Oct 16, 2019

Seeing Red – the One Book Everyone with a Period Needs to Read

We’re excited to announce that our founder, women's health expert Kirsten Karchmer, wrote a book! Here’s what she has to say about it – and how you can help her shift the menstruation conversation:

About a year ago, I was approached by Simon and Schuster to write a book on women’s health based on the work I had been doing in my clinics over the last two decades. I was delighted to have the opportunity to tell the world what I had been telling thousands of women in my clinic every day: Getting your period isn’t a curse; it’s the most valuable feedback mechanism we have to understand our overall health, and it is a tool we can use to create a roadmap away from suffering and towards amazing health.

As part of my clinical work, I helped my patients decode what their menstrual cycles were telling them about their overall health. Often, when I explained what their symptoms were signaling, they got mad and asked, “why don’t all women know this?”

Seeing Red seeks to fix that – to close the menstrual knowledge gap and make the insights I shared with my patients available to all people with periods.

It dispels myths, untangles the stigma that keeps so many of us silent about our suffering, and provides tools that give people with periods a newfound agency around their cycles and health.

Here’s a taste of what to expect from the book (pulled from the introduction):

Women are marching. They are rising and calling “Time’s Up.” They are harnessing their rage to demand change like never before. Yet, there is a critical missing piece that no one is talking about: how can women possibly take our place, defend our rights and earn equality when over 80% of us are sick from our periods every month?

More than 80% of all women of menstruating age in the United States experience significant, life-interrupting side effects from their periods every month. Beyond severe cramping, many have serious underlying conditions like PCOS, Endo, PMDD, and infertility. We act like this is normal. It is not. These numbers represent epidemic conditions, and these conditions are HIGHLY predictive of the diseases that kill women (heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and estrogen-dependent tumors).

Still, we stay silent. We have been conditioned to hide and sanitize; to have shame for possibly the most important biological function that ensures the future of our species.

Times are changing. This book, Seeing Red explores how the history of the menstrual cycle got us here, the current state of women’s health, and how to change things. It’s an opportunity to re-educate women that their cycles are not a curse but possibly the most valuable, regularly occurring and free health feedback/diagnostic tool they have. A woman’s cycle is the only recurring feedback tool that a woman can use to measure her overall health. It can also provide a roadmap for fixing it and improve not only her current and future health and quality of life but also her access to power and freedom.

If our goal as a society is to REALLY empower women, we have to start with women’s health. It’s time we broke the silence surrounding the messy, uncomfortable matters related to the female body. It’s time we started SEEING RED.

I need your help. My goal is to shift the conversation about menstruation and get it to the top of the New York Times bestsellers list – this will give us access to every media outlet, so we can reach all corners of the world and begin to change what is possible for people with periods everywhere.

If this conversation is important to you or someone you love, please help me by sharing this post on social media. You can also pre-order Seeing Red here. Better periods await.

Seeing Red – the One Book Everyone with a Period Needs to Read

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