TRANSCRIPT 🔗
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The views expressed by speakers
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are their own and may not necessarily represent the views of
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the IMS. Hello, I'm Dr.
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Marla Shapiro, and I sit on the Board of Trustees of the International Menopause
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Society, and I'm joined today by a fellow Canadian, Dr. Susan Goldstein,
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who has a shared passion, which is educating women about
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midlife health. So firstly, introduce yourself to our audience.
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Thanks so much for having me, Marla. So I'm a family physician in Toronto.
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I do provide primary care. I am an
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assistant professor in the Department of Family Community Medicine at the University of Toronto.
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I am a Menopause Society certified practitioner,
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and as of the taping, I am the president-elect for Canadian Menopause
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Society. So with that in mind, you created a
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website, and I want to talk about the average woman who is
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inundated with social media and all
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types of inaccurate misinformation,
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disinformation. So talk about this website you've created,
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where it can be found, and why it can be helpful for
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any woman in midlife. Okay, so where it can be
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found, it's www.mq6.ca.
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So nice, easy to remember. MQ6 stands for Menopause So
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there, you're right, there's a ton of misinformation, social media.
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I think I really feel badly for our patients because
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how do you figure out what's evidence-based? And one of the purposes
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of creating this website, and it was designed specifically for use by healthcare providers,
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so everything on it is evidence-based. While it's
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at the level of the healthcare provider, it is written in simple language,
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so not too many big medical terms so that anybody who reads it
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can understand it. And there is a section that's
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particularly for women, but I particularly left it open access
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so that if patients are wondering what the doctors are doing or
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should be doing, they can actually read along on the other side of the
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website and get evidence-based medicine
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that has been peer-reviewed. And I try and keep it quite
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up to date. So what are the questions that are covered?
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In this MQ-6? All right, so within the website
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itself, there are a number of tools. There's an MQ-6 assessment tool, there's an MQ-6
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treatment algorithm, there's a counseling page and other tools that we'll
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talk about. But the thing was built originally because there was a
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publication in 2017 of the MQ-6 assessment tool and accompanying
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treatment algorithm. The MQ-6 assessment tool is
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a menopause symptom screener. It is simple, It is
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quick. It is based on the questions that we need to be asking, the most
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common symptoms related to menopause, and those for which
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we have menopause-specific treatments. Do you— should
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we go through the 6 questions? Well, I think women can find
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the 6 questions, but I think— and they can, you know, look at the questions
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that they should be asking themselves because some women are unaware what
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is menopause and what isn't. But, you know, part of the site refers to
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management. And I think for many women, there's the question of, okay, these are my
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symptoms. How do they get managed? There's so much misinformation. How, as a
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consumer, can the website help educate them or arm them when they
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do see their healthcare provider to know what they want to be asking about?
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That's a great question. So this is how I recommend the consumer to
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use the website. You first start by using the tool itself. You can self-administer
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it. You can do it on your mobile phone. There are PDFs. The original MQ-6
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screener was written in a conversational way,
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but there are forms of it on the website that have yes/no answers where you
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can just click on the computer. You can take that screener with
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you to your healthcare provider and say, hey, I did
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this screener and I have symptoms. So that's the first way they can use it.
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The second way is that we know that a lot
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of healthcare providers are reticent to provide menopausal care
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because they have knowledge gaps. It just is what it is.
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I have had patients who will say, look, I went on this website,
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there's a treatment algorithm. Why don't we go through the treatment algorithm
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together? I looked at it and I'm not a doctor, and of course
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the algorithm is informational. It does not replace
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medical care, but it can give patients a sense of the
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decision-making they might expect from their healthcare provider. And they
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Load full transcript
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can go through the algorithm on the website with their clinician
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to help support the clinician provide them the care that they need.
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There's also health promotion because menopause is much more than just
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a decision to be on therapy for hot flashes and night sweats.
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Absolutely. So as you well know, we spend—
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we women spend half of our,
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half of our life or more in adulthood, and half
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of that is actually postmenopausal. And during the menopausal
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transition, there are a lot of health changes and metabolic changes
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related to our cardiovascular status, our bone status. So it's
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a very important time for women really to be thinking about preventive
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health and how to optimize their health and promote health. So on
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the website, there's a button that says Menopausal Health Promotion,
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and it's also found on the tab for women. And it talks about
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what we need to do to stay healthy for that second half of our
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adult life. To have good health and good quality of life speaks
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to doing your update, you know, updating your necessary screening,
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but also speaks specifically to how to maintain bone health,
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how to maintain brain health, and how to maintain cardiovascular health.
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And again, all guideline-informed, up-to-date information.
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Quickly, I think that's what I want to leave our women who
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are watching this, that regardless of your level of education or
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where you live, if you have access to an internet and you can
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access the tool, then you can spend your time looking at
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the different tools, all the different options it offers you to educate
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yourself and to make yourself an informed consumer regardless of
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who's providing your healthcare to you. So before I let you go, one last time,
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where do our women find this tool?
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www.mq6.ca.
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Well, I think it's terrific that there's a tool that on the one side our
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healthcare professionals can use. And on the other side, women who are
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navigating midlife and beyond can look at to get educated,
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to open up the door to proper evidence-based information as
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opposed to whatever else is out there that may or may not be true.
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So thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you very much for having
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me, Marla.
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Okay, great. All done. Thanks very
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much. Thanks for coming up for us.
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Thank you all. Bye for now.
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Thanks. Um, Erica,
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I have a question for you now. It may not be for you. Um,
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we have an old video from 3 years ago. Is there
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a way to get— I'm applying actually for promotion to associate professor.
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Um, is there a way to get the metrics at all? Like, how many people
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have viewed the videos or listened to the podcasts? Do you know? Uh,
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do you know where, like, the roughly the date?
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Uh, I think it was March 2023. Okay.
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So because there are existing videos about the MQ6, and I had wanted to
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redo this with Marla a little bit because they were
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more about the tool, the tools per se, and this was supposed to be a
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bit more about how to use the website. So it had— I think
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I gave her a different Uh, title for this one, I think, was Using
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Technology to Support Menopausal Care: The MQ-6 Menopause
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Management Tools. Okay. Yeah. Um, was it with BT
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Congress? Was it? Yeah. Okay. In a
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webinar? Yeah, the old videos are in— there's
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like a video, and then there's just one for patients,
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one for doctors, and then there is a Um,
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I think there's also like a podcast version of it.
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And it's there on the website. I checked it yesterday. So it's still there.
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There's about 14 of them. Yeah. If you could
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send me the link, that's, that would be great. So I can have a
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look at that because I just recently joined
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BT Congress in May. So, so I
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can check better if it's not a problem for you. Otherwise I'll just— Oh,
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not at all. No, no, I really appreciate it. Okay,
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thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.
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Thank you so much. Bye-bye. Have a great weekend. Thanks, you too.