The Dr Louise Newson Podcast - 94 – Fixing doctors' fear of hormone treatments including testosterone

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

Dr Holly Carding, GP, Women’s Hormone Specialist and Education Lead at Newson Education, joins Louise to expose the hormone training gap that leaves doctors too scared to prescribe hormone treatments including progesterone, estradiol and testosterone.Holly had almost no training on hormones as a medical student and as a GP, became a menopause champion after returning from maternity leave and now leads global education for Newson Education, building the Confidence in Hormones course from scratch to close a training and education gap for all healthcare professionals globally - including for GPs, nurses, pharmacists, psychiatrists, cardiologists and all other doctors.They discuss the course's modules on testosterone prescribing, mental health, and individualising care for women with a history of breast cancer or clots, why "just a guideline" isn't enough for real patients, and the Hormones Uncovered conference returning as a two-day event in London, Hormones and Healthspan, in March.Holly leaves three take-home tips for any healthcare professional wanting to get to grips with hormone health.Let’s connect👉 Find out more about the Hormones Uncovered conference: https://bit.ly/4wOmLtm 👉 Doctor, or know one who needs to hear this? Build confidence in hormone health with the Confidence in Hormones course at Newson Education: https://bit.ly/4g5V0ps👉 More from Dr Louise Newson: https://linkin.bio/drlouisenewson

So Holly, it's lovely to have you in my podcast studio. I've known you for quite a while and you lead our education, which is News and Education and do a sterling job. But I wanted to spend this time just talking about education, not just for GPs, not just for doctors, but for healthcare professionals globally. So not in UK. So there's, I don't know how many healthcare professionals there are in the world, but there'll be a lot. And the minority of them, are confident of prescribing hormone treatments. So we're quite ambitious in what we're doing, aren't we? So we want to educate as many people as possible. So tell me just a bit about you and your background and also your own training, because I hope it was better than mine because I wasn't taught anything about hormone treatments.

Unfortunately, I don't think it was. So, I mean, I'm really excited to be here and talking to you. We've wanted to do this podcast for quite a while, haven't we? but I think it's quite fitting that it's happened now because it was just my one-year anniversary as education lead for nursing education. And I had quite a similar journey to you. I went to Manchester medical school at the University of Manchester. I did an interclated degree in pathology, moved down to Kent to do my junior doctor years, and then back up to Manchester to do my GP training.

And you ask about what training I had around hormone health. And there's very little that I remember from my training. And even as doing GP training, there was very little. And then after I finished my GP training, I had my children. And then when I came back for maternity leave, I was a bit lost. I had all these colleagues who were,

developing special interest in things and I was wondering like Holly what are you going to do with your career so I became a menopause champion actually at a previous job and once you start to connect those dots around the symptoms and the suffering that these women are going through it's really hard to unsee it and every consultation it flavors the consultation and I really wanted to try and provide optimal and individualised care for them. So I needed to upskill. And one of the ways I upskilled was to use your education. So the menopause doctor website, the podcasts where you've had some incredible clinicians over the years. And then also I did the confidence in menopause course. That eventually led on to me being a news and health clinician. Um,

And I work in the Manchester Clinic. I'm actually here in the Hale Clinic today at Bank Medi Spa. And as well as kind of thinking around my journey into hormone health, my journey into education, education has always been a huge part of my career. And I've, on an annual basis, I supervise a third-year medical student at the University of Manchester doing an applied experienced project and they have very little training still even in hormone health and I see some real opportunities there to help educate them and you know recent project did incredibly well we had data from from News and Clinic and we looked at the improvements in self-esteem schools for women

who've been initiated or optimized on their HRT and the amazing improvements that these women see. And that's something that you don't sort of see in the guidelines as a suggested indication. And so that actually won a prize at a recent conference for the students posted. But, you know, they still, they were very much influenced by the Women's Health Initiative

and the legacy that that's left. It's incredible, isn't it? I mean, I graduated 31 years ago. And, you know, you graduated more recently than me. And then it's still not moved on. And it's a massive opportunity to really improve the health of women if we think about hormone treatments and hormone changes right from the start, really, not just menopause.

