Women's health
What we learnt from 50,000 menopause consults
Most Australian women still wait years for hormonal care to be discussed properly. Here's what 50,000 consults at My Clinic taught us about what works.
In the four years since My Clinic started, we’ve completed more than 50,000 menopause consultations. That’s not a small dataset, and it’s also not the most important fact in the title. What matters is what those consultations told us about what good menopause care actually looks like in Australia.
Symptoms first, labels second
The most consistent thing we hear from patients in the first consult isn’t “I think I might be perimenopausal.” It’s a list of symptoms (broken sleep, brain fog, a heaviness that wasn’t there a year ago) and the conviction that someone has been telling them it’s nothing.
In our clinical pathway, we start with what the patient is describing, not with what we want to call it. The label comes later, and sometimes it doesn’t matter.
The hormonal conversation patients can’t get elsewhere
Most patients arrive at us having had at least one GP consultation where MHT (menopausal hormone therapy) was either dismissed or framed in 1990s risk terms. Our clinicians are trained in the current evidence and can spend more time on it than a standard 15-minute GP appointment allows.
That’s not a criticism of GPs. It’s a system problem. Telehealth and a longer first appointment gives us room to do this properly.
What we’d tell another clinical team starting out
Three things, if we were starting again:
- Build for the second consultation, not the first. The first consult is information. The second is where the clinical work happens.
- Track outcomes, not just consults. Are patients feeling better at three months? Six?
- Make declining to treat easy for clinicians. The wrong incentive design here is the difference between a clinical practice and a prescription engine.
We’ll be writing more about the data over the coming months. Two specific patterns we’ve covered separately: why sleep is rarely the right problem to treat first, and how often iron deficiency masquerades as hormonal fatigue.