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If you follow us on social media, you’ll know that a small moment that happened recently in the House of Commons ended up sparking a fairly lively debate about attitudes to ageing and hair loss. Those went to Huw Merriman and Kelly Tolhurst, the two MPs sitting directly behind Mr Fabricant who appeared to be debating the provenance of the senior MP’s hair. Mr Fabricant, who has always been known for his flamboyant style, but has always been guarded about his hair – admitting only vaguely to ‘having had some work done in the follicular area’, responded by suggesting in an interview he gave later that had Mr Merriman remembered that PMQs was a televised event, the junior MP may have acted ‘in a more grown-up manner’. You would have thought that might have been the end of it, but instead the exchange sparked an interesting, though brief, social media discussion about whether male hair loss was a natural part of ageing and whether men should therefore simply accept thinning and receding hair as part and parcel of life’s rich tapestry and grow old gracefully.

But increasingly, many women, like Emma Forbes, are turning to bioidentical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT) – sometimes referred to as body identical HRT – to manage the effects of the menopause and it’s telling that having made that choice she now claims to ‘feel like the old me’. The difference between BHRT and the synthetic alternative prescribed by the NHS is that the BHRT uses compounds that have precisely the same chemical and molecular structure as the key hormones naturally found in the body, making it the treatment that most closely replicates the body’s hormonal profile. Because BHRT includes more hormones, all of which replicate through natural ingredients the hormones produced by the body, it is more effective in successfully treating a wider range of common symptoms – which means a more comfortable journey through the changes your body is undergoing. At The Natural Doctor we believe every woman should have the right to relief and so our bioidentical hormone replacement therapy is perfect for women who have chosen to decline synthetic therapy but want to avoid common symptoms whilst staying safe in the longterm.

And for those who read that last paragraph and argue that conventional medicine also treats the root cause, there is an important and fundamental difference that separates clinical treatment from natural treatment. It may also treat the root cause by, for example, allowing the body to come out of spasm, freeing a nerve – but that isn’t necessarily the primary reason for prescribing the treatment. By contrast, natural medicine largely focuses on the causative factors of the problem, and it does that by supplementing the body’s natural biology on a like-for-like basis and by using non-invasive processes and equipment to monitor ongoing health either in a specific area of the body or, in some cases, more generally. You’re given medication to take at a specific time, or you’re invited for treatment at a certain time.

To an extent, that makes some sense: the service has long been short-staffed and more doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals will speed up a system that labours under punitively long and slow waiting lists, whilst better IT will shorten the delays in one part of the NHS receiving patient records from another. But the extra £20bn over five years – which, I should add, is around £130bn short of what the service’s executive management believe is necessary to meet demand in that period – is no more than an eye-wateringly expensive sticking plaster for a gaping wound that will get progressively worse rather than better. Much of the approach taken by natural health practitioners like us at The Natural Doctor focuses on reducing health risk, monitoring risk and then managing potential issues before they become a drain on the NHS. By contrast, screening tools like ThermoCheck® breast thermography is suitable for women of all ages and measures breast tissue temperature to identify health risk, including breast cancer, up to a decade before a mammogram would spot a tumour.