This week's podcast is all about endometriosis. I've got with me, Evelyn Scott, who's an author and women's health advocate, and she has endometriosis. She's been turned away, she's been gaslit, she's been told wrong information. She's suffered herself, but she's a great advocate for others to listen and learn from. Endometriosis and adenomyosis are often poorly understood

and inadequately managed conditions. There's loads we need to do, but we need to start by listening

to patients. So I hope you learn a lot from this episode. So endometriosis is still a word that lots of people don't know what it is.

Patients, doctors, clinicians, researchers.

People really get confused, but it's one in ten women at least.

Yeah, one in ten.

Yeah.

10% of all women, they reckon, which I think is about 176 billion women worldwide.

That's quite a lot of women, isn't it?

It's an incredible amount of women, and it's just as common as diabetes.

So diabetes has quite a lot of investment in it, doesn't it?

So diabetes has proactive care. It has a great pathway to diagnosis, very simple, not invasive, and people tend to take it a lot more seriously than a condition like endometriosis, which unfortunately suffers from being a women's only condition.

It's a problem, isn't it, when it's only women?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's, you know, you hear a lot in the communities that if endometriosis

affected both genders, we would have a cure by now. And I do think that's an accurate way of

looking at it. I think people would rather invest money into research into diseases that affect

both genders as opposed to just women, which creates this horrendous lack of knowledge, which means that a lot of women don't know where to turn and a lot of medical professionals don't know how to treat it.

Well, I mean, we've known for years that women haven't been used in medical research.

You know, I qualified as a doctor in 1994 and that was the year that women had to start being used in clinical trials.

It's quite scary, isn't it?

That's terrifying, but it doesn't surprise me.

No, no.

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