Dr. Jocelyn Wittstein

And there's some mixed evidence.

Some studies show that use of oral contraceptive pills reduces risk of ACL injury.

Some studies don't, especially if you control for things like comparing to other women who use IUDs.

So you're kind of getting a good control group, things like that.

And I think one funny thing is you've got sometimes orthopedic surgeons trying to figure out how to study these things, and they're not necessarily maybe differentiating between, you know, phasic or continuous or different forms.

Yeah, so this gets into my whole thought process about, I just feel like we need less siloed approach to studying musculoskeletal conditions that have this intersection with women's health.

Because people really want to answer this question, but they're using insurance databases that pull, oh, these people were on oral contraceptives and...

It's more nuanced.

Yeah.

There's so much nuance in my field that people outside my field are not going to know.

And there's so much nuance in women's health that I don't know.

And I'm an orthopedic surgeon with a very high interest level in women's health.

But I consult all the time with my partner, Ann Ford, who is in women's health at Duke.

I constantly ask her questions to help me clarify things because and I pull her into studies all the time because I need her expertise in the study to to do it.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

I mean, I want to get back to orthopedic conditions with sex disparities, but I will tell you the gateway to my connection to women's health and all this work that I do came from the fact that my mom's favorite doctor over the course of her entire life, my mom's gone now, but was Ann Ford.

And so for like 20 years, she'd be like, I just love Ann Ford.

Ann Ford is the best doctor.

This is her women's health doctor.