Selfority

Your va**na wants its Céline Dion moment.

New essay on the most undertreated condition in menopause medicine. Also I did va**na hand puppets at a public event and I would do it again.

Link in bio.

Apple just added perimenopause detection to the Health app.

I love this for us.

Not because it tells the whole story. Because it puts the word perimenopause on millions of phones that have never seen it before.

Here's what it tracks: cycle changes.

Here's what it misses: hot flashes, brain fog, joint pain, sleep disruption, anxiety, mood shifts, changes in libido. Oh, and it won't even flag you until you're 40.

Symptoms can start in your mid-30s.

A notification is not a diagnosis.
A diagnosis is not a treatment plan.

But if your phone said something to you today? Or you've been silently wondering for months and nobody has given you a real answer?

That notification is a starting point. The rest of the story is waiting for you at Selfority. Link in bio.

Poison control centers have seen a 1,500% increase in calls related to GLP-1 overdose and adverse effects since 2019.

That number is not in your group text. And there is a reason for that.

I am a gynecologist and menopause specialist, and I have watched this story arrive in my exam room with increasing frequency. I also live in the same world you do. I get the same messages about what my body should look like at this age. I know the pull of a solution that arrives in a friend's text.

What I also know, from the other side of the exam table, is what happens when that answer comes without medical oversight.

The GLP-1 medications themselves are real and effective. This is not about that. This is about the compounded versions, the questionnaire approvals, the vials shipped without a physician who actually knows you, and the women who are left monitoring their liver enzymes for months wondering what they missed.

They missed nothing. The system failed them.

Full piece linked in the caption and is available at . Read it. Send it to the group text where someone just shared that link.

📍

We apparently needed to make "access to a fan" a civil rights issue. We are absolutely thriving.

This week: Illinois passed a bill treating menopause as a civil rights issue. Washington's governor signed an executive order on workplace accommodations. Melinda French Gates committed $600 million to women's health. And women still receive 2% of private research funding.

Two percent is not a data point. It is an indictment.

Thank you for the data points:

The full breakdown is in the Substack. Link in bio.

The research gap in women's health doesn't stop at 40. For women in perimenopause and menopause, it compounds.

Only 31% of OB/GYN programs have a menopause curriculum. The NIH didn't track menopause funding as its own category until 2023 and when they finally did, it totaled $56 million. That same period, prostate cancer research received an average of $270 million a year. A landmark study that reshaped prescribing for a generation was built on women who averaged 63 years old.

This is the gap. You deserve to know it exists.

When did we decide that men get to negotiate with time and women just have to survive it?

I was on a long run last week, coaching, the playlist pure 80s and 90s, when something I had never quite articulated before clicked into place.

Tom Hanks got a trampoline.
Meryl Streep got a hole blown through her stomach.
Same era. Same multiplex. Completely different lesson.

I wrote the full essay on Substack this week and I genuinely think you are going to have feelings about it.
Link in bio (substack).

STI rates in adults over 55 are rising. Not rumor. CDC data.

And yet public health messaging is still aimed almost entirely at college students. Which makes sense: young adults carry the highest overall burden. But when we only talk to one generation, we create the illusion that risk has an expiration date.
It doesn't.

New piece on the Substack covers the actual data, why rates are climbing in older adults, and why "I trust. But I also verify." is honestly some of the best prevention advice I've ever heard from a patient.

Link in bio.

Seventy percent of people with PMOS, formerly PCOS, have no idea they have it.

After my piece on the name change ran in , my inbox filled up with messages from mothers writing about their daughters. Women who had watched their children struggle for years with fatigue, weight that wouldn't budge, irregular cycles, skin that never cooperated, and a quiet persistent sense that something was off. Women who had sat in exam rooms and been told everything looked fine. Daughters who had been handed an incomplete diagnosis, or no diagnosis at all, because medicine spent ninety years looking in the wrong place.

Seventy percent undiagnosed is not an abstract number. It is someone's daughter.

It is possibly you.

I wrote a follow-up on Substack today with what to look for, what to ask your doctor, and why the new name changes what gets found.

Link in bio. Share it with someone who needs it.

Your brain is not just a collection of parts. It is a communication system.

Three networks run most of your inner life. The default mode network: active when your mind is wandering or reflecting. The salience network: your brain's traffic controller, deciding what deserves your attention. The central executive network: focus, planning, working memory, decisions.

When these networks work well together, you feel sharp. When they don't, you feel scattered, foggy, and like you're trying to hold too many things at once.

Aging weakens the boundaries between them. Exercise restores them. A 12-week walking study improved connectivity across all three networks alongside measurable memory gains. A single 30-minute session improved network segregation in older adults. Cardiovascular fitness, not just movement volume, predicted stronger network integrity in a study of nearly 400 people.

This is series finale of the brain series. Four episodes, four systems, one universal that will help.

Not a supplement. Not a gadget. Movement.

Follow Selfority if you want to keep going.
And if this series has given you something, please send it to a woman who needs it.

I said sorry to my coffee maker this morning.
And then I thought about my daughter.
And then I thought about every woman who has ever apologized for taking up space in a room she had every right to be in.

The full essay is on Substack. Link in bio.