I’ve been published!!!
I want to my legacy to be that I changed healthcare. I recognize that achieving this legacy is going to be difficult given my education background but it’s who you know not what you know, right?
The legacy I want to leave is preventing others from being denied the health care and treatments they need, specifically due to an age bias, being told “you’re too young”, an excuse I was repeatedly given during my own health care journey.
I created the Healthy Hooha patient advocacy and education organization to be one of the ways I helped people get the health care they needed but a blog wasn’t going to change medical practices or medical school education. I was driven to try and change the definition of a condition called Genitourinary Syndrome of Menopause, a definition that prevented me from the treatments I needed for over a decade.
This term was coined by a group of people I admire, it was an update to the term then in use – vaginal atrophy. But, Vaginal atrophy is only one symptom in a collection of symptoms someone experiences when they have low estradiol and/or low testosterone. Genitourinary Syndrome of Menopause was an improvement over vaginal atrophy but it does a significant disservice to those experiencing the symptoms but are not yet old enough to be considered going through age related menopause.
One of the things that pisses me off about this updated term is that sexual health experts recognized that people younger than menopausal age can absolutely experience hormone related genitourinary syndrome and they STILL choose to put menopause at the end of the new term causing too many people to be denied safe and effective treatments for their very preventable symptoms.
So, to turn my lofty legacy into something more focused I decided I would try and get the word menopause removed from this condition and expand it into subtypes so that when a patient does present with the known symptoms of genitourinary syndrome their doctor has the knowledge and tools to correctly care for and treat their patient.
Early in 2024 I started a task force consisting of a few world sexual health experts (the “who” I know). I proposed a draft (the “what” I know) and with their help we turned it into an abstract presented at the ISSWSH Annual conference.
All this to announce that I am one step closer to achieving my goal – the full paper was recently published in the Maturitas Journal!!
The paper is free to read until October 2, 2026 but as an author I can share it directly for non commercial purposes at any time, send me a message through the contact form or my social media accounts and I’ll gladly share it!
I will continue trying to make things better, and the number of people trying to help make things better has grown in multitudes since I started this journey in 2019, which has definitely taken a load off of my shoulders, but I’m not done yet!
With Love,
Healthy Hooha 
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