Jackie's Take: What's on My Mind in Women's Wellness ✍️ 🤔 📰 

The Gray Space Medicine Can’t Hold

I don’t often share this, but if you don’t mind (AND on the 6️⃣ month anniversary of In the Saddle! 🐎) — I am going to get a little personal with you today. Here goes…❣️ 

I am a BRCA2 previvor. That means I carry a genetic mutation that puts me at significantly higher risk for breast and ovarian cancer, even though I’ve never had either disease.

It’s not a label I love to lead with, partly because I’m still figuring out what it means in my own head. Am I “sick”? Not at all. Am I “well”? Yes, but also not entirely, at least not by how the system sees me. I live in between, in what I’ve come to call the waiting room.

And here’s why I want to tell you this: being a previvor is one of the clearest case studies of how the friction between healthcare and wellness shows up for women today. It reveals exactly where the system misses us, and what’s at stake if it doesn’t evolve.

The System’s Default Setting

Earlier this week, I went to my routine breast health appointment. I walked in as myself, healthy, grounded, living a full life, but the system met me as someone else entirely.

The questions came almost like a checklist:
“When is your next MRI?”
“Have you decided when to schedule surgery?”
“Would you like me to refer you to oncology to discuss tamoxifen?”

Each question carried the same unspoken message: that I am already halfway down the road to disease. That my identity is best defined by what might happen to me, not by the life I’m living right now.

I sat there thinking, You see me as a patient-in-waiting. I see myself as a well woman with risk. Those are not the same thing.

What struck me most wasn’t the advice itself — imaging, surgery, medications. It was the absence of curiosity. No one asked what it feels like to live in this in-between. No one asked how I think about wellness today, or what my priorities are for the next decade of my life. The system skipped past my present reality in favor of a future that may never arrive.

This is how healthcare operates in the gray: it begins at the endpoint of illness, then works backward. Prevention is framed as treatment-lite. Wellness doesn’t even make it into the conversation.

Living in the Gray

To be a previvor is a strange kind of limbo: you are technically well, but treated as though you are already sick. Not tragedy, not triumph, just the steady hum of possibility. And the truth is, most don’t know what to do with that. Our construct for health was built for binaries. You’re either sick and in need of care, or you’re well and sent on your way.

But life is more complicated than that. What about those of us living with risk? The woman with a family history of dementia who is already caring for her aging parents? The woman with a history of trauma that shapes her physiology as much as her psychology? These risks may not appear on a lab slip, but they are just as real, and the system has no language for them.

The Scarcity Lens

It all starts with a vantage point— and historically we have viewed women’s heath through a lens of scarcity and fear. It counts what’s missing, what’s at risk, what’s likely to break. That perspective may save lives in acute situations, but it fails when applied as the default for all of midlife and beyond.

Longevity, on the other hand, starts from abundance. It begins with the assumption that health is present and asks how to extend it. It doesn’t deny risk, but it doesn’t collapse identity into risk either.

For me at this time, that has meant self-study and choosing my own guardrails: a risk-reducing salpingectomy, microdosing a GLP, reducing alcohol, exercising with intention, weighing hormone therapy carefully. None of these erase my genetic mutation, but they give me agency. They meet me where I am now — a woman in midlife, not a patient defined by potential illness.

That is what precision longevity medicine offers: not certainty, but clarity. Not guarantees, but choices.

The Waiting Room as a Teacher

For now, I’ll continue to live in the waiting room. My greatest hope is that I remain here forever, that I never cross into the world of cancer. But even if I do, this holding space has already taught me something essential.

It has shown me that longevity is not just about adding years, but about elevating the quality of the years we already have. It has reminded me that agency matters as much as protocol, and that women deserve to be treated as more than the sum of their risk factors. And it has clarified something medicine itself often forgets: sick-care and longevity are not enemies. They share the same goal, but they rarely speak the same language.

The challenge, and the opportunity, lies in weaving those two language together.

We are all, in some way, living in this waiting room. The question is whether our healthcare system can finally learn to meet us here. Not by medicalizing us too soon, and not by dismissing us outright, but by creating space for the gray.

In my vision of the future, women’s health will not be written in the language of fear, but in the space where wellness and healthcare finally meet in abundance.

