On the Mones

It’s my 49th birthday, and I’m feeling stronger than I did a year ago.

After a family weekend at the Lonely Mountain Ultra, I’m reflecting on what it felt like to run my strongest race there yet, watch my children take on their own distances, and meet my husband at the finish of his 100-kilometre run. I’m also thinking about my friend, who kept going through a very tough day, and about the strength middle-aged women carry in all sorts of ways.

From there, I turn to a question many women have shared with me: why can ADHD medication feel different before a period or during perimenopause? It’s a personal conversation about changing hormones, changing bodies, and learning to pay attention to what we’re experiencing.

This week’s On the Mones is a little different.

After a deeply disappointing week for Sydney Swans supporters, I wanted to talk about what happens when a club you’ve believed in, and whose values you thought reflected your own, lets you down.

I’ve always bought into the idea that the Swans had a different kind of culture: one that respected women, welcomed the queer community and stood for something beyond football. So the recent scandal has felt surprisingly personal.

But I also don’t want the actions of a few people to define an entire club. I believe in consequences, but I also believe in second chances.

And then something quite extraordinary happened: a record crowd turned up at the SCG to watch the Swans women play and to keep supporting the wider club.

Did the women’s team somehow give supporters permission to feel proud again? Did they, in some sense, “save” the men’s team, or is that completely the wrong way to think about it?

After my introduction, we head to the Dinnertime table to talk it all through, along with Audrey smashing her longest run yet, a 21st at the Sydney Aquarium, Obi becoming qualified to care for injured possums, why sugar gliders smell so bad, and another fairly disastrous attempt at the Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend Quiz.

I’m having coffee with my friends Sue and Richard, which means we inevitably end up discussing the important social questions of our time.

Like: if you’re sitting in a quiet nail salon and another client is having a very loud phone conversation, are the rest of us now part of the call?

Nothing she was saying was particularly private, but suddenly I, my nail technician and hers were all unwilling participants. Is that rude? Is it particularly rude to the nail technician, who can’t exactly get up and leave? And at what point, if ever, is it socially acceptable to say something?

From there, we wander into the changing face of community pharmacy, and specifically, the “shop” part of the pharmacy. Once upon a time it was gifts, perfume, photo frames and things you could buy your mother for Christmas. Now that space increasingly seems to be filled with supplements, wellness products and things sitting somewhere in the hazy territory between healthcare and retail.

And finally, we reflect on something I can hardly believe: it’s been a year since I started making content online.

What began as me trying to answer questions about medicines and misinformation has turned into something much bigger, stranger and more wonderful than I expected.

Coffee, pharmacy, social etiquette and one year of putting myself on the internet. Just a normal catch-up, really.

What happens when On the Mones, Why Smart Women and The Skeptic Zone all end up around the same café table?

You get Smart Moans Zone.

Recorded at Calibrate Coffee, we’re joined by our very special guest Dr Angie from Atlanta, USA, for a conversation that somehow manages to cover cutting-edge medicine, pseudoscience, social etiquette and Australia’s noisiest birds.

In this episode we chat about:

• The recent Four Corners investigation into peptides, including Dr Norman Swan’s reporting on the rapid rise of peptide clinics, the evidence, the hype and the challenges of regulation.
• Ear candling—why it continues to be popular despite the evidence (or lack of it).
• One of life’s great social dilemmas: you’ve just met a group of new people, you’ve been enthusiastically eating bruschetta, and only later discover an enormous basil leaf has been decorating your front tooth the entire time. Would you want someone to tell you? And if you’re the observer… do you say something?
• And, because we’re recording outdoors in Sydney, we also wage a losing battle against the soundtrack provided by some particularly enthusiastic sulphur-crested cockatoos.

It’s science, scepticism, friendship, coffee and complete conversational chaos, in exactly the proportions you’d expect.

Grab a coffee, pull up a chair, and join us.

This week I am recording from my deck in the Sydney rain, wearing an Oodie, accompanied by the dog and a one-week-old baby goat called LeBron because apparently this is adulthood now.

In this episode, I reflect on starting a new job in the same hospital, and the same physical department, where I worked for 15 years. It made me think about what it means to return to an old place without becoming the person you were when you left.

I also talk about being new again, the irritation of competency hurdles, and learning to manage my own ego when a role involves more process than I might like.

From there, I move into a careful educational discussion about the NSW Voluntary Assisted Dying Act, what is publicly available in the legislation, and why voluntary assisted dying needs to be understood as a regulated process rather than a slogan.

And because no conversation about voluntary assisted dying is complete without it, I also talk about palliative care: what it is, what it is not, and why it should never be framed as simply “giving up.”

This episode is about work, parenting adult children, goats, legislation, palliative care, and the strange relief of realising that going back to an old place does not mean going backwards.

