Is Your Women’s Health “Expert” Lying To You? | Dr. Jen Gunter
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What concerns do women have about hormonal therapy and the internet's impact?
So do you think the internet scares women away from birth control unnecessarily?
I think the internet is both an amazing and a terrible tool, and it depends where you end up. When you Google something, what comes up isn't what's the most scientifically valid. What comes up is the most popular.
Do you think that not enough women are on hormonal therapy? Welcome back to the Checkup Podcast. Lately, social media has been absolutely flooded with wellness gurus and even medical doctors making all sorts of claims surrounding women's health. Based on what I've seen, there's been a lot of fear mongering and shaming regarding women's bodies, usually done to encourage the purchase of some sort of quick fix supplement or product. This is why I'm so excited to host Dr. Jen Gunter, who's a board certified OBGYN and pain medicine physician, a two-time New York Times bestselling author of The Vagina Bible and The Menopause Manifesto. She also writes the Substack newsletter, The Vagenda. She's one of the most prominent critics of wellness pseudoscience and a widely cited voice on women's health from almost every leading news outlet.
In our conversation, not only will she tell you the truth about when hormone testing is useless, how hormone therapy is actually supposed to work, the truth about how women are targeted with vaginal products, but she also opens up about her traumatic experience in navigating the healthcare system in seeking answers to her children's serious, serious conditions. Please welcome Dr. Jen Gunter to the Checkup Podcast. I think a good place to start would be the fact that I've been dying to have you on the show for probably half a decade or so, mostly because I feel that the women's health space has been contaminated, for lack of a better word, with a lot of misinformation and a lot of look over here while I'll sell you something over here.
And I feel like in my world as a primary care physician, I feel like it's led women to potentially make bad choices with their healthcare, but also perhaps just have a poor understanding of how their own bodies work. And being a primary care physician, I want to fix it, but I'm not also fully equipped to have every conversation in every bit of detail, especially because in my residency training, I wasn't learning a lot about hormone replacement therapy. It was kind of frowned upon actually when I was doing my training. And I'm excited to learn more about it from someone who's actually evidence-based in this regard.
you. I'm really excited to be here and very happy to meet you in person finally.
For sure.
How has social media influenced women's health decisions?
So do you feel like the situation that I've described is an accurate one, a situation that you've been seeing as a women's health specialist?
Yeah. So I would say, you know, I've been active on social media since 2010 when I first got on Twitter. And I would say that there has been a progression of disinformation online. And I don't have good studies to back this up but my gestalt is is this really happened when reels became a thing when this really short form fast kind of inject it right into whatever vulnerable vulnerable part of your brain it's going into and Fear is what sells. Fear is what gets our attention. Facts are often super boring. Being really definitive sells. And you and I know that it's really rare to be super definitive. I can say, yeah, I get the HPV vaccine. That definitively reduces your risk. But we don't have a lot of great data like that.
And there's nuances, but nuances don't play out. And so I think what we're seeing is this chorus in many areas of medicine of this sort of these fast format, you must do this, or you must buy this product, or if the real doesn't include that product, every third one might, you know, that, that it's a long for the ride. And we're sort of starting to see, like, I think an amplification, you know, once you get, once you tell every single person that they must be on menopause hormone therapy or something bad's going to happen to them, Well, then, okay, when you have all of your followers doing that, then you've got to have the next cell.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What concerns do women have about hormonal therapy and the internet's impact?
0:00–2:32
2
How has social media influenced women's health decisions?
2:32–9:36
3
What is the importance of informed consent in hormone therapy?
9:36–17:29
4
How do misconceptions about hormone therapy affect women's health?
17:29–1:19:21
5
What are the risks associated with hormonal contraceptives?
1:19:21–1:22:06
6
How does misinformation about birth control affect women's choices?
1:22:06–1:25:14
7
What role does social media play in shaping health narratives?
1:25:14–1:27:48
8
How can women navigate the complexities of vaginal health products?
1:27:48–2:25:24
Speakers
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