The Hormonal Podcast

For most of medical history, the menstrual cycle has been treated as an inconvenience to manage, not information to read. Zarah Khondoker sits down with Laura Federico and Morgan Miller, the authors of The Cycle Book, to talk about what changes when you start paying attention: what the cycle can show about your health from month to month, why so few people are taught to track it, and what gets lost when cycle data is ignored by medicine or left to apps.

They get into the science behind each phase, the boom in cycle-tracking technology, and the questions it raises about who holds that data and what they do with it.

In this episode of The Hormonal Podcast, host Zarah Khondoker sits down with Dr. Anjali Malik, a board-certified, fellowship-trained breast imaging radiologist at Washington Radiology and a women’s health advocate, to explore breast arterial calcification (BAC) and the research examining its relationship to cardiovascular disease risk.

The conversation explores how BAC differs from the calcifications associated with breast cancer, what the evidence can and cannot tell us, and what questions women should bring to their care teams when this finding appears on a mammogram. We also examine the challenges of turning emerging research into routine care, from unanswered scientific questions and communication between specialists to insurance coverage and appropriate follow-up.

Looking ahead, we discuss where technology and innovation could help bridge the gap between an imaging finding and meaningful action. Throughout the episode, Dr. Malik’s commitment to women’s health anchors a larger conversation: how can we move beyond treating breast health in isolation and better connect it to a woman’s overall health?

We’ve been taught to hide our periods. But what has that taught medicine to overlook?

We've always collected blood, tested urine. Yet menstrual blood has largely been treated as something to dispose of, not something to learn from.

In this episode of The Hormonal Podcast, Zarah Khondoker is exploring a different question: what could change if we treated menstruation as a source of information rather than an inconvenience?

From the potential of menstrual blood diagnostics to the questions we miss when menstrual cycles are left out of research, we’re connecting three things that belong in the same conversation: innovation, research, and equity

Because ending period stigma isn’t just about making it easier to talk about menstruation. It’s about taking the next step: asking better questions, studying what we’ve overlooked, and turning that knowledge into better care. Advocacy opens the conversation. Science helps us do something with it.

Join Zarah in the studio as she interviews Rico Herre about his feature film, Impure, which describes the harrowing consequences of not speaking up about menstruation. The stigma in the Global South continues to impact young girls all over the world, from conversation to access to products, but why is there silence? Menstruation is a normal bodily function; in fact, it's often considered a deeper indicator of your overall health. How can we change the narrative to be that way? Check out more updates from Impure here at https://linktr.ee/impure.film

For far too long, we’ve used the word “hormonal” to undermine women and their reproductive health. But what exactly does “hormonal” mean? Hormonal encapsulates the parts of reproductive health we don’t think about. Our lived experiences and our academic interests contribute to the reproductive health conversation. When we, as young people, talk about reproductive health, the most common topics that are addressed include conversations around sex and abstinence— leaving out hormone-driven reproductive disorders such as PCOS and endometriosis alongside men’s reproductive health, menopause, IVF, and fertility.

All of us come from different backgrounds with different stories to tell about both our hormones and fertility, whether it be the finances of hormone therapy or the technological advancements with period trackers.

In this episode, Zarah interviews Dr. Rene Almeling, professor of Sociology at Yale University, and author of GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Male Reproductive Health pertaining to men's fertility. Why do we not speak about male infertility? What do sociologic aspects are involved when speaking about these stigmas in mainstream media? How can we do better for the future?

In this episode, Melissa and I talk about where the origins of the word "hysterical" comes from, and its modern translation- which is calling women "hormonal". As we travel back through the pages of history with tales from the oldest empires in the world to modern civilization, women's reproductive health has been used against us, but not anymore. As we talk about the representation of menstruation in history, film, and social media, one thing remains certain- we must give power to the period.

There are so many aspects of hormones and reproductive health that we don't necessarily think of when introducing these conversations, for example, the intersections of law, medicine, technology, literature, and environmental health. Health is so much more than what we make it out to be-- especially hormonal health. Join Zarah Khondoker as she talks about her journey with the different angles of endocrinology and their presence in multiple sectors of society, to explain how hormones are everywhere, if we look a little closer.

In The Hormonal Podcast's first episode, Zarah Khondoker and Dr. Randi Hutter Epstein speak about their common interest in hormones and its inception. As Dr. Epstein talks about her book, Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything, one thing is inherently clear: throughout history, hormones have remained under the radar. How can these hormonal narratives help influence our conversations about reproductive health?