Hello, I'm Dr. Louise Newsome and welcome to my podcast. I'm a GP and menopause specialist and I run the Newsome Health Menopause and Wellbeing Centre here in Stratford-Bron-Avon. I'm also the founder of the Menopause charity and the Menopause support app called Balance.

On the podcast, I will be joined each week by an exciting guest to help provide evidence-based

information and advice about both the perimenopause and the

menopause. So today on the podcast, I'm very excited and delighted to introduce to you,

someone that I've been stalking for quite a long time without him realising, actually.

So someone called Professor Chris Harding, who I was first introduced to or about, really,

from my husband Paul, who's a urologist, and he kept saying, you need to read this guy's work.

So I have been reading a lot of his work and kept saying to Paul, I'm going to try and reach out to him.

And he said, don't. You're a menopause specialist. He's not going to be interested in you,

Louise. But now, here, I have him in the studio. So thanks, Chris, for coming today.

Oh, it's a pleasure to join you.

So you're obviously a urologist, like my husband, but you're different to my husband because you specialize

differently and you're very academic and you have the most amazing past record of research as well

so do you mind telling me a bit about why you do what you do and how you got here so i'm a consult

urologist as you say and i work in newcastle and for about a third of my working week, I work in Newcastle University with an absolutely

amazing team of very clever scientists who do most of the hard work for me.

And our research program is centered around urinary tract infection and looking at various different

factors, the microbes themselves, the host response.

And we've kind of over the last five to seven years concentrated our efforts on non-antibiotic

treatments for recurrent unit tract infections.

And we're now really thinking about different patient groups and how we might target treatments,

particularly some novel treatments, because of course the issue with antibiotics is the emerging

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