ICYMI news for women - Aug 24

No TL;DR. Just the facts, ma'am. 60+ new articles in the last week alone that matter to women. Click your picks, ignore the bricks. We watch the news so you can enjoy the last days of summer!

Aug 24, 2025

Sunday Snippets is a round-up of headlines about women’s health and lives from the past week that we haven’t covered in our regular posts. Snippets is a perk for our terrific paid subscribers, released two days later for all subscribers. It takes time — 10+ hours every week — to search for relevant news, add context and deeper dive links and get these news stories to you without ads or promotions. If you find this valuable, give us a shout-out with a❤️ or a share, or consider buying us a much needed espresso (or a snippet of wine?) or—definitely better yet—a paid subscription to support what we do for you.

In the news this week for women: CT scans and cancer. Summer cold or the new COVID variant? RFK Jr. fighting everyone…when will he become more of a problem for the administration than entertainment? The latest on sugar subs—not all good news. Don’t drink from that plastic bottle you left in the car. WalMart’s radio-active shrimp. It may not be the blue screen keeping us up at night; wearables headed for a welcome dent in the overpriced medical device market. Biomarker testing as Western medicine deals with not-invented-here integrative and functional medicine. Mississippi remains one of the most dangerous places to have a baby in the world. Women’s healthcare funding goes [more] political. GLP-1s and good cancer news, lower cash costs, but…Ozempic teeth. How abortion bans negatively affect pregnancy care. Menopause: GMS and tinnitus. Medical guidelines still act like race is biology; it’s not—it’s a social construct and guesswork. Vag estrogen doesn’t cause stroke, and stroke odds decrease with higher brain health scores. Dementia, women, and fatty acids, hearing loss link. Complete women’s health profiles for every state—terrific resource! Rabies, malaria and plague make summer COVID increase look boring. Femtech news and much more.

Tip: If you hit a paywall here or anywhere, copy the URL of the article into archive.ph.1
See our “Why it matters” footnotes for context from our 30+ years in healthcare.
Articles marked with an asterisk (*) are from professional journals.
Disclaimer: Listing these headlines does not indicate a recommendation. With so many news items each week, we don’t take the time to review each. Use common sense and dig deeper into any issue that interests you. More on sources and bias.2

Our bodies

CT scans could result in 100,000 new cancers across the US. Why this is a big deal.3
What to know: Summer cold or the new COVID variant?
Checklist for routine women’s health visits for all ages.
Five reasons women should see a urogynecologist. Symptoms are one thing; read why the “urogynecologist” part matters.4
Nutrition and exercise
Trending
GLP-1 news
- Novo Nordisk, GoodRx selling Ozempic half price—still $500—to cash customers.
  - Bernie Sanders: “Ozempic costs just $59 in Germany while it costs less than $5 to make.”
- Now we have Ozempic teeth.
- GLP-1s lowers cancer risk—except one.
- Serena Williams joins Ro as GLP-1 ambassador.
- Related: Researchers find genetics may impact weight and metabolism more than diet. Eventually, epigenetics is going to solve a whole lot of questions we didn’t know we had.

Note we arbitrarily group some articles in generational/lifestyle categories for easier reading, but some overlap generations. Also check femtech, below, for more news that can apply to your generation and interests.

- Pregnancy, birth and parenting

* How abortion bans are leading to substandard pregnancy care.
Hospitals shouldn’t separate new moms in crisis from their babies.
Tylenol, pregnancy and autism: why is the evidence so contradictory?
Mississippi calls infant mortality rates ‘unacceptable’ in emergency declaration. Why this matters and likely related to abortion bans.8
- Related: Post-Dobbs, 10% increase in genetic, chromosomal disorders, and 7% increase in infant mortality.
  - Related: The post-Dobbs reality for Black maternal and infant health.

- Midlife and perimenopause

- The time-for-me years

News impacting our health and lives, and those we love and guide

- Kennedy’s HHS

Deeper dives | policy

Femtech and women’s health innovation

We’re way past time for innovation in women’s health, and Femtech is hoping to fill the gap. Don’t miss this free post with tips on investing in women’s health and see more about why investors are excited, but also why femtech can be the new Wild West. And see more about why we have a special section on femtech.12

Archive.ph is a web archiving service that captures and preserves snapshots of web pages. If it’s a lesser-known site or if the article is very popular, it could take a few minutes to load, but it generally works very well—including, BTW, forwarding posts to Canada or other countries wisely concerned about some of our US media.

Sources: We check both public and professional news sites, with click-throughs for sources. We tend to go straight to the original info more than the interpretation of popular magazines and blogs, as we’ve found the latter do not always correctly interpret medical science information. Medical editors are becoming rare. We give you the news directly, including the primary studies when available, and leave you to your interpretation.

Bias: We’ve been in women’s and children’s health—as providers, international consultants, and health system execs—for over three decades. If you’re in healthcare, with few exceptions, women’s and children’s services are not where you make money; those services are where health systems lose money. From policy to research to reimbursement for providers, women and children have been 2nd rate citizens, related to the historical perception of monetary value. So, you probably won’t be surprised to understand we do not lean politically right on women’s health. We are center left but fair: we do not misrepresent data, and we do scan information from neutral and both center-left and center-right sites. If you’re wondering about media bias. check it on AllSides. We do.

