Poppy Candid: Hot, Bothered & Still Making Sh*t Happen

Poppy Candid is for the conversations *about* work that we can’t always have *at* work, and on August 24, we’re talking women’s health.

We are the WebMD generation. Look up one symptom and pretty soon you’ve diagnosed yourself with an incurable disease, or traced it back to something you ate. Perimenopause, menopause and women’s health – they all get the same treatment from a lot of us: either it’s terrifying, or it’s nothing. Neither answer is good enough.

A 2023 survey found 70% of OB-GYN residency programs in the U.S. don’t teach menopause at all. Zero curriculum. And when we go looking for expert help, The Menopause Society has only certified a few thousand medical professionals nationwide as midlife women’s health experts, supposed to cover 1.3 million American women reaching menopause every single year.

So, unsurprisingly, a lot of us end up doing exactly what our speaker Lynn Galusha did: becoming our own researchers, because it feels like nobody else is going to do it for us, let alone stay with us for the whole journey. Lynn is a self-taught patient advocate who found her own answers because the support she was getting wasn’t good enough.

Dr. Darshana Naik is a pelvic health physical therapist, TEDx speaker, and bestselling author who’s spent her career on the intimate health challenges most of us don’t dare say out loud, especially at work. Her thing is “whole health is whole health,” and she’s helped thousands of women feel at home in their bodies again.

Together, Lynn and Darshana cover this from both directions: the woman who had to figure it out herself, and the doctor whose whole career is making sure fewer of us have to.

On August 24, Poppy Candid is going to talk menopause, perimenopause, pelvic floor health, permission, curating the information overload, and more. We’re going to say the things we’ve been taught are uncomfortable, out loud, because that’s the only way any of it gets easier.

We’ll cover things like:
What are the industry realities that make it so hard to get the information and coverage we need?
What does it actually take to get real answers about perimenopause, instead of “it’s probably just stress”?
How do you tell good health information apart from a well-marketed trend?
What does self-advocacy look like in a medical appointment, and how do you get taken seriously?
Why does pelvic floor health keep getting left out of the conversation entirely? And what actually does it mean?

And in true Poppy Candid fashion, we’ll open the room, because the best answers a lot of us have gotten about this came from another woman who’d already lived it.

At the end of the night, we’ll be putting together care kits for Project Beauty Share: hygiene items and handwritten notes of encouragement for women who are unhoused or living in shelters.

Join us August 24 for Hot, Bothered & Making Sh*t Happen, the conversation a lot of us have been having alone, and shouldn’t have to anymore.