listened. And I thought, actually, this is
1:40.2	incredible. So I'll be really interested, actually, if you don't mind talking about
1:44.3	the lecture that you gave and your sort of thoughts about menopause before and after actually
1:50.3	starting your own journey, if you like, onto getting some treatment. Well, it's very interesting
1:55.8	to me that when I gave the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival, which is the main lecture in the TV year for the television industry,
2:08.5	I talked about so many different things about how women are assaulted at work, the state of British television, and yet the thing
2:22.1	which seemed to get the most attention of all was that at the end I talked about the
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dr Louise Newson, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Dr Louise Newson and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.