Dr. Helen O'Neill Hertility - Why Our Hormones Hold the Key to Our Health
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What issues do women face in the medical system regarding health and fertility?
Hello, you're listening to Stretchmarks with me, Sinead O'Moore. This is for any woman who is just furious at the medical system for ignoring our health, our periods, our fertility, and in turn, just our ability to show up with energy and joy. with answers to what's going on. My guest is a phenomenal Irish woman, Dr. Helen O'Neill, who decided that we deserved better. She is a molecular geneticist, reproductive scientist, and as CEO and co-founder of Hurtility Health, an award-winning women's health biotech company, she is pioneering a shift in female healthcare. Dr. Helen saw how abandoned women were and decided to use what she knows to create answers. Hurtility makes advanced, tailored hormone and fertility testing kits that are delivered straight to your home.
With answers, you then have referrals to partner clinics. But don't worry, this isn't heavy on the science, but it is full of proof that there are several generations of women right now that know that something is wrong without knowing how or where to get any answers.
Dr. Helen, thank you so much for joining me on Stretchmarks Podcast.
Who is Dr. Helen O'Neill and what motivated her work in women's health?
Thank you for having me. I am, as many women who understand your work, a huge fan. Like what you're doing for women in a space that has systemically ignored us as human beings, our needs, our changes, our fluctuations, our bodies, our health care is nothing less than miraculous.
I don't know. I don't think it should be considered a miracle. I think it should be considered about time. Yeah.
And yet here we are. And yet here we are. Yeah.
How does Hertility Health aim to improve women's healthcare?
Like it is about time, but you're doing it. And it took someone, an Irish woman, to go do it.
It did. Yeah. Time and time again, I hear from people, surely that should exist. And I say, surely it should.
So why did you do it?
For me, there were so many different callings towards women's health, but also towards solving a problem, not just a problem, many problems. And that was grounded in my own research and looking at the disparity between, you know, what we can do in the lab, what we can do in terms of clinical trials, and then looking and seeing side by side You know, the fact that I always say I'm a geneticist and the fact that we can, there are actual cures for some of the rarest of genetic conditions and we don't even have answers, diagnosis, treatment, or even insights into the most prevalent of women's health conditions. That for me was like such a stark comparison from going bench side to these honestly revolutionary tools that we can use to interrogate genomic function, to extrapolate data, and then looking at this absolute void when it comes to data in women's health and allocation of those tools towards actual progress.
You have existed within these walls. Why are we ignored? Why has it taken so long? Why does it continue to take so long?
To say that it's one thing is probably like everything. There's many different things at play. Speaking as a scientist, it is relatively, in fact, very difficult to collect data at scale when it comes to women. And that's not an excuse. So when you look, when you look at the cascade like a roller, it's literally like a roller coaster of our emotions going up and down in every single month. In order to capture time specific or menstrual stage specific information about women at scale is actually relatively difficult because it requires you to collect data and collect blood rather on the third day of a woman's menstrual cycle so we're in the early that early follicular phase and if you were to work so when inertility started it started as a clinical trial and the idea was that we were going to find out all of this information but actually
Very quickly, we saw that it's quite difficult to collect and ensure that women are all on the third day of their menstrual cycle. We're busy, we're working, we're traveling, weekends. And so when you only have 12 opportunities every single year, that is, we have 12 periods every single year, and that's assuming you're regular, then actually the number of opportunities that you can get to collect that blood at that specific time point
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What issues do women face in the medical system regarding health and fertility?
0:05–1:22
2
Who is Dr. Helen O'Neill and what motivated her work in women's health?
1:22–1:50
3
How does Hertility Health aim to improve women's healthcare?
1:50–4:48
4
Why are women's health conditions often overlooked in medical research?
4:48–10:16
5
What challenges exist in collecting data on women's health?
10:16–14:30
6
How can women better understand their hormonal cycles?
14:30–21:11
7
What role does stress play in women's health according to the discussion?
21:11–23:43
8
What steps can women take after receiving their health assessment results?
23:43–47:08