Gut–Brain–Hormones: The Threads We Keep Missing

✨ This Week: It’s All Connected

From your gut to your brain to your hormones — this week’s stories show what happens when we stop putting women’s health in separate buckets.

💥 Gut–Pain Link: The microbiome’s surprising role in chronic pain (and why it’s still experimental)
✨ ADHD as Adaptation: Maybe you’re not “distracted” — you’re a born hunter (plus the PMDD link)
🌙 Menopause Momentum: States push new bills, big funding for doctor training, but what about the gaps no one’s fixing?
💌 Little Extras: PCOS renaming, endometriosis continues to gain momentum, Bill Gates on the internet, turmeric caution, book recs, and art from leaves.

So much to connect — and question — this week. Let’s dig in.

MICROBIOME

🧠 The Gut–Pain Connection: Are We Ready to Test and Treat?

A new study shows what so many of my expert interviews have hinted at: your gut microbiome can hold signatures for chronic pain conditions — from fibromyalgia and CRPS to arthritis and migraines.

Researchers even found that transplanting gut bacteria from fibromyalgia patients into mice caused pain-like behaviors, while healthy donor microbes reversed it. Fascinating, right?

However:

• We’re not yet ready for routine microbiome tests or “gut fixes” for pain — the science is still early, and results can be hit-or-miss.

• Short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) seem to matter, but more data is needed.

• An anti-inflammatory diet and probiotics might help — but personalized “test and treat” isn’t here yet.

🧃 My take? This is another clue that the gut–brain connection is huge — not just for digestion but for pain, immunity, and inflammation. And it’s why I keep saying: the vaginal microbiome needs just as much attention.

🎙️ Related: If you missed my interview with Dr. Caroline Mitchell on the vaginal microbiome, listen here. She breaks down how your vaginal flora shapes your overall health in ways we’re just beginning to understand.

🔗 Read the Medscape deep dive

MENOPAUSE

🌙 A National Push for Menopause Care — Finally

More than a dozen states are stepping up: from California to Oregon, Illinois to Rhode Island, new bills are pushing for insurance coverage, clinician training, and even workplace protections for menopause.

📌 The numbers:

• 15+ states, 24 bills introduced in 2025 alone

• Policy targets: insurance coverage, CME for doctors, public education, workplace protections

📚 The backstory:
For two decades, menopause care got sidelined — partly because the Women’s Health Initiative results scared doctors off hormone therapy. That led to 23 years of lost training, research, and real care for millions of women.

💡 The good news:
There’s new funding to rebuild this pipeline. The Menopause Society’s NextGen Now initiative, launched with a $5M grant (and aiming for $10M total), plans to train 25,000 healthcare professionals over the next 3 years — using immersive tools, new guidelines, and maybe even AR/VR. Read more about the initiative here.

🗝️ My take:
Big money and big bills are encouraging — but we can’t ignore the real bottleneck:

• A growing shortage of providers who even have time for longer menopause visits.

• Many gynecologists are moving to cash-pay because they can’t cover the cost of care under insurance.

• Women are waiting months for appointments — if they can find one at all.

I’ve written about the billions flowing into the menopause market — and who you can actually trust. Catch up here if you missed it.

More education, better policies, and funding are all needed — but it’s implementation that will close this gap. Advocacy is key. And if your doctor shrugs off your symptoms? Keep pushing. You deserve better.

📖 Related: I wrote about the menopause movement and how to know who to trust — read that here.

👀 Seen menopause policy progress in your state? Or struggling to find care that doesn’t cost a fortune out-of-pocket? Hit reply and share your story.

MENTAL HEALTH

✨ ADHD: An Adaptation, Not a Defect

New research backs what many of us have long felt: ADHD isn’t a flaw — it’s an evolutionary advantage.

In a “berry-picking” experiment, people with ADHD traits gathered more resources than neurotypical folks. Why? Because “impulsivity” and “distractibility” helped our hunter-gatherer ancestors survive.

👉 This “hunter in a farmer’s world” theory shows we’re not broken — our environment is.
👉 Our schools and work systems still treat ADHD traits like problems instead of strengths.

🌙 And There’s a Hormone Link, Too

More than 40% of women with ADHD also have PMDD — a severe, hormone-driven mood disorder. The ADHD–PMDD connection shows just how much our brains and hormones interact.

📖 Related: If you missed my past piece on mental health and menopause, catch up here.

💡 My take:
As someone who’s neurodivergent myself, I love this conversation — and I’m so curious how we’ll talk about neurodiversity in 50 years.
After all these years interviewing experts, I’ve always felt we massively underestimate how hormonal fluctuations shape women’s mental and physical health across a lifetime.

We chop it up into buckets — “hormonal” teens, “postpartum stress,” “menopause brain fog” — but these aren’t isolated events. It’s a continuum that affects everything: mood, ADHD symptoms, pelvic pain, prolapse, UTIs, pain with sex — and we rarely connect the dots.

We have to. The more we see the whole story, the better we get at supporting women’s real lives.

🔗 Read about ADHD as an evolutionary advantage
🔗 Explore the PMDD–ADHD link
🔗 Explore Fempower Health’s ADHD resources

🙌🏼 What Caught My Eye This Week

🧬 PCOS Name Change:
Monash University wants patient input on renaming PCOS. If you’ve ever felt buried in misinformation, here’s your chance to weigh in.

👉 Add your voice | Background piece

🩸 Endometriosis Bills: Growing Momentum
Massachusetts just held its first-ever hearing to create a task force for endo treatment and research — echoing similar work happening with EndoRISE in CT. It’s encouraging to see states acknowledging what patients have always known: endo deserves real solutions, not a decade-long wait for answers.
🗂️ I’ll keep pushing these conversations forward through Fempower Health’s Endometriosis Working Group.

🌐 Bill Gates Explaining the Internet (1995):
This reel cracked me up — look how far (and not far) we’ve come.

👉 Watch here

🧡 Turmeric & Ivermectin Toxicity:
A reminder that “natural” isn’t always harmless. Worth a quick lesson if you’re taking big doses.

👉 Watch here

📚 Book Reco: Crave: The Hidden Biology of Addiction and Cancer — fascinating if you’re curious about how cravings and the body collide.

👉 Get the book

🍃 Just Beautiful:
Art made entirely from leaves. Tiny reminder that not all masterpieces are digital.

👉 Enjoy here