The V Word

It's that thing that goes in your vagina to do your pap smear, check for infections, put in your IUD, monitor bleeding, and everything else in gynecology: your friend, the speculum! Cold, metal (sometimes plastic), rachety, pinchy... you know the drill. In this episode Executive Producer, Beth Bonilla, talks to Fahti Khosrowshahi, CEO and Founder of Ceek Women's Health about specula in general and the company's mission to overhaul the speculum as we know it. Specula don't need to look or feel like medieval torture devices. Listen in to learn more about how this renovation is transpiring.

Postpartum Psychosis is a rare but very real illness that affects approximately 1 to 2 out of every 1,000 postpartum people. We don't talk about it as much as other postpartum mood disorders like depression and anxiety, and perhaps because of the extreme stigma these moms experience as a result.

In this episode, we break down what exactly is postpartum psychosis, who is most likely to be affected, and how to get help. 

We also talk to Eve Canavan, recipient of the British Empire Medal, Coordinator of the UK Maternal Mental Health Awareness Week for The Perinatal Mental Health Partnership, about her own powerful experience as a postpartum psychosis survivor.

In this episode of Ask A Lady Doc, we talk with Chief Medical Officer and Co-Founder of CurieMD, Dr. Leslie Meserve. After seeing her own mother struggle to find a doctor qualified to treat menopause, Dr. Meserve recognized that a majority of the 50 million menopausal women in the U.S. face significant barriers to treatment. These include misinformation, stigma, and a national shortage of physicians trained in midlife women’s health & as a result, three in four women who seek help for menopausal symptoms don’t receive treatment.

To compliment our last AALD episode with Dr. Amy Voedish on menopause, the primer, we're answering the next logical question which is, "What's a gal to do if she doesn't have access to a provider who is knowledgeable in menopause care?"

Listen in to hear how telemedicine is changing menopause care & how you can easily access board-certified midlife health experts, and, if necessary, also receive FDA-approved hormone replacement therapy medications through CurieMD.

Abortion care is time-sensitive essential health care. Even just a few days can make a difference in what options are available - and even if the option is available at all. A global pandemic is not the time to push a political agenda that interferes with people’s lives and rights.

As NARAL & The Center for Reproductive Rights states, politicians are exploiting the fear and urgency of this moment to push their political agenda to ban abortion. Elected officials should be focused on responding to the crisis at hand, not playing politics with people’s health care.

“The historical misclassification of most abortions as “elective” is also central to the vulnerability of abortion care. There is no debate that a minority of abortions are necessary to prevent death or serious physical harm. But this strictly medical model fails to capture the reality that the non-medical reasons that women exercise their constitutional right to abortion are often as important to them and their families as averting a serious health consequence. The long-standing insistence on using the word “elective” to describe the vast majority of abortions frames women’s equality as a luxury and women’s autonomy as expendable. Categorizing abortions as “elective” or “therapeutic” is more of a moral judgment than a medical judgment,3 and it allows people who use these terms to determine a woman’s level of deservingness on the basis of her reason for choosing to pursue abortion."

Abortion during the Covid-19 Pandemic — Ensuring Access to an Essential Health Service

Michelle J. Bayefsky, B.A., Deborah Bartz, M.D., M.P.H., and Katie L. Watson, J.D.

In this episode of Ask A Lady Doc, we talk with Dr. Amy Voedisch, who specializes in family planning and menopause care at Stanford University, about all the ins and outs of mid-life women's healthcare. This is a no-nonsense, tell me every single thing I need to know about what perimenopause and menopause look like kind of episode with one of our favorite lady docs of all times.

Producer, Aysha Choudhary has this interview.

In so many ways, climate change disproportionately affects women's health, from increased exposures to heat, poor air quality, extreme weather events, altered vector-borne disease transmission, reduced water quality, and decreased food security. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change reported that women, and especially those in poverty, face higher risks than men, and experience a greater burden of climate change impacts (surprise, surprise, right?).

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Barbara Erny from Physicians for Social Responsibility about Climate Change and how it disproportionately affects women’s health. Dr. Erny is also a member of the Board of Directors for Acterra, which is a nonprofit environmental education and action organization in the Silicon Valley, and an ophthalmologist. Get ready to be surprised, angered, and energized to make change!

Let's be honest, this is a scary time to be pregnant, but despite the uncertainty of unprecedented times and a global pandemic, people everywhere are starting and building families, bravely. Here is everything you need to know about pregnancy and COVID-19, regardless if you're about to deliver or are considering when to start trying to conceive. Dr. Jenn & Dr. Erica go through everything we know and don't know so far in this first installment of our COVID-19 special coverage.

This is PART 2 of a special two-part In Their Shoes episode about donor conceived individuals in the age of commercially available genetic testing. This is the idea that, for example, the parent you thought was your parent your whole life, is in fact not your biological relative. In this day and age, where genetic testing through companies like Ancestry and 23 & Me is so readily available and financially feasible, it is becoming more and more common to hear stories about people finding relatives they never knew they had.

This is the story of one such woman. To protect her and her family’s privacy, we’re calling her Claire. Claire bought one of these tests, mailed in the tiny sample of saliva required, and a few weeks later, found her entire world turned inside out. The father she had always known and loved–the man who raised her since birth– was, in fact, not related to her at all, and she suddenly found herself in a sticky web of assisted reproductive technology truths and family secrets. Here’s part one of her story.

RECOMMENDED READS! Inheritance, by Dani Shapiro

All things Carolyn Hax at The Washington Post

This is PART 1 of a special two-part In Their Shoes episode about donor conceived individuals in the age of commercially available genetic testing. This is the idea that, for example, the parent you thought was your parent your whole life, is in fact not your biological relative. In this day and age, where genetic testing through companies like Ancestry and 23 & Me is so readily available and financially feasible, it is becoming more and more common to hear stories about people finding relatives they never knew they had.

Here's your C-section primer on all things surgical delivery: why people have them, why they don't have them, and some detailed personal stories from women who've experienced them firsthand. Dr. Jenn & Dr. Erica cover it all, including how to address unnecessary stigma and guilt.