Male MPs attempt menopause in hot flush vest – then can’t wait to take it off
“Volcanic” and “very uncomfortable” – just some reactions from male MPs trying out a vest that simulates menopause hot flushes as part of an event raising awareness of the UK’s acute shortages of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) products.
Wes Streeting, Stephen Kinnock and Nick Thomas-Symonds were among the politicians who tried out the device fitted with heated pads that mimics one of the most common and unpleasant symptoms.
“I’m feeling this on my back now,” said the former Conservative party leader Iain Duncan Smith, a few seconds after putting the vest on. “Imagine making a speech in the House of Commons and suddenly getting a hot flush. If [men] had this, we’d be complaining a lot.”
“If you pass out, we’ve got water,” joked Carolyn Harris MP, co-chair of the menopause taskforce, who sponsored the event at Portcullis House in Westminster on Tuesday to drum up support for measures to ease the HRT products shortage. “Welcome to my world. I don’t need the vest to be hot and bothered.”
A sharp increase in demand for HRT drugs in recent months, partly fuelled by TV documentaries highlighting the safety of the treatments, has led to widespread shortages of products, leaving some women unable to sleep or work effectively, and forcing them to barter for HRT products in carparks or to buy them online at vastly inflated prices.
Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said after trying on the vest: “It’s deeply unpleasant and an enveloping heat. How you would crack on with life I don’t know. I can’t wait to take this off.”
Kinnock, shadow minister for immigration, described it as “a very intense kind of heat and an internal feeling, not like being warmed by the sun, but almost volcanic inside”.
The vest was developed by Over the
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