Selfority

If you are waking up at 2am during menopause and have been told that's just what happens now, I want you to know something new.

There is a non-hormonal prescription medication, already FDA approved for hot flashes, that new sleep lab data just measured for something else: how long you actually stay awake after falling asleep. Not how tired you feel the next morning. Actual overnight brain wave data, the same kind used to diagnose sleep disorders. Women on the medication spent meaningfully less time lying awake in the middle of the night than women on placebo.

This is not a hormone. If hormone therapy isn't right for you, for any reason, history, risk, plain preference, this works through a completely different pathway in the brain, the same one responsible for hot flashes in the first place. I describe it as a smoke detector that won't stop screaming over nothing once estrogen drops. This medication targets that exact wiring.

One more thing, because I can't help myself. The company that originally developed this drug named itself KaNDy Therapeutics, after the very neurons it was built to fix. I did not make that up. I just think you should know your medicine has a sense of humor.

Full piece on the Substack, link in bio, including what this actually costs and how to bring that number down.

Is your progesterone harder to fill lately? You're not imagining it.

Prescriptions for women 45+ have more than tripled since 2021, and climbed another 19% since the FDA lifted its black box warning on hormone therapy last fall. A handful of companies make this medication. Demand keeps climbing. Nobody built more supply to match it.

I'm not going to tell you this is the next estrogen patch shortage, because it isn't, at least not yet. But I'd rather name a small problem early than wait for it to become a big one and act surprised.

Tell me in the comments, has this hit your pharmacy yet?

Swipe through the data behind the headline: menopause is now a multi-billion dollar market, and the medical system underneath it has not caught up.

Only 31% of OB-GYN residency programs teach menopause care at all, and most that do offer two or fewer lectures a year (Allen et al., Menopause, 2023). The average doctor's visit runs about 18 minutes (Neprash et al., Medical Care, 2021). Meanwhile, new brands, supplements, and self-proclaimed experts launch every week.

Visibility is not the same as care. You deserve real, credentialed information, not just a really good ad campaign.

As a board-certified OB-GYN and certified menopause practitioner, I am here to offer that education.

Learn more: Link in bio.

I have this thought almost every time I hit a climb on a trail run. Lean back, and I’m basically pumping the brakes. Lean forward, and the climb gets easier almost instantly. Same hill, same legs, completely different experience depending on which way my weight is leaning.

We do this in regular life too. We lean back into hesitation, old stories, the fear of getting it wrong. It feels safer back there. It is also exhausting, and it is not actually safer. It just feels like control because we are not moving as fast toward whatever is making us nervous.

Leaning forward takes more guts up front. It also takes way less effort once you commit, because you stop fighting your own momentum.

My women in perimenopause and menopause, you already know what it feels like to brake on yourself. The fatigue, the brain fog, the days you do not recognize your own body. It is so easy to lean back into all of that and just survive it. But you deserve to lean forward into this season too, not just get through it.

Where are you leaning back right now?

The data exists.

Black women in the largest US study of the menopause transition experienced nearly 4 more years of hot flashes and night sweats than white women in the same study.

Nearly 4 years.

And when researchers corrected for who could even access the study, corrected for the systemic inequities that shaped participation, they found Black women also reach menopause earlier.

Longer symptoms. Earlier arrival. Less access to care.

This is a health equity gap.

Every woman deserves to be seen, heard, and treated. That includes this conversation.

🔗 Link in bio → Selfority

Ozempic, But Make It Artisanal.

We have done this to everything.

Coffee. Bread. Pickles. Candles that smell like specific decades. We took mass production, decided it was spiritually empty, and replaced it with the comforting fiction that small-batch and personalized means better.

And now we have done it to injectable pharmaceuticals.

Poison control centers have seen a nearly 1,500 percent increase in calls related to GLP-1 overdose and adverse effects since 2019. That number lives in medical journals and pharmacovigilance databases.

It is not in your group text.

The before and after photos traveled. The safety data did not.

I wrote the full story for because the women most affected by this, and the data is clear that it is women, deserve to know what the platforms delivering these medications had no interest in telling them.

Read it. Then send it to the group text where someone just shared that link.

Because your friend seems totally fine.
Until she calls you from poison control.

If you work nights, or you know someone who does, this is for you.

A decade of rotating night shifts is associated with a 22% higher risk of early menopause. This data has depth, it is from finding of 80,000 women followed for 22 years.

Nurses. CNAs. Physicians. Mid-level providers. EMTs. Hospital techs. Pharmacists. Janitorial staff. Retail workers. The women stocking shelves at 3am and the ones keeping patients alive overnight. They showed up for everyone else, year after year.

Nobody showed up with this information for them.

If you spent years on rotating shifts and you're now in your 40s wondering what's happening to your body, this research is relevant to you.

You've spent your career taking care of everyone else. Let me take care of you.

The information you deserve is waiting at the link in my bio.
🔗 Link in bio → Selfority

If you spent years trying to get pregnant, nobody probably sat you down and said: this may also affect when menopause starts.

New research published in Menopause just confirmed the link. Women with primary infertility reach menopause about a year earlier. Women whose infertility was driven by endometriosis — nearly three years earlier.

Three years earlier. With no warning. No adjusted timeline. No heads up to watch for symptoms sooner.

This is the gap I keep talking about.

Your reproductive history doesn't end when fertility does. It shapes what comes next. And you deserve a provider who connects those dots with you.

Save this if your history includes infertility or endometriosis. Share it with someone who needs to see it.

We talk about menopause like it starts at 51 for everyone.

It doesn't.

Endometriosis. Cancer treatment. Smoking. Night shifts. Lower income. The color of your skin. All of it can move your timeline — and almost nobody tells you that.

The research exists. The conversation doesn't.

You deserved to know sooner. That's exactly why Selfority exists.

Save this post. Send it to a woman who needs it.

Want to learn more?
🔗 Link in bio

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.