I’ve been worried about this for years. My ex-DIL used the ER like her personal physician; she went in several times a year. And 90% of the time she ended up with a CT Scan. Many reasons: Liability, a big issue for every doctor and health system in our litigious society, and likely the single biggest reason—if a rushed, often understaffed ER physician misses something, they and the hospital can be liability toast. There’s pressure to use a very expensive machine that’s critically needed for some purposes, but often not nearly enough to underwrite the cost. The same for underwriting the cost of expensive radiologists; keep them busy. Profit: imaging is hugely profitable for health systems and for radiology mega-practices. And who questions what an emergency doc orders? Neither they nor the patient have the time for that—at least in true emergencies, which the docs have a lot of even if my DIL didn’t. The surfacing problem is that one CT scan can deliver the same radiation dosage dozens or hundreds of x-rays, depending on the type of scan. And with a 30% increase in CT scans in a couple decades, there’s no surprise this is finally showing up.

I can’t say enough about the importance of women seeing a urogynecologist, not a urologist, for urinary issues. Urogynecologists are dually trained in both gynecology and urology, and the two are intrinsically linked in women. There is a world of difference in training, perspective, and overall experience in women’s health between the two specialties. Urogynecologists are available at most major medical centers and, as more of them come out from post-specialty fellowship training, in the private practice as well.

Politics digs deeper into women’s health, apparently now deciding anti-abortion facilities deserve better funding. That’s a political stance, not a medical stance. This may head to the courts; whatever happens, other Republican and purple states will be watching carefully. As we’ve seen, they try to outdo or at least follow.

This is another clash between traditional medicine (and what insurers will pay for) and new technology, and the answer will be in between for now. But identification of biomarkers—when needed—can make a difference in focusing prevention and fixing long-standing issues. The trick is “when needed”—versus a far-ranging panel that can yield results that look important but may just be tech clutter. For now, unless you have an integrative or functional medicine provider you trust, a lot depends on your own research. But if you have symptoms no one seems to be able to nail down, or if someone in your family has a genetic disease and being tested for it gives you the opportunity to mitigate or prevent the disease, focused biomarker testing can make a real difference, now and in your future.

Despite the early stage wrinkles of AI, it’s already showing promise in medicine, particularly for uses like this. Radiologist look at breast scans hour after hour, day after day. It’s easy to miss something; it doesn’t surprise me additional screening by AI is decreasing misses.

Now we have a sense of how bad it had to finally get to get their attention. And it’s well beyond bad. And it’s not just infants. Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama are three of the most dangerous places to birth in the civilized world, not just the US. According to our own CIA World Factbook, women in those states would be safer giving birth in Libya or Iraq.

Providers previously waited months for new adverse effects of new drugs. Love this administration or hate them, they are showing how government can move a lot faster when they already have the plan in place well before the election (Project 2025) and leverages information age approaches. Yes, they are needlessly breaking—devastating—a whole lot, using a business perspective that is often the complete opposite of governing. But for better or worse, they are showing us that government could function a lot faster. IMO (and FWIW), that’s long overdue. We’re functioning with structures and systems developed after WWII—still industrial age-dependent—that have been increasing outmoded in an information age.

The letter followed the attack in Atlanta, which CDC employees largely blame on misinformation about vaccines and other health issues. “Hundreds” of staff signed it. In a vacuum, it might not make a difference, but most of the top physician health organizations are now actively opposing, and suing, Kennedy over vaccine policies and other HHS actions, and the OMB just restored research funds the CDC blocked. Medical push-back took a bit to get organized but is now strengthening; at some point it will stop being entertaining to those who like chaos and start being a problem for the administration.

IMO, there is no specialty to whom money matters less than pediatrics. If you want to make money, you don’t go into pediatrics, one of the lowest paying specialties in medicine. You go into it simply because you love vomiting, screaming, peeing and pooping, tantrum-y, sick kids. No organization is entirely free of political influence, but on the issue of whether Kennedy or the AAP is more likely to function on science and the best interests of the patient, Kennedy is not my pick. This could be the fight that starts to bring Kennedy down.

We have a special section on femtech for three reasons: While not all femtech is created equal, outside investors—now finally often led now by women—are stepping up in a major way to fill the huge hole that traditional medical research is still neglecting and will worsen under Trump and Kennedy’s NIH that classifies women’s health research as DEI. Second, many of us have never invested specifically in women’s health but are in a position now to do so—if not us, then who? Finally, it’s a good eye-opener to those of us who have been dulled to the possibility of better after decades of often insensitive and boringly predictable care. Femtech views that neglect as opportunity.

Partly because of the costs of approvals, licensing and malpractice protection, and partly because they can, manufacturers have huge mark-ups on items labeled “medical device.” A great example is electric recliner chairs: get one from a medical device company and it’s $2600. Get it as furniture from Amazon and it’s $500. Far less expensive consumer wearables are increasingly providing data increasingly similar to medical devices. There will be wearable fine-tuning, but in the long run consumers will benefit as wearables straddle, then cross, the invisible line that separates them now from medical devices.