Why International Women's Day Matters When It Comes To Your Health Care Providers

Every March 8th, the internet fills with flower graphics and "girl boss" quotes. But for me, International Women's Day isn't about aesthetics — it's about something I see every single week in my practice: women who have been failed by a medical system that was never fully designed for them.

You Are Not a Small Man

Here's something that should shock you but probably won't: the majority of medical and pharmaceutical research conducted until very recently was performed almost exclusively on male subjects. Male animals in lab studies. Male participants in clinical trials. Male bodies as the default.

Which means the dosing guidelines, diagnostic criteria, and treatment protocols your doctor is working from? Often built on data that has nothing to do with your body.

A postmenopausal woman and a 25-year-old male are not the same. A woman in her luteal phase and a woman in her follicular phase are not the same. And yet for decades, medicine treated "human" as synonymous with "male" — and women were left to figure out why the advice wasn't working for them.

This is not a small problem. This is why women are more likely to be misdiagnosed after a heart attack. It's why autoimmune diseases — which disproportionately affect women — are so frequently dismissed or delayed in diagnosis. It's why so many of my patients come to me after years of being told their labs are "normal" while they feel like actual crap.

Period Pain Is Not Normal. Neither Is Suffering in Silence.

Let me be direct: cramping so severe you can't function is not normal. Bleeding so heavy it's disrupting your life is not normal. Hormonal shifts that send you into an emotional spiral every month are not normal. Pain during sex is not something you just live with.

These are symptoms. They are your body communicating. And they deserve to be taken seriously.

One of the most heartbreaking parts of my work is hearing women describe symptoms they've had for years — sometimes decades — that they never mentioned because they assumed it was just part of being a woman. Or they did mention it, and were told to lose weight, exercise more, eat better, and stop complaining.

Here's what I want every woman reading this to know: you are not dramatic. You are not weak. You have been gaslit by a system that was not built to listen to you.

When women talk to each other — when we share what is and isn't normal — we become harder to dismiss. That's not a coincidence. That's power.

The Gaslighting Has a Name

If you've ever left a doctor's appointment feeling dismissed or like you were overreacting, you are not alone. I've written more about this here: Just Lose Weight Isn't Medicine — It's Medical Gaslighting. Give it a read if you've ever been told your symptoms are just stress, or that you'd feel better if you just lost a few pounds.

The short version: being told to "just lose weight, exercise more, and eat better" in response to legitimate symptoms is not care. It's dismissal. And you deserve better.

Women's Medicine Has Deep Roots — And They Were Deliberately Cut

Traditional women's health practices — herbalism, midwifery, vaginal steaming, doula support, home birth — are ancient. They were developed by women, for women, passed down through generations of healers who understood the female body intimately.

Many of these practices were criminalized. Midwives were prosecuted. Herbal knowledge was rebranded as witchcraft. The medicalization of birth moved women out of their homes and into hospitals, away from other women and into the hands of a profession that was, at the time, almost entirely male.

I'm not saying modern medicine has nothing to offer — it absolutely does, and I work within an integrative model because both worlds have value. But we lost something when we severed women from their own healing traditions. And part of my work is helping to restore that connection.

Ask for a Female Provider — Seriously, It Could Save Your Life

This isn't just a preference. Research has shown that patients — especially women — have better outcomes when treated by female physicians. Female ER doctors are more likely to take symptoms seriously, order appropriate testing, and correctly diagnose. The gap in outcomes is real and documented.

And yet female physicians are still paid less than their male counterparts, carry heavier patient loads, spend more time with patients, and are held to higher standards of emotional labor. If you have the ability to choose your provider, choose a woman. It matters.

Why I Do This Work

Naturopathic medicine has always attracted women, healers, and people who felt like outsiders in conventional medicine. I feel genuinely lucky to have trained in a field where the model is built around listening — really listening — to the whole person.

Every day I work with women who have been dismissed, misdiagnosed, overtreated, undertreated, or simply never asked the right questions. My job is to ask those questions. To take your symptoms seriously. To look at your hormones, your gut, your nervous system, your history — and treat you like the complex, whole human being that you are.

That's not witchcraft. That's just good medicine.

Also if you want to hear more about this check out my recent Podcast episode on Small Town Big Minds you can listen- HERE

You Deserve Care That Actually Sees You

If you've been struggling with hormonal symptoms, chronic issues that keep getting dismissed, or you're just tired of having to fight so hard to be heard — I want you to know there's another way.

You can learn more about working with me at Full Scale Wellness, or explore my Harness Your Hormones course if you're ready to understand your body on a deeper level. And if you're looking for a gentle seasonal reset this spring, my free Root to Bloom course is a beautiful place to start.

Because you deserve care that actually sees you. All of you.

Resources:

1. Male bias in medical research / women excluded from clinical trials:https://orwh.od.nih.gov/toolkit/recruitment/history

2. Female physicians and better patient outcomes:https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M23-3163

https://www.uclahealth.org/news/release/treatment-female-doctors-leads-lower-mortality-and-hospital

The study found that hospitalized women treated by female physicians had lower mortality rates, and researchers estimated closing that gap could save around 5,000 women's lives annually. NBC News

3. Women and autoimmune disease rates:https://www.aarda.org , https://health.osu.edu/health/general-health/women-higher-risk-autoimmune-disease

4. Women and heart attack misdiagnosis: Link to this WomenHeart article: https://www.womenheart.org/womens-heart-disease-symptoms-overlooked/

Research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that women under 55 were seven times more likely than men to be sent home from the ER without proper cardiac testing. WomenHeart