And it seems really weird because, also, you know, we've both got a big clinical practice. We both see a lot of patients and obviously we work in the same clinic. So collectively we're seeing thousands of women a month. And it's very transformational medicine. You know, as a GP, of course you can help your patients, but not to the same extent as, you know, when our patients come back for follow up, like you say, they're improving their symptoms, but also often you see their blood pressure coming down. Their LDL cholesterol's come down, their weight has improved, their exercise ability has increased, they're often back at work, you know, it's a massive positive benefits that we see and it's very rewarding, isn't it,

clinically, the work we do? Absolutely. I mean, it's the most satisfying work that I've ever done as a GP and I think one of the real benefits about working at news and clinics is that there's so much focus on education, which is pretty unique. when it comes to working as a healthcare professional. There's so much that goes into developing our clinicians and then that then impacts on the care that we can give the patients. Yeah. So, yeah.

It's really interesting because education has changed, but it's still very traditional. And when I set up the education course, initially it was confidence in menopause and now it's confidence in hormones. I was sort of quite frustrated with the way that I'd been educated as a postgraduate because often you have to sort out childcare, you have to pay quite a lot of money, not just for the course, but for the accommodation, for, you know, travel.

And then, you know, I spent many a day sitting in a lecture theatre thinking, well, I know all this. It's like, or you get out of date to slides, somebody's just talking, you know, reading the slides at you. And I'm thinking, this isn't very helpful. And I knew that when I set my clinic up 10 years ago, I had a lot of, like, theory knowledge. I knew about hormone treatments. I knew about how to make a diagnosis.

But I didn't know that art of, like, what do you say to the patient? How do you, which hormone do you start first? What dose do you give? Do you give it different if they're younger or older? When do you start vagina hormones? And then I sat in some clinics in London, and that's when I really learned. But I thought, well, Well, even in our clinic, we mentor our doctors,

but we can't have everyone sitting in with us because we haven't got enough space. So that was where the idea came to film some of the consultations. So just explain a bit about what we do with that. Yeah, I mean, our education philosophy is quite different from the other education that's out there because we're not just teaching about menopause as a topic. And I know that you don't like labels like menopause and PNDDD,

PMS, postnatal depression. So what we've done is we've tried to and teach that underlying physiology and pathology. And then once the clinicians understands that mechanism, it makes the clinical decisions much clearer. But we've also taken that foundation of the extremely successful confidence in menopause course that was very much focused around watching mock consultations. And then we've used the same principle in the confidence in hormones course because one of the pillars of our education was that we wanted to focus on building confidence and compassion.

I think in clinic we see a lot of women who've been ignored, misdiagnosed, medically gas-lit. And so we want to not only teach our clinicians about the basics and the theory, but also how to listen to our patients, how to communicate with them. And I think through your patient education, the patients are very ahead of the curve, and we want the healthcare professionals to come over the hill with them as well. Yeah, and that's where I sort of feel that I've sort of got things slavis. wrong in that women have understood hormones very quickly and healthcare professionals less quickly and there's this mismatch and the problem is now we've got to a dreadful situation

where women seem to often know more than their healthcare practitioner and you know most of us as good healthcare practitioners are always challenging what we do when we're always like I always used to go home and think have I done the best for my patients is there more I need to read is there something else they need to learn. And sadly, a lot of healthcare professionals aren't quite the same. So they're pushing back on their patients. And the stories that we hear every day are quite, well, they're very harrowing. You know, I've just been told this morning that one of our patients, their doctors, had a group practice meeting, and they've now said they're not going to prescribe testosterone anymore to any of their patients. And it feels weird. Like they'd never sit down and say, sorry, we're not going to

prescribe antidepressants to our patients or gabapentin, which is a highly addictive drug with a lot of side effects, but they somehow choosing, like, to target hormone treatments to the detriment of women. And these stories are not coming from any evidence. These doctors seem very scared of hormone treatments for the wrong reason, don't they? Yeah, and I mean, we're quite committed to improve in patient experience and trying to reduce some of those health inequalities. that you see because there may be one practice that does that, but down the road, you know, the patients are being prescribed testosterone.