Will you join me in building it? 🌺 👭 

(P.S. keep scrolling down below for your chance to do just that…)

The Tea: What's Trending in Women's Wellness & Culture 🍵 📰 

👀 AI Is Revolutionizing Healthcare. But It Can’t Replace Your Doctor

AI is already reading scans and drafting chart notes, but here’s the thing: the real risk isn’t robots replacing doctors, it’s doctors losing their edge when they lean too hard on the tech. The future of medicine isn’t AI instead of humans. It’s AI that supports judgment and makes clinicians more thoughtful, not less. 🤖 (Time)

👠 Your Feet Are Begging for a Break From Your Cute Shoes

Fashion Week says we’ll all be comfy in riding boots, retro sneakers, and even sock boots this fall — but NPR reminds us that foot pain isn’t just a nuisance, it impacts posture, mobility, and longevity. The best takeaway? Trendy shoes are fun, but pairing them with these simple foot-strengthening exercises (like toe yoga and calf raises) is the real move if you want to walk pain-free into midlife. 🦶(Marie Claire + NPR)

🇦🇹 In Austria, Government Health Care Can Look a Bit Like a Spa

In Austria, if you have a heart issue you don’t just get a quick hospital visit. You spend weeks in a rehab center that looks a lot more like a retreat (think exercise classes, saunas, nutrition workshops, even art therapy). The idea is simple: real recovery takes time, and when it feels good, people actually stick with it.🤲 (NYT)

I’m not sure who needs to hear this but…. 🗣️ 

The real problem with midlife healthcare?

You’re either ignored or micromanaged.

When you go to the doctor, you get 7 rushed minutes, a prescription, and a pat on the head — if you’re lucky. Try asking about GLP-1s, HRT, or how all your symptoms might actually be connected, and you're dismissed as “too much.”

Or, you sign up for a "menopause coaching" program where someone else controls your food, your supplements, and your schedule — and the minute it ends, everything crashes back to normal.

Let’s be honest: both systems take your power away.

And that’s why I created The Longevity Lab 🧪 

A first-of-its-kind health experience where YOU become the expert of your own body — backed by clinical insight, AI, and real results.

Here’s how it works:

✅ You get a comprehensive metabolic + hormone panel (and actually learn how to understand the results)

✅ You track your own symptoms, day-to-day

✅ You sync wearable data from your Oura, Apple Watch, or Whoop

✅ You build a full-body timeline — all the little things that might be connected (from teen years to now)

✅ You use AI prompts powered by my clinical brain to start seeing patterns and possibilities no one has pointed out before

✅ You choose your treatment path — with your doctor, my resources, or trusted practitioners in my nationwide network

✅ You get 6 weeks of guidance with me + a functional nutrition coach

The Result?

You stop being a passenger in your own health.

You build your own intelligent health map.

You make decisions with confidence.

No more “waiting to be seen.”

No more “hoping they’ll listen.”

No more being told what to do.

This is healthcare reimagined — where YOU are in charge.

And this is your LAST CHANCE to experience The Longevity Lab! Saddle up now before another year passes and let me show you how to Biohack Like A Girl™️. 

The Group Chat Edit 📲 👯‍♂️ 

👀 To Try: Sometimes, its the simplest solutions that make the biggest impact. A patient shared this hack for remembering to stay on track with your meds, and I loved how this could also work for your teens or anyone with ADHD.

👂️To Listen/Watch: Tonight! Under the Hood of Perimenopause
📅 September 18 | 🕔 5 PM EST

Perimenopause is powerful, messy, and totally misunderstood. That changes tonight.

I’ll be live with three other powerhouse midlife experts to pull back the curtain on:
✔️ Mental health & emotional well-being
✔️ Sexual health & midlife care
✔️ Holistic lifestyle shifts
✔️ Hair, hormones & beyond

👉 Save your spot now — and see you tonight.📺️ 🎧️.

🛍️ To Buy: My obsession with longevity-focused skincare continues, and I have this serum on order to my doorstep at the moment.

Powered by prescription-strength tretinoin, it also levels up with my favorite skin peptide GHK-Cu (giving it that blue color), as well as NAD+. It combines with actives including niacinamide, vitamin C, HLA, and exosomes to minimize and prevent signs of aging. Anyone else up for a 12 week GHK-Cu skincare challenge?! 👱‍♀️