Why I Brought My Health Questions to a Medical School Dean
After a near-misdiagnosis and years of dismissed symptoms, one woman questions how medicine treats healthy women and makes a case for a new kind of care.
It started as one small question, the kind you can almost shake off.
If a single number could be that wrong — if "kidney failure" was really just the collagen I sell for a living — then what else? What else had I taken as gospel that was really just a snapshot nobody bothered to explain?
I tried to let it go. I couldn't. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Because I kept noticing the same reflex everywhere I looked. Something's off? Here's a pill. Hormones shifting? Here's the pill. Protein in your urine? Specialists, a year of waiting, more tests — but almost never the one simple question, what are you actually putting in your body?
Intervene first. Ask questions never.
And once I named that pattern, it didn't stay in the doctor's office. It followed me home.
II'm the woman who said no to the COVID shot. Not because anyone told me to — because I wanted to understand what I was putting in my body, and I had questions nobody seemed all that interested in answering. I still have them. I'm not some hardcore fine-print reader. I'm just a woman with common sense who asks the obvious questions — what's in this? — what does it actually do? — what do we really know? before I say yes. For me, and for the people I love. And somewhere along the way, we got taught that asking those questions is the rude part.