And it's about helping the clinicians to understand that underlying physiology and the evidence so that they don't feel worried anymore. And I mean, one of the foundational modules of the confidence in hormones is, the program is the Hormones 101 101 module. And that we created. really as a gateway for the rest of the program. And it's very much for clinicians who are new to hormone health and he might have some outdated perceptions,

especially around the Women's Health Initiative Study. And, you know, if they want to challenge that and then progress into the other modules that focus more on clinical care, I think that would be a really good place to start. Yeah, and, you know, I remember, sitting down at my computer trying to put down in black and white your very ambitious vision, which was a global one. But, you know, we did do that. And what we wanted to do was to transform

hormone health education through it being accessible, through it being evidence-based learning that then genuinely changes clinical practice and really to empower the clinicians and with the knowledge and with the confidence so that the care is safe, but it is person-centered and it's holistic as well. And, you know, with, I think we love a guideline as a doctor because things are there in black and white four wheels to follow. But unfortunately, our patients do not fall nicely and siloed into those,

those boxes and so they're going to be patients that sit outside that and it's about how you manage those patients and and give them good care as well because when I was at medical school I was always taught a guideline is just that it's a guide. Yeah, it's a guide. Yeah. Totally. And we have to be thinking outside the books because the suffering is immense and we see a lot of people who have been told wrongly usually that they can't have hormone treatments yet they want them for their future health. They want them to allow their brain to function, their body to function better. And anything that we do in medicine is a choice that's patient-centered. You know, the shared decision-making is really important. And so with the course, we've got these different scenarios, haven't we,

with consultations or mock consultations, with a lot of the doctors who work with us, who are excellent. But we've also, there's a lot of references, aren't there? We sort of refer to the And there's webinars as well that people can watch too. So there's a hybrid type of learning that people can develop their confidence and knowledge from. Yeah. And I mean, one of our other pillars is about accessibility and inclusivity. We have face-to-face learning, but we have the online learning as well. And, you know, you mentioned before about trying to access education when you're a busy clinician. and, you know, the cost of travel and accommodation. And so that we have a lot of online learning available. But I mean, it's probably my biggest achievement this year was launching the Confidence in Hormones course.

And really developing that program. We didn't want it to just be, you know, a series of lectures and by the, end of it, you know, you should have achieved these learning objectives. We wanted to build a real educational journey and that is built around these these mock consultations that you're right, they're done by our clinicians who see these types of cases day in and day out and see the improvements that women get with the bioidentical hormones. So we started with those mock consultations, but we built around that as well. So there's expert Q&A from yourself and Rebecca,

and there are reflective exercises in there, which is important to complete that learning loop. There are assessments for you to do to make sure that you have achieved those learning objectives. There are the video lectures, but there's also resources as well. So there's all the clinical tools and there's the patient resources. There's the links to things like balance and your website. And then the great thing is all of the resources, I've spent a long time with you, putting all of those resources and references into one easy-to-access section so that you can go away and read the papers for yourself and critically appraise them, but also you know where they are when you need them for your consultations or your learning.

Which is so important. And so what's the feedback being like from their confidence in a hormones course? Yeah, amazing, really, really good. Like, completely different experience to anything else that is out there in terms of education. I mean, I've done a lot of menopause and hormone health education over the years. And we've talked about that foundational module, but we've got other modules as well. So there's hormones in practice that covers the basics in terms of perimenopause and menopause and POI. we've got confidence in testosterone, which talks about all of the evidence around testosterone replacement,

how to prescribe that and how to monitor that safely. You said, I think clinicians can be very scared of hormones in general, but testosterone especially. And we've also created a module focusing on mental health and well-being, which I know is a real passion of yours. So that contains cases that, you know, not only about depression, but about suicide, ideation, and about the impact of hormone issues

on relationships and on work as well. And then we have an individualising clinical decisions module, which really starts to look at the nuances of care. so off-label prescribing of estradiol and the role of progesterone in hormone health, and then safe prescribing in women who have like a family history of breast cancer or a personal history of clots as well. We also have the other two modules that are coming out in October, hopefully, looking at optimising care with comorbidities,

and also improving the health span of women. So we know women live longer, but they live in poor health. So I think that's quite a focus of our education coming up. Yeah, and it's amazing because it is so practical. And also we've got the ability to add and change things all the time, whereas a lot of education courses are quite rigid. And we're not rigid because we're learning and extending. And that's why it's not just menopause.