Recorded in the car with Annie, this episode begins with a very important question: why is Kate wearing a star-shaped pimple patch on her forehead?

The answer leads us into testosterone treatment for hypoactive sexual desire disorder, hormonal changes through menopause, and the potential role of menopausal hormone therapy and testosterone replacement for appropriately selected women.

Then we enter the strange world of looksmaxxing: soft maxxing, hard maxxing, Botox, injectables, plastic surgery, gym memberships, hair dye, expensive clothes and, at the more extreme end, people taking a hammer to their own jaw in pursuit of a sharper face.

Women have been encouraged to modify their appearance forever, so is looksmaxxing genuinely something new, or is it old beauty pressure repackaged in internet language?

And where is the line between looking after yourself, changing something you dislike, trying to prevent ageing and becoming convinced that your perfectly ordinary human face is a problem that needs to be solved?

We also ask what people really mean when they talk about longevity. Is it living longer, living better, staying attractive for longer, or simply another wellness word that can be used to sell almost anything?

In this episode, I sit down with my friend Annie to talk about misinformation in science and healthcare and why the most confident explanation is not always the most accurate one.

We unpack the difference between misinformation and disinformation, the idea of “inoculating” people against misleading claims, and why becoming more comfortable with uncertainty might actually make you happier.

We also talk about what science really is: not a fixed collection of facts, but a process of testing claims, challenging hypotheses and continually correcting itself.

Along the way, we venture into COVID vaccine conspiracies, the false claim that Professor Richard Scolyer’s brain cancer was caused by vaccination, the vague promise that a multivitamin can make an already healthy person somehow “weller,” and the surprisingly difficult question: what does optimum health even mean?

There is also a discussion about reinventing yourself in a room where nobody knows you, and the revelation that Annie has digits like chipolatas.

In Part 2 of my conversation with my dad, former marketing professor Graham Dowling, we turn to a deceptively difficult question: how do you market medicine?

We talk about the decline of trust in medicine and mainstream media, why people often struggle to interpret numbers and risk, and how the same data can appear to tell very different stories depending on how it is analysed or presented.

We also explore an uncomfortable tension inside community pharmacy: tightly regulated medicines are supplied from the dispensary, while wellness products with far weaker evidence are sold only metres away often borrowing credibility from the pharmacist and the pharmacy itself.

Along the way, we discuss “costless opinions,” misleading polls and why the way a question is framed can shape the answer.

In part one of this conversation, I’m joined by Professor Graham Dowling; former professor of marketing at the Australian Graduate School of Management and Macquarie Graduate School of Management, branding expert, and my dad.

We talk about what “big wellness” actually means, how health has expanded from something purely physical into something mental, emotional and social, and why wellness marketing has become so powerful.

We also explore whether evidence-based medicine has a marketing problem, why science can struggle to compete with simple promises and emotional branding, and whether I may need to give my pharmacy degree back.

And we end with the question that leads us into part two:

How would you market medicine?

Maryanne Demasi. “From FDA to MHRA: are drug regulators for hire?”
The BMJ, 2022;377:o1538
DOI: 10.1136/bmj.o1538
Published: 29 June 2022

Whether you are in perimenopause, approaching menopause, or simply trying to understand your hormones, I've got you.

Read more about this episode at Medication Clarity Clinic, Kate's own medication education and telehealth consulting site: https://medicationclarity.com.au

Follow Kate for more no-nonsense health education at @prescribeorpass on Instagram, Tiktok and Facebook. 

In this episode, pharmacist Kate Thomas is joined by Annie McCubbin from the Why Smart Women podcast to unpack the myths, marketing and medicine behind cold and flu season.

Together, they explore what the evidence really says about popular cold and flu remedies, including vitamin C, zinc, echinacea, andrographis, pseudoephedrine and phenylephrine.

They discuss:

• Can you actually shorten a cold?
 • Do “immune boosters” work, and do we even want a boosted immune system?
 • The role of stress, sleep and lifestyle in immune function
 • Why symptom relief still has value, even when it doesn’t cure the virus
 • The TGA warning on andrographis-containing products
 • Which cold and flu tablets are worth your money and which aren’t
 • Why spreading your virus around the office, gym, or Sydney tram is not a public service

Most importantly, Kate and Annie discuss one of the least popular but most useful pieces of health advice:

Lower your expectations.

A practical, evidence-based conversation for anyone who’s ever stood in the cold and flu aisle, wondering what actually works.

Oh, and how much butter is appropriate on a piece of toast?

Whether you are in perimenopause, approaching menopause, or simply trying to understand your hormones, I've got you.

Read more about this episode at Medication Clarity Clinic, Kate's own medication education and telehealth consulting site: https://medicationclarity.com.au

Follow Kate for more no-nonsense health education at @prescribeorpass on Instagram, Tiktok and Facebook.