In this episode, we introduce you to U by Uterinekind, an app that will improve the experience of uterine care for everyone.
Happy Holidays!
In the spirit of the season, we are finally gifting you a sneak peek into our mission to change the experience of uterine care for everyone. We hope to achieve three key goals by arming you with our creation to support you as you navigate the healthcare system. This life-changing creation is U by Uterinekind. In this episode, we dive into the behind-the-scenes of our mission, introduce you to U by Uterinekind, and show how it will make a lasting impact on you and the gynecologic health care system.
Thanks for listening, learning, and being you. And join us back here every Tuesday for all things uterus, in service to you, uterinekind.
Carol: What do horses and zebras have to do with your healthcare experience? Everything. I'm Carol Johnson, and this is Hello Uterus.
Coined in the late 1940s by Dr. Theodore Woodward, professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. This phrase is taught in medical schools when you hear hoof beats, think horses not zebras, meaning don't jump to a disease or condition, thought to be rare. Stick with the mundane, the expected.
In other words, , it's just a bad period. It's not endo, it's not fibroids. You're just having a bad period like your mom or your grandmother or your sister. Doctors think patients see zebras when it's actually horses, while patients think doctors only see horses when they talk about their symptoms and fail to pursue potential.
Zebra. This is a problem in healthcare overall, but it's compounded in gynecology because women are already dismissed and thought of as emotional and capable hypochondriacs for people of color. This bias is further compounded by racial bias. Last week's podcast featuring Dr. Jennifer Garrison delivered a bombshell description of the state of gynecology.
Our understanding of the female body is, and I. Primitive. So now I'm beginning to get why people aren't diagnosed, but rather medicated. Like it's not important to find out what's going on, but only important to suppress symptoms. It's not a zebra, it's a horse. Well, you know what? You're right. Endo, adenomyosis, fibroids.
P C O S, they're all horses. The prevalence of these conditions is off the charts, one out of 10. Endometriosis as many as as as 20% have P C O S, chronic pelvic pain easily one out of 10. These are horses, not zebras. After 10 years working in healthcare, creating educational materials for patients and healthcare professionals, My team and I realized our work wasn't enough.
We were supporting manufacturers and healthcare systems. So their goals came first, not the goals of the patients. So we thought, how can we have a more meaningful impact on people's experiences with gynecologic care? And we concluded that we needed to arm you with data and knowledge, support you in the wings as you navigate the health.
And bring researchers out of the labs and into your spaces to talk frankly about our state of care and share their learnings, which will directly and immediately have a positive impact on your experience. Seeking help for your symptoms, you by Uterine Kind, was born. Now this special holiday episode of Hello Uterus isn't going to be just a commercial for you by uterine kind.
We felt that today more than ever, it's important to understand the intention and mission driving companies. So we wanted to take a little bit of your time to tell you about us. We're on a mission, and the mission is not build fast, break things, sell fast, make people huge amounts of cash. We are actually the opposite of that.
This is a mission for us at Uterine Kind to change the experience of uterine care for everyone. That's our goal. The mission is not to build some big company or to generate tons of wealth. The mission is really, really simple and clear to everyone who works at Uterine Kind, and that is to change the experience of uterine care for everyone, and we'll do it in three.
Educate and empower you with data and research, pulling back the curtain on the female system and the state of gynecologic care and help you become a citizen scientist of your own body. That's goal one. Goal two, fund research so we can get beyond a primitive understanding of the female system. And goal three is to speak without fear about the problems in gynecologic care.
And that's why we self-funded the build of You by Uterine Kind, because we felt that if we took money from industry, we'd have to answer to industry and we'd rather answer to our members. We'd rather answer to you,
it's just, it's a biological.
So what does you do? Doctors have shared on this podcast numerous times the importance of a detailed symptoms diary stating that it's the key to solving the mystery of your symptoms. So we began by building a tool that helps you quickly capture a detailed picture of your symptoms each day. And this achieves our first goal to help you become a citizen scientist of your body, making it easy to learn about your body and the systems that make it run, teach you to tune in and listen to your body, help you connect the dots on your symptoms, monitor the impact of treatments and lifestyle choices on your symptom.
And you also generates a data report for your physician, which eliminates the, tell me what's going on. Part of the consultation that is often super stressful and generally feels really unproductive. Our second goal with the app is to bring you and research scientists together. We make it easy for you to be educated on current research. Your Dr. May not be, so you need to be, and also by, by listening to scientists talk about the things that they're discovering.
We feel that that you'll have an increased level of curiosity about your systems, that it will be interesting to learn this and that ultimately it will improve your body literacy, which will make you a much better advocate for your own healthcare when you're in consultations with your care team. Our third goal is to fund research because without it, we will remain in limbo.