We're thinking about, you know, PMS, PMDD, you know, other conditions that associate with hormonal changes. But one of the things I think is completely unexamination. acceptable is that a lot of GPs say to me, oh, no, I don't know anything about hormone treatments. And then psychiatrists say to me, oh, I'll never prescribe hormone treatments. And then cardiologists say, we see lots of middle-aged women with palpitations, but we never prescribe hormone treatments. And I feel like everyone's fine with saying that they can't prescribe. Like, it feels like you're a doctor with part of you missing if you're ignoring hormone treatments.

because there's no other area of medicine where it's acceptable to not understand. And even as a GP, I wouldn't always prescribe, for example, if someone had cancer, I wouldn't give the first treatment for chemotherapy, but I would make the diagnosis. I would refer them to the oncologist. But somehow, like, if women are just told, oh, it's probably your hormones, but I can't do anything about it, it's allowed to happen and I do understand how like regulators, how people who do the appraisals, how educators in a bigger, you know, have got more roles, responsibilities than us, you know, people at universities, how can they allow doctors and clinicians to graduate without knowing

anything about these fundamental hormones? It doesn't make sense. Yeah, so we're doing a bit of a catch-up, I suppose. But the amount of women that I see in clinic who, will have seen, you know, cardiologists for their palpitations, a neurologist for their headaches, a urologist for their recurrent UTIs, and then we join up all of those dots and say, well, this is related to your hormones. And the thing about our education is that it is for everybody. So you can be a healthcare assistant, a nurse, a pharmacist, a physio, a GP, a specialist in the hospital, and you can access our education. And we've made it modular.

So we, that you can, if you've got a continuing professional development need, that you can just access that section. You know, I think it becomes overwhelming, doesn't it, when you have to do a 30-hour course that costs hundreds of pounds, and that as a specialist you may not want to go down that route, but at least, you know, you can focus on the basics and some of the prescribing as well with our approach with modules. Which makes it really flexible because also increasingly, thankfully,

a lot of people do have knowledge, but they still need more specialist area of knowledge and everyone's different. So the ability to be able to dip in and out is really important. But the other part of news and education that for me is really exciting is our annual conference. We've had a couple of times now we've just put out the date in March for the next one in London. And I mean, we had people from loads of different countries. Is it like 18 or 19 countries? Yeah, it was, wasn't it?

So, you know, which is incredible. And what's really interesting is that in some ways there's more support for our work in other countries than there is in the UK. because instead of a pushback. But the energy in the room we had a dinner the night before and this time we're going to make it a two-day conference. But just like the energy from the people is quite different to other medical conferences, don't you think, Holly? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, we had the hormones uncovered conference back in March at the Royal College of Surgeons in London and, like you say, people from across the globe joining together. And I think one of the biggest take-home messages for me was how eager people are to learn. And we had clinicians from all different specialities in the room together. It wasn't, you know, an exclusive club that's only for doctors. Everybody came together and learned together.

And I think that's because we know that hormone health will touch every single aspect of healthcare. And so it's important that everybody learns about it as well. And do you remember we did that reflective word cloud? Yes. That was great, isn't it? Yeah, it was an idea stolen from your book. But we said hormone health feels dot, dot, dot. And then the delegates had to fill in the gaps. And we did it by the beginning and the end of the day.

And you could see at the beginning there was these real gaps in education and in confidence. But then by the end of the day, there was some really great feedback and great words. in that weird cloud about how confident and how enlightened everybody felt and empowered. So it was a fantastic conference and I was running around trying to coordinate everything. So I didn't really have a lot of time to get as involved in the conversations as I wanted to. But as you're running around that conference centre, you can hear people talking and networking and sharing their experiences. And we also included some patient experience in there as well,

which you never see at all the conferences, but extremely powerful learning. And you can really see how everything that you've learnt during the day you then put into it can be put into practice at the end of the day. So, yeah, next year is the 16th and 17th of March. It's at the Royal College of Physicians in London. and it's going to be called hormones and health span. So we're really going to look at how hormones impact the whole of the lifespan,

but also chronic disease and how we can live healthier. And we've made it two days this time because some of the feedback was that they wanted more. And more time to network and more time to ask questions. So we've got international experts coming to give lectures. Of course, you're going to be there and giving a lecture. There's more time for the expert Q&A's. We've got panel discussion. We've got case-based discussions.

