{"id":809546,"date":"2026-10-21T10:00:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-21T10:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/809546\/"},"modified":"2026-10-21T10:00:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T10:00:09","slug":"women-hope-yearly-health-checks-will-improve-pmos-diagnosis-and-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/809546\/","title":{"rendered":"Women hope yearly health checks will improve PMOS diagnosis and care"},"content":{"rendered":"

For many years, Rochelle Lewis, from Wolverhampton, struggled with facial hair<\/a> growth, painful periods and anxiety.<\/p>\n

“I’ve always struggled with a lot of facial hair growing up, it was something I was really bullied about, so I tried to do absolutely everything I could to try and get rid of it,” she explained.<\/p>\n

“One of my mum’s friends, she was like, ‘oh, maybe she’s got PCOS’. So that was the first time I’d ever even heard of it, and I was probably about 16.”<\/p>\n

Rochelle said she first raised concerns about PCOS as a teenager, but felt they were dismissed.<\/p>\n

“So I went to the doctors and they literally just brushed it off and were like, ‘no, we don’t think you’ve got PCOS’,” she said.<\/p>\n

The 31-year-old was finally diagnosed with the condition in 2025, a process she described as “frustrating”.<\/p>\n

“It was emotionally draining, not to be listened to, not to be heard,” she said.<\/p>\n

Now a mother to a seven-month-old son, she said too often women were diagnosed and then left to navigate the condition alone.<\/p>\n

The name change alone wasn’t enough, she added.<\/p>\n

“So you get told, you get given your diagnosis and that’s it… we’re just left to it,” she said.<\/p>\n

“We need to have processes put in place to actually help us.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For many years, Rochelle Lewis, from Wolverhampton, struggled with facial hair growth, painful periods and anxiety. “I’ve always…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":809547,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-809546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=809546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/809547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=809546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=809546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=809546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}