New Ways to Get Your GP to Help You During Menopause

What is the best way to spend your ten minute GP appointment to ensure that you get the help that you need?
How do you decide what the symptoms to focus on are?
If you feel that you haven’t had the help you needed when you see your GP, should you try again, or switch to another GP?
How do you even know that your GP is up to date with menopausal issues and treatments?
I’m frustrated with the lack of help and support offered and I need to approach things in a different way. Any help or advice would be very much appreciated.
How do you decide what the symptoms to focus on are?
If you feel that you haven’t had the help you needed when you see your GP, should you try again, or switch to another GP?
How do you even know that your GP is up to date with menopausal issues and treatments?
I’m frustrated with the lack of help and support offered and I need to approach things in a different way. Any help or advice would be very much appreciated.
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Comments
It’s so hard just to keep going, especially when you feel that you’ve been dealing with it for so long, and you’re right. It affects everyone around you. I’m sometimes amazed that my poor husband hasn’t run for the hills by now! I can’t use HRT, but I take lots of supplements, and since joining the forum, it helps me enormously to know that I’m not the only one coping with all these horrible symptoms.
I don’t know if you saw the Ask Me Anything Event with Nicki Williams the other night? It’s worth having a read through some of her answers to questions we asked her. Her website has lots of helpful information too. Might be worth a read in case there’s anything there that might help you ♥️
https://community.livebetterwith.com/menopause/discussion/161/award-winning-nutrionist-nicki-williams-joins-us-for-our-first-ever-ask-me-anything-event#latest
Like you too - can cry at the drop of a hat! At the tv, things the kids say, things that happen during the day! Like a leaky tap I have no control over! Memory loss, not so much, except there are days I can’t string a sentence together!
I think the thing to remember is that you have somewhere to share your stories with now.
It’s really helped me to have other women to talk to who understand what I’m going through!
Keep talking to us ♥️
It took 7 months to get this appointment, and whilst explaining my symptoms, I got asked why, if I’ve been treating myself for over 19 years, I suddenly felt the need to seek help now.
Now, that’s not quite true, but the times I’ve asked for help before haven’t resulted in any great success. You get disheartened though, when you feel that doctors are not fully understanding your symptoms or the impact they have. So yesterday I tried to explain that being menopausal, and dealing with insomnia and hot flushes on a ridiculously regular basis, I need to do everything I can to help myself, and that includes getting rid of the carpal tunnel pain which adds to my lack of sleep. Lack of sleep makes my menopausal symptoms much worse. It impacts on my whole life.
It then got pointed out (by the overweight consultant which I always find frustrating!) that being overweight may not be helping. Whilst I fully understand that, I explained that I have been considerably heavier than I am now, and I have also been considerably lighter than I am currently. My symptoms have never altered. Equally, when you don’t sleep, or are forever dealing with horrible symptoms, you get miserable. And you eat more than you should. When you try to help yourself by visiting a doctor and you don’t get the response you’re looking for, you get despondent again, and for some, like me, despite knowing that over eating is incredibly bad for you, that’s where your comfort lies. It’s a vicious circle.
Now I get that a neurologist isn’t really there to treat my menopause symptoms, but the impact of not sleeping as a result of my menopause symptoms AND the carpal tunnel is crippling me. I think they’re relevant to the situation I find myself in. They are part of the reason I was there to see him yesterday. He can’t help me with the menopause symptoms but he CAN help me with the carpal tunnel. I’m just frustrated that as a patient, this doctor wasn’t really interested in seeing the bigger picture, and definitely didn’t seem to be interested in treating me “as a whole” but rather just as the five minute appointment to consult on painful hands,
And as I walked away with a referral for some nerve conduction tests (with another three month wait for an appointment) I couldn’t help feeling as if I was being unreasonable expecting the doctor to have time to understand anything more than my sore hands. I’m a great fan of the NHS and all that they do, but I wonder if a few extra minutes more spent getting the full picture of women in the menopause, their symptoms and the impact they have on day to day lives might mean that treatments are better targeted and in the long run, would mean fewer appointments for other things.
Interesting read. So many of us finding that this is exactly what we are up against when we go to our GPs for help.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/fb-6727157/What-HRT.html?ito=link_share_article-factbox