We've got some more patient experience, some debates going on. And it's going to be much more interactive because sitting in a stuffy lecture theatre for eight hours is just not fun and it's not a good way to learn. No. And we've got some lovely people, you know, we, there's a lot of awful stories from doctors, you know, not just me, but other doctors and other countries

that have been sort of told off often by gynecologists for setting up a clinic, for prescribing, for prescribing testosterone or different doses of hormones or whatever. So one of the things that I really like is that it's a very sort of horizontal meeting, there's no hierarchy, there's no people saying you have to do it this way or that way. We learn from each other, but we also are supporting each other because medicine can be quite toxic actually and quite misogynistic and there's still this hierarchy and I wrote about it in my book, The Power of Hormones, that there's this thing where hospital doctors think

that they're superior to GPs and then some GPs think they're more superior to nurses or pharmacists. we don't think that at all. In fact, I respect everybody who works regardless of their job. And that really got, I got that feeling when we were together that when people talk about, you know, difficult emails they've had or hostile conversations with other healthcare professionals, sadly, a lot of people there were going, that's happened to me as well, that's happened to me.

But we can help each other by supporting each other and using tools, you know, I've learned a lot how to deal with people who are very resistant to my, work and so we can help and I think this is going to make a big difference to patients because you know last year I had a very difficult year after the panorama program and I was very close to stopping everything but that wouldn't be helpful for patients and I don't want any of my colleagues to ever go to the dark places that I've been at so how we can lift each other up and I think that's quite unusual in medicine because medicine doctors are quite sort of full of self-importance and they're looking

at they're looking after themselves more than others, whereas what we're trying to do with youth and education is help and support mentally as well as educationally people. And that seemed to really, I could feel that last year. I don't know what you think. No, I completely agree with you. I mean, one of the other pillars of our education is community and creating a community. And one of the highlights of the year has been working with some incredible clinicians from around the world and and this faculty that we're creating. And yet, I mean, there's, just to take a moment to think about the impact of, you know, hostile interactions between colleagues and the impact of GMC investigations and, you know,

things like documentaries like Panorama on, on clinicians' mental health. and you need to have a good support network around you, but also a really good support network of professionals. Yes. Yeah, totally. Because they really do understand so much more. And I think we're creating that at the moment and we're building this community together.

And you could see that at the conference. I see the conference this year, next year, sorry, in March, as being an extension of the confidence in hormones program and getting that online learning offline and getting us all together in a room. Yeah, which is so important. And we're very lucky in our clinic that was so much mentoring going on. We're used to supporting others, but a lot of people don't have that. So it's exciting.

And I'm so grateful publicly, Holly, I want to say thank you for your work. Because it's only been a year, but it feels like. a lot longer and we've got a great team of people in youth and educators and supporting you, supporting everyone else, working together. We've got some very ambitious plans. So you need to come back in about six months and tell us a bit more about the plans that we've got. So in the meantime, I want to thank you because I know you're in clinic today, but thank you for coming on to the podcast, but you're not going to go without three take-home tips. Yeah, I did some preparation.

Yeah, go on. And so three ways, really. They're all. All healthcare professionals should know about hormone health for women. Yeah, I mean, just a beat before I go into that because I want to say thank you to you as well. Because, you know, I'm incredibly proud of what we've achieved so far this year. But, you know, I think having the opportunity to come on as education lead for news and education, none of that would have happened without having that opportunity. And I think as a GP, I mean, we see like 30 pages. patients a day, don't we? But the impact that you can have with education on thousands and thousands

of patients is just huge. But I take out for clinicians who want to learn about hormone health is physiology first. So think about the underlying mechanisms of what's going on in the body when you're faced with hormone-related symptoms. I don't think you should ask, okay, so what the condition. I think you should be asking what's happening physiologically. And then once you understand that, that makes diagnosis and investigation and treatment much more logical. My second take-home tip would be to build confidence and not just knowledge. Rebecca's taught me a lot about guidelines and how they are important, but they do not replace clinical judgment. And so you think you really need to invest in education that understands the evidence and questions it where appropriate

and then you can feel confident in applying it to that very individual case that's sitting in front of you. The third point I would say is keep on learning. So yeah, hormone medicine is evolving. I think, you know, my understanding has come on leaps and bounds over the last few years. And we need to keep on challenging this outdated thinking and keeping up to date with emerging evidence. So that you give the patients the best possible care. And you can do that through News and Education. You can go to our website, which is Newsomeeducation.com. And you can sign up to our programs.

you can follow us on Instagram and on LinkedIn and we'd love to see you at the conference as well in March next year. Absolutely. And if you're listening and you're not a healthcare professional, please share this podcast episode to as many healthcare professionals as you know because they need to learn too. So thank you so much for your time today, Holly. It's been great and thank you for your work too. Thanks very much, Louise.