PCOS Has a New Name: What P-MOS Means for Your Health | Dr Emma Sloan | Ep 106

And we've got lots of people here talking about how challenging it is to get help from the GP about this.

People feeling dismissed or not feeling heard or feeling like they're having to go back time and time again, taking long time for diagnosis.

What kind of top tips would you give to try and ensure someone is getting that? Because we know GPs are under massive pressure.

Yeah.

huge amount of work and and all of the the things that they've got to do but we know women's health is often underrepresented and and not as understood so so yeah just kind of advocating for themselves what kind of top tips or advice would you give

well i guess

it's

really tricky isn't it because gps are stretched thin you know and women need this help there is a lot of help coming from a kind of wider scope so the um what the guidelines, the NICE guidelines are in draft form.

And they talk about monitoring women with PMOS, annual monitoring of women with PMOS, because we know that women with PMOS have worse cardiovascular outcomes.

So GPs are being encouraged to monitor women once they are diagnosed for cholesterol, you know, blood pressure and all those other things, diabetes I talked about earlier, but women, you know, we need to get an appointment with the GP.

And sometimes, because of the friction in the NHS, it might take three weeks.

It might take a month.

I don't know.

It might, depending on your location, your surgery, it might take three weeks, four weeks, if you're lucky, to get an appointment with your GP.

Because nothing's urgent.

We've lived with this condition.

We can wait three weeks, you know.

And I think getting that initial appointment is so important.

And during that time, what we need to do is prepare ourselves for that consultation.

And I think what we need to do is be writing down, that's why I asked you at the beginning of this call, write down your symptoms.

What I would recommend is you go to that GP with three questions saying, are my symptoms indicative of PMOS? Can you help diagnose me with PMOS? And can you treat me please with PMOS? And can I also have a follow-up appointment please? You know, so it's about going in and using that 10 minutes to really focus on your, on that, those three questions or whatever the three questions you are and take somebody with you, you know, who's going to help you find your voice as well and position yourself well in that consultation.

It's not because GPs don't want to help them and it's just so tricky.

you know, to sort of cram everything in and going with that focus around your issues can really help.

Absolutely.

Deborah, I can see the chat is really busy, which is amazing.