When Medicine Gets Women Wrong: Sleep Aids, Startups & Stomach Pain

✈️ From Airport Hiccups to Health Headlines

Happy Saturday, friends.

I'm writing to you from an airport lounge, where my son and I are navigating the aftermath of his broken arm and a possible flight cancellation.😬 It's been a whirlwind, but amidst the chaos, I've gathered some compelling stories in women's health that deserve your attention.​

This week's highlights:

• 💊 The Ambien Wake-Up Call: Discover how a sleep aid revealed significant gender disparities in drug dosing, leading to crucial FDA changes. ​

• 💼 SVB's Women's Health Report: Explore the latest findings on venture capital investments in women's health startups, highlighting a 314% increase since 2018. ​

• 💩 IBS Awareness Month: Understand why Irritable Bowel Syndrome disproportionately affects women and the importance of recognizing and addressing this condition.​

Because staying informed shouldn't feel like a chore, even when life throws you curveballs.

Wishing you a smooth weekend ahead. 💕

🧠 When Medicine Gets It Wrong:

Part 1 of 3 - Ambien, Sex-Based Dosing, and the Win That Raised New Questions

Imagine waking up in a jail cell standing barefoot in your pajamas while someone shares that you assaulted a woman and her child. This wasn’t a dream that you were startled awake from. Instead, it was real. That’s what happened to 45-year-old flight attendant Julie Ann Bronson. The night before, she had several glasses of wine and took the popular sleep aid, Ambien. As the day unfolded, she learned that she drove into a car carrying three passengers, one of them being an 18-month-old child, but all she remembered was drinking two glasses of wine followed by taking her prescribed dose of Ambien.

Soon, stories of Ambien-related ‘sleep driving’ dominated headlines—followed by even more disturbing -and sometimes bizarre - cases of nighttime drowning, binge eating, and even sex acts. Partners witnessed them. The patients did not remember. You’ve probably heard that women should take half the dose of Ambien as men. The FDA made that recommendation in 2013, and it was widely celebrated as a win for women’s health.

And it was. But it’s also worth asking: Why did it take until 2013 for sex-based dosing to get this kind of attention? And what do we make of the fact that no other regulatory agency made the same change?

To answer that, we need to zoom out.

For decades, women were systematically excluded from early clinical trials—seen as too risky, too variable, too complicated. It wasn’t until 1993, when NIH Director Bernadine Healy pushed through the NIH Revitalization Act, that inclusion of women in federally funded research became the rule, not the exception.

Ambien was one of the first high-profile examples of how including women could reveal important differences in how drugs work. But it also exposed the complexity of interpreting those differences—and the limitations of early data.

Ambien was a milestone. But it also revealed the challenges of interpreting early data, translating it into policy, and doing so in a system that still struggles to see women’s bodies as complex and worthy of scientific rigor.

That’s the theme of this series:
📉 How flawed or limited data becomes medical consensus
🧪 How policy sometimes lags—or leaps too far
🔍 And why real progress requires more than inclusion—it requires nuance

Next week, we go back further in history to explore thalidomide, and how it reshaped drug regulation by removing women entirely from early-stage research.

Until then, I’ll leave you with this:

When the system wasn’t designed for women, even progress requires a second look.

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

 💡 IBS Isn’t Just ‘Stress’

It’s IBS Awareness Month, and we’re done sugarcoating it—IBS disproportionately affects women, yet it’s still brushed off as anxiety or a “sensitive stomach.” In this episode, leading IBS expert Dr. Peter Whorwell breaks down the real science behind IBS, why it hits women harder, and what actually helps (spoiler: it’s not just cutting gluten). If your gut has been calling for help, this is your sign to listen.

🎧 Listen to the interview or 🤓 read about IBS. I think my editor deleted this….but he had to step out of the interview for a moment because a goat was eating his roses. 😆

📚 Read Dr. Peter Whorwell’s book: Take Control of Your IBS: The Complete Guide to Managing Your Symptoms.

🙌🏼 Related: Dr. Chris Damman, a board-certified gastroenterologist, who formerly led the functional food and microbiome initiative at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Washington Department of Medicine and Global Health speaks about Nutrition, Diet and the Gut Microbiome.

🙌🏼 New Report About the State of Women’s Health

Check out the latest SVB report, which doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It builds on the business case WHAM and WEF/McKinsey have already made: Women’s health isn’t a vertical. It’s a horizontal challenge—and a horizontal opportunity worth $1 trillion!

As we say often at Fempower Health: if the system wasn’t designed for you, it won’t automatically serve you. We need smart, inclusive, and strategic redesign.

Because better care for women doesn’t just improve lives. It improves economies.

👉 What other data, reports, and research do I need to be aware of? Reply to this email or join the Slack channel.