the making of Supple

My friends have asked me why I'd start another health company after the first. The honest answer is that the deeper I personally go into perimenopause, the harder it becomes to look away.. It's the most common thing in the world; half of all humans will live through it, and somehow it remains one of the least seen phases of the female life.

One of my favourite authors, Gabor Maté, has a phrase for the kind of suffering that hides inside the word “normal”: too vast and too near to be noticed, the way water is invisible to a fish. That invisibility is the thing I want to attempt to undo.

But like all of my previous selves evolved through the decades, I will argue against myself first, and also, because I owe it that. Perimenopause is a phase (a decade long phase!), not a disease, and the last thing any woman needs is to be told a life stage is a ‘condition’ that someone can sell her a cure for. I've sat with that fact for a long time. But naming something is not the same as pathologising it, and silence has never protected anyone. The women in my own family were told their symptoms were normal, right up until one day the “solution” was a hysterectomy. Remove the organ, end the argument.

I am building Supple so that dismissal stops being the standard of care. Here are the pillars of belief that I want to work around:

The first thing I kept running into, when I spoke with my doctors, was my own self-judgement and the certainty that all of it was in my own head. Maybe it was the midlife itch, maybe it was depression, maybe something was wrong with my way of being. What else can you imagine? A seemingly healthy woman, who looks nice but feels tired, foggy, aching, fully not like herself… what could be wrong with this woman, other than her being a moody woman? This has felt and will continue to feel regressive and utterly ridiculous.

So, naturally, I want to change the direction of that. I want to turn that scattered thought of symptoms into data that women can hold in their hands, something with a shape and a slope, so that they never again have to argue her own body into being believed.

And when it comes to relief I want every option on the table, with nothing withheld because “someone” decided it was too much for women, and not oversold either, because the honest truth is it can feel worse for a couple of weeks before it feels better, and women deserve to hear that up front. Comfort has its place… but comfort offered instead of the truth is only another kind of dismissal, and I would rather educate women first and soothe them second.

I was flabbergasted when I first learned that Doctors actually weren't well-informed on the subject, because for a long while I blamed them for the wrong reason.

I assumed doctors simply weren't listening, too overwhelmed by the long list of whines, couldn't confirm the actual discomfort in a 3-page essay of the symptoms some ladies brought them, until I looked at what they're actually taught, and the whole picture turned over.

Only about one in five OB/GYN training programmes offers any real menopause education, and most of that is an elective that a student can quietly skip! (same Mayo study). When Mayo Clinic surveyed residents, only 6.8% reported feeling adequately prepared to manage women experiencing menopause.

So women patients weren't always being dismissed by a careless doctor, but more often they were being met by a well-meaning one who was simply never taught the best.

And it begins further back still, in 2002, when a single large study frightened the world off hormone therapy almost overnight; the one that we've since learned was badly misread, drawn mostly from women already a decade past menopause, and a whole generation of clinicians was trained inside that long shadow, with the guidance only now being improved.

So here is what I want to do about it:

• I want to place a valid account of data into the doctors' hands and not only the patients', so the few who ever get to see one are no longer working half-blind…
• I want to build Supple alongside clinicians rather than around them, with co-developed protocols, a doctor kept in the loop, honest briefings.

The thing is that most of what we call knowledge actually comes from Western women and Western studies, and Asian bodies, Asian diets, our budgets and our families were never really part of that sample.

So what I want to build are recommendations genuinely tuned to how Asian women metabolise, eat and live, with all the household constraints that come with that, vs pasting advice designed for a different body!

And underneath it I want to build the definitive Asian ecosystem for personalized health, for all of us, and that begins with getting to know each woman deeply: learning her body in her own rhythm, following her own story rather than the average of a thousand strangers.

That's where our name comes from.

To be ‘supple’ is to bend without breaking, to stay soft and adaptable to change instead of braced against it… which is exactly what a body is trying to do through this transition if only we would let it.

And, there is a great deal here that can't be predicted or controlled: how a body will shift from one month to the next, which remedy will land and which won't, how long the whole passage will take. But there is so much that we can solve for, making the invisible visible, clearing away the noise and the guesswork and the endless conflicting advice, and letting a woman spend her attention on living well rather than on quietly decoding herself, alone.

Supple will open to its first women later this year, in a few select places to begin with. In the meantime, I'll leave you with this: how we move through this one decade shapes the decades that follow more than almost anything else — and that is far too important to be left to chance, and far too personal to be handed a one-size-fits-all script. We're building Supple to give women the care they have always deserved.

More soon.

If you want to know more, write to me at shruti@supple.care.

— Shruti, founder