With primitive diagnostics and treatments, leaving millions of people suffering,
ultimately by focusing on educating members and equipping them with data, we believe the experience they have in the consultation room will improve. The amount of time it takes to get a diagnosis will decrease, and they will be confident and prepared to advocate for modern gold standard care because they know the research.
So if you go in and say, my periods are really bad, you'll get a standard response. It's normal. Nope. No it's not. It's been normalized, but it's definitely not normal. and you'll get on that cycle of, here's some birth control pills. We'll try a few different kinds and see if we can help your symptoms.
Rather than saying, Hey, I think that there's an underlying condition here and I want a definitive diagnosis so that I can research gold standard treatments.
I'm pretty sure that there's gonna be some people that walk into consultations and use some of the language that they learn in the app, and they're gonna see their doctor's eyes maybe. Maybe instead of their eyes rolling, their I, you know, which I've had happen to me in consultations. Their eyes will just sort of bulge out of their head,
and that's not the goal by the way. When we say improve uterine care for everyone, we mean for doctors too, because it's not, it's not good for them either. , so, you by Uterine kind enables you to go in with detailed symptoms, data recorded daily over time and formatted so care teams can quickly scan the data and see your experie.
They'd have to go out of their way to ignore your self-reported data. So now the conversation changes from tribe, the birth control to the data shows there's a problem. And I understand that your goal here today is to get a definitive diagnosis and that we consider mission.
You aims to be a reliable, trusted companion there to educate you and save you from Dr. Google. Keep you in touch with your body and provide you with tools that change the conversation in the exam room. We give you the straight scoop because we aren't owned by or in service to any corporation, hospital, or manufacturer who all have their priority.
in a few minutes a day, you can easily capture your symptoms, explore articles, podcasts, patient stories, and more in a comprehensive library of content we created just for our members. Over time, you'll feel more confident advocating for your needs and better able to distinguish between gaslighting and proactive care backed by current.
Our hypothesis is that by empowering you with data and knowledge, your investment in your membership will be recouped by decreasing the number of appointments it takes to get a diagnosis and all of the assorted costs that go around getting to the doctor, taking time off from work, going to see multiple doctors.
We definitely believe that. The amount of money and time that you spend on trying to get to a diagnosis will be decreased, and then once treated, U helps you monitor the impact of treatments and lifestyle choices on your symptoms.
U helps you become more aware of your body and its systems. It increases confidence to better advocate for your needs. Gives you simple tools to help shorten the amount of time it takes to feel better, and it improves your experience. With gynecologic care, we launch in the new year. It has been, uh, a year of, of a lot of work and a lot of learning, and a lot of, um, Commitment.
Every time we show up in the morning to to hit the to-do list, we're thinking about our membership.
Speaking of membership, here's what you get with your membership. No paid influence, no ads, no marketing of treatments, supplements or diagnostics. Also, you're not the product, you're the boss. We will not sell your personal information ever. Our business isn't structured to make money based off of selling your data.
We, we make money. By selling memberships and that money we use to create new features and new content. So the app is fresh all the time, and 10% of your membership cost goes directly to research labs who are dedicated to understanding the female body. And those researchers will be on this program and will do special podcast episodes just for members keeping you up to date on what they're.
These interviews with researchers and physicians are super valuable and actionable. So if you, if you're not in a place where you can easily access excellent gynecologic care, you can supplement the care that you're receiving, where you're at with learnings that you can get by listening to interviews with the researchers and doctors that we have on Helen Uterus and in the app.
You by uterine kind launches in the new year. There's a free trial and the subscription price is a hundred dollars for a year, $55 for six months or $10 per month.
Those who participated in our market research this past year say that you is simple, beautiful, and packed with great content, so we hope you'll give it a. The app is not available in the app stores. We chose to build a better performing, less expensive, progressive web app following in the footsteps of Spotify and Starbucks among men, many other corporations that have decided that it's not sustainable to have to build a different version of an app for every type of device that needs to.
So to download you, you'll need to visit our website, which is uterine kind.com, where you can learn more about the app, our business choices, and join. So happy holidays to all. I'm so grateful to have had this last year to talk to you about Uterine health and gynecologic. Research and to invite physicians and researchers and patients to come on the show and share with you their experiences and their, their knowledge.
It's been, um, it's been really, really fun and super insightful and I'm looking forward to 2023 and having another 52 weeks to bring you 52 episodes of amazing content as well as the content that we create for the U by Uterine kind. Next week we'll be back with a very special guest, Shannon Cohn, creator and director of the documentary Below the Belt, an unflinching look at endometriosis.
We're thrilled to have her on the show, so please tune in next week and happy holidays to everybody. I wanna thank Angel and Maryelle for producing the podcast and the team at Uterine Kind for bringing your passion and talents every day in service to our. I hope everyone is doing well. I hope that you have electricity and that you're warm, and that you're spending time with your loved ones and enjoying this season of the year, um, in a way that supports you.
So till next week, be well, be cool. Be kind.