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Rachel Bowman

Rachel Bowman

Director of Menopause and Cancer, the UK charity supporting people whose menopause is triggered or accelerated by cancer treatment.

Sep 30, 2026

21:34
Do you know what? As someone who, like me, works in this menopause and cancer sort of field, and we've run the organization together for a long time now, menopause and cancer that is, and as someone, you personally, who really navigated their endocrine therapy and tried so hard to and then came off it for all of the menopause symptoms, I thought this conversation about SIRDS was hopeful, but I wanted to ask you, was it hopeful? What did you think when you listened to her?
22:07
Oh my god I thought it was really interesting and I'd be intrigued to find out about them and I think if somebody offered me a trial right now to test them then I would take it because it sort of feels like what have I got to lose and it was interesting because in the conversation a lot has changed and even in the time that I've had cancer so my first diagnosis is coming up to four years ago and I think people who are diagnosed now have quite a different treatment plan to what I would have got back then.
22:35
And we know that there are new medications and certainly the introduction of drugs that help manage certain menopause symptoms like the hot flushes.
22:45
So I think it's interesting that there's a lot of development.
22:48
And I think what I thought in the conversation was that the doctors themselves are moving away from just treating cancer.
22:55
They're now thinking about the survivorship.
22:58
And I think if I could do anything, I would take away the hideous symptoms and side effects I had from the aromatase inhibitors, but know that I had some level of kind of risk reducing measure.
25:06
It's
9:39
Do you want to go?
9:41
So I've had breast cancer twice.
9:43
So I was diagnosed, had a mastectomy and then was advised to undergo chemotherapy, which resulted in me having my ovaries suppressed.
9:53
And at that point, which obviously throws you straight into menopause, but I didn't get any warning.
9:59
I was told, oh, you might have a few hot flushes.
10:03
I mean, what happened was not just a few hot flushes.
10:06
We were talking 20 to 30 a day.

8 MINS LATER

18:27
How does that link together that somebody is looking after you as a person? At the minute,

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