108 – Why is there so much confusion about HRT education for clinicians?

8 Oct 2026 · 32 min · S2 E108

Episode 108 – Why is there so much confusion about HRT education for clinicians?

0:00 31:37

Doctors are being taught to treat hormone guidance as if it's law, but according to retired GP and medical educator Dr Mark Coombe, that guidance is too often "at best very conservative, at worst wrong."

Mark spent two decades in education and assessment for the Royal College of GPs and founded FourteenFish, the training platform used by hundreds of thousands of clinicians. He and Louise previously built free hormone education for GPs together — education that was pulled from its hosting platform after a handful of doctors complained it didn't "run to the guidelines."

In this conversation, Mark and Louise unpack how guidance gets misused as law in consultations and courtrooms, why NICE menopause guidance mentions breast cancer over 20 times more often than osteoporosis, and why more female GPs take HRT than the general public despite so much hesitancy to prescribe it. They close with three take-home tips on why every healthcare professional has a duty of care to understand progesterone, estradiol and testosterone.

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