Better treatment urged for the 'inevitable phase' in every woman's life
A petition on change.org to get Pharmac to approve and fund transdermal estrogen gels in New Zealand has garnered more than 1000 signatures.
Dr Linda Dear, together with Émilie Joyal and Kiri Turketo, launched the petition on change.org a week ago, calling on Pharmac to “give New Zealand women fully funded access to more options for the safest form of estrogen”.
Dear, now a full time menopause doctor, said the response to the petition so far had been "brilliant”.
“Patches aren’t all bad,” Dear said, “they’re better than pills, because they don't carry the clot risk that pills carry. And they also don't affect a woman's testosterone levels which sometimes oral estrogen can.”
All patches contained bioidentical or body identical estrogen, whereas not all estrogen pills did, she said.
“So there's lots of good things about patches. But there's also some bad things about patches - the main three being that you can’t always get any. Some women are allergic to them, that sticky stuff in them. Or for some women, they just won't stay on their skin, they just will not stick. And if it's not on you, it's not delivering any hormones or doing its job.” Read More…
