Female Health

🎙 Guest: Glenn Macko  ·  📅 Aired September 4, 2026  ·  ⏱ 55 min episode

Introduction

Historically, women have been under represented in all clinical research. As recently as 1992, US legislation was passed to ensure that women are represented in all clinical research. Medicine has assumed that women respond to medications the same as men and that they respond the same across the menstrual cycle.

Further frustration to women is that it can take eight years to receive a diagnosis of endometriosis.

This is the first generation where women were told they could have it all and were encouraged to actively seek it all. Stay beautiful, stay skinny, give the perfect dinner party. With this amount of stress, are we prepared for the years of menopause?

• In the UK, US and Australia, perimenopause years were listed as times of high suicide rates among women.
• The Blanchflower and Byrson article on the female happiness paradox states that women have increasing anxiety, depression, fearfulness, sadness, loneliness and anger.

Girls are raised to nurture, play nice, and say yes. Boys are raised to be independent and to win. This creates a dynamic where a “yes” from a woman may represent a significant personal sacrifice — one that a man in the same situation might not register as a sacrifice at all.

• The UK’s 2023 Careers After Babies Report found that 85% of women leave the workforce within three years of having their first child.
• Many women today carry both traditional domestic responsibilities and full professional lives simultaneously — a compounding load that is rarely acknowledged as such.

This is further complicated by the fact that the medical profession divides treatment according to parts of the body.

Hormones are intimately connected to stress and metabolic health. Menopause response is intimately connected to metabolic health (blood sugars), stress, gut health, diet, and toxins. As these are not attributed geographically to one part of the body, many physicians may not look at these interconnections.

Furthermore there is the damage done by decades of synthetic hormones and false claims that proper biologically identical hormones can cause strokes and heart attacks. Such events typically occur when estrogen metabolites go down the 4OH and 16OH pathway which many practitioners do not consider.

Are we women unhappy?