Adenomyosis, Ambien & the Myths That Still Shape Women’s Health

✨ This Week’s Headline: Your Body Was Never the Problem

🗞️ Summary:

This week, we’re diving into the stories and systems behind the real struggles in navigating the healthcare system—and what it really means to be seen in medicine.

🩸 Rachel E. Gross (New York Times journalist and author of Vagina Obscura) joins me to unpack the cultural taboos, scientific failures, and forgotten women who shaped modern medicine—plus why her writing is shifting the narrative on everything from vaginal infections to fertility.

💥 Dr. Ken Sinervo breaks down adenomyosis—a condition that’s often mistaken for endo, dismissed as “normal,” and sometimes only diagnosed after a hysterectomy. (And yes, we compare symptoms.)

🧠 And next week, I’m kicking off a new 3-part series:
“How Did We Get Here?”
From Ambien to hormone therapy, I’ll unpack three moments that still shape how women are studied, treated, and too often misunderstood.

👇 Keep reading for my latest obsessions—and one very unexpected travel list.

🧠 When Medicine Gets It Wrong: A 3-Part Series on How We Got Here in Women’s Health…..Starts Next Week!

If you’ve ever been confused, dismissed, or blindsided by how the healthcare system treats women’s bodies—you’re not alone.

But what if the real problem isn’t just about symptoms or doctors?
What if it’s rooted in how medicine was built—and how deeply flawed stories became policy?

This month, I’m sharing a 3-part series unpacking three moments that shaped the trajectory of women’s health in the U.S.—and still influence how drugs are studied, prescribed, and misunderstood today:

🔹 Ambien: A sleep aid becomes the poster child for sex-based dosing—but is the science as solid as we thought?
🔹 Thalidomide: A drug that wasn’t (at the time) approved in the U.S. that still erased women from trials for decades
🔹 Hormone Therapy: How one press conference changed menopause care for a generation—and what we now know was missing

Each story is different. But together, they reveal a pattern:
Limited data. Oversimplified conclusions. And long-term harm for women.

We can’t change the past—but we can learn from it.
This series is for anyone navigating healthcare, building products, influencing policy, or simply trying to understand their own health in a system that wasn’t built for them.

👇 Stay tuned. Next week, we start with Ambien.

🙌🏼 Related: Join the conversation and ones like this in the newly formed Fempower Health Women’s Health Slack Community.

 🩸 This Isn’t Just a Bad Period

Crippling cramps. Heavy bleeding. Back pain that won’t quit. If this sounds familiar—and you’ve been told it’s “just a bad period”—you might be missing a critical diagnosis: adenomyosis.

I spoke with world-renowned surgeon Dr. Ken Sinervo to unpack why this uterine condition is so often overlooked, how it differs from endometriosis, and what women really need to know about their treatment options.

🚨 Why does adenomyosis so often go undiagnosed?
💡 What’s the difference between adenomyosis and endometriosis?
🩸 Why do so many women end up with hysterectomies—and are they always necessary?
🧠 What are your real options if you still want to have children?

We cover the symptoms, the science, and the hard truths about navigating chronic pain and fertility with a condition no one is talking about enough.

📚 For the full breakdown (with the side-by-side symptom comparison), head to this week’s blog post:

🔗 Adenomyosis vs. Endometriosis: Why Knowing the Difference Could Change Your Health

Because knowledge is power—and adenomyosis deserves awareness too.

🙌🏼 Related: Read about Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), a severe form of PMS. Or you can listen to patient advocate Laura Murphy share her story.

🔥 The Vagina Is Not a Void

For centuries, medicine treated the vagina like a hole to be filled and ignored the clitoris entirely. Sounds extreme? It’s not—it’s the history of women’s health. And Rachel E. Gross is here to tell it.

Rachel is a science writer, New York Times contributor, and author of Vagina Obscura. In this interview, we talk about:

🧠 Why BV research stalled for decades
🧬 The myth of the 8,000-nerve clitoris (spoiler: it’s more)
🩸 Why menstrual blood might be the next diagnostic frontier
📚 And the women scientists history tried to erase

From her deeply researched NYT articles to her irreverent, brilliant footnotes, Rachel’s writing is redefining how we think about science, gender, and our bodies.

🎥 Watch the Sneak Peak

🎧 Listen to the full episode

📚 Read: Vagina Obscura

Because the female body was never a mystery. We just refused to look.

🎧 Related: Exploring Psychedelics in Mental Health
Last year, I did a three-part series on psychedelics. In part three, I interviewed Andrew Penn, a leading clinician and researcher at the forefront of psychedelic science. One listener even called it “the most thorough interview I’ve heard on this topic.”