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This is exciting research with a lot of promise! People think period blood is gross, useless, and unclean. The truth is, it’s alive and holds potential keys to understanding endometriosis, fertility and infertility, diabetes and health.
This researchers are forging ahead, even with funding challenges.
Imagine the good your menstrual fluid could do! Send it in!

‘A medical miracle’: is period blood ‘the most overlooked opportunity’ in women’s health? Period blood has long been thought of as ‘stinky and useless’, but startups are exploring using the fluid to test for a wide range of health conditions – including difficult-to-diagnose endometriosis

Hyperemesis Gravidarum is possibly one of the hardest ways to go through pregnancy, and most frustrating challenges to work with as a midwife. It’s survival, not joy. Sometimes it’s literally a matter of life or death.
This is a long read, and worthwhile. There’s history here I never learned. There’s fascinating research happening (slowly - but happening). It’s strangely hopeful! Link to article below.

“People tend to misunderstand the furore around medicalised misogyny and bias. They imagine arrogant male doctors wilfully and deliberately dismissing female patients, which is rarely the case. They exist, of course, but there are very few doctors who deliberately pursue a “women’s health is not important” policy, and no one enters medicine in order to mistreat and misdiagnose 50% of the population. Bias is very often unconscious, because most of us are not aware of the ways in which our core beliefs and expectations might exclude others or diminish their concerns. But research from a number of sources shows that women not only wait up to 33% longer in emergency rooms than men with the same symptoms, they are also more likely to be turned away in the middle of a stroke or cardiac event, and have to push harder and longer (sometimes years longer) to get a cancer diagnosis. But increased awareness of this disparity hasn’t changed it.

“Women have internalised some of these biases, too. Girls growing up within a patriarchal framework absorb certain ways of thinking about their bodies and their identities. That includes female doctors and nurses, holistic midwives and female patients. Periods are meant to be excruciating. Pregnancy is meant to be gruelling. Mothers’ bodies are meant to be exhausted. Menopause is meant to be debilitating.”

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jul/31/dont-call-it-morning-sickness-hyperemesis-gravidarum-extreme-pregnancy

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Sunday Morning Music!

Small Axe (1973) - Bob Marley & The Wailers “Small Axe” from Bob Marley & The Wailers’ 1973 album, Burnin’! Listen to the full album now on all major streaming and digital services at http://smarturl.i...

People in the developing world and the southern states of our own country are suffering the devastating effects of our warming planet. Excess heat is a risk to pregnant people. Please take our changing climate seriously, it’s easy in Wisconsin to ignore the deadly consequences.

‘It was my first pregnancy so I didn’t know what was normal’ – This is climate breakdown I’d been taking care of myself and the baby. Then the heat came. This is Mariama’s story