Gynaecology & Women's Health

Many women arrive here having been told, more than once, that what they're feeling is normal. Heavy periods. Pain that flattens a day. A cycle that has never quite made sense.

Gynaecology at Origia starts with being believed. We take a full history, examine carefully, investigate where it's warranted, and explain what we find in plain language.

From your first period to well past your last, there is usually something that can be done.

Gynaecology across a whole life

Gynaecology covers a lot of ground. It is the fourteen-year-old whose periods keep her home from school, the thirty-two-year-old whose cycle has quietly stopped, the forty-eight-year-old who hasn't slept properly in a year and has been told to wait it out. Different decades, same question: is this normal, and does it have to be like this?

The conditions we see most often include:

• Heavy, prolonged or painful periods
• Irregular, absent or unpredictable cycles
• Polycystic ovary syndrome and other hormonal conditions
• Fibroids, ovarian cysts and other structural findings
• Persistent pelvic pain, and pain with sex
• Bleeding between periods, after sex, or after menopause
• Abnormal cervical screening results, and colposcopy
• Contraception: choosing it, starting it, and having it removed
• Perimenopause and menopause symptoms
• Prolapse and pelvic floor symptoms

Being believed comes first

Long delays are common in women's health, and they are rarely the patient's fault. Pain gets normalised. Heavy bleeding gets described as just how you are. By the time many people reach a specialist they have told their story so many times that they have started apologising for it.

You don't need to convince us. Bring what you know: the tracking app, the diary written on the back of an envelope, the notes on your phone. A careful history is genuinely the most useful diagnostic tool we have, and we make room for it.

How things get investigated

Not everything needs a scan, and not every scan needs repeating. Depending on your symptoms, investigation might include blood tests such as hormone levels, iron studies or thyroid function; a specialist gynaecological ultrasound; swabs or cervical screening; and in some cases MRI, or a hysteroscopy to look inside the uterine cavity. Where endometriosis is suspected, imaging is best read by people who know what to look for, though a normal scan does not close the door on that diagnosis.

We'll tell you what each test is for and what we would do differently depending on the result. If a test wouldn't change the plan, we'll say so rather than order it.

Treatment, and the order we try things in

Most gynaecological conditions have more than one reasonable path. Hormonal options, non-hormonal medication, an intrauterine device, pelvic floor physiotherapy, pain-management strategies and surgery all have a place, and the right order depends on your symptoms, your plans for children, and what you are willing to live with.

Surgery is one option among several, and it shouldn't be the first thing offered. When it is the right answer, Dr Joseph Sgroi and Dr Marcus Davenport both operate at their accredited hospitals, and you'll have a full conversation about what that involves before anything is booked.

Perimenopause deserves its own mention. It can start earlier than people expect and last longer than they are told: hot flushes, broken sleep, mood changes, difficulty concentrating, vaginal dryness, changing bleeding patterns. These are treatable symptoms, not a test of character. We'll go through the options available to you, hormonal and non-hormonal, with the risks and benefits as they apply to your own history rather than to a headline.