by Dr. Meghan Blake, co-founder of Good kitty
I never planned to start a business. I am a doctor. I spent the first decade of my career working as a radiologist, analyzing the imaging of athletes at Cal Berkeley Sports and the Oakland A’s, and I was happy. Co-founding a women’s wellness brand was nowhere on my list.
But that was before I contracted eleven urinary tract infections in the span of a single year.
That number alone was shocking, but what was even more confusing was that I had no idea why. I had done everything women were told to prevent UTIs. I drank a lot of water. I went to the bathroom after sex. I took antibiotics, then more antibiotics, then prescribed antibiotics just to prevent the next cycle.
During this time, I also saw my gut health deteriorate, developed infections that stopped responding to regular medications, and slowly found myself dreading intimacy, which I thought should be an ordinary and healthy part of life.
But these problems, as serious as they were, were not really the worst. The worst part was how everyone except me seemed to think my situation was completely normal.
A problem hidden in plain sight
Even as a doctor, I’ve gotten the same shrug that so many women get when they seek advice about what’s happening to them. The prevailing attitude seemed to be that what I was experiencing was just an occupational hazard of womanhood.
To be honest, UTIs in women are common. More than half of women will have a urinary tract infection in their lifetime, and one in eight women will suffer from one. three or more urinary infections each year. These are not rare occurrences.
But despite the frequency of UTIs, most advice for women who suffer from them boils down to telling us that we must learn to live with the discomfort.
Unfortunately, that’s what many of us do. Some of us stop dating or avoid intimacy altogether. We learn to live with constant low-level anxiety or constantly scroll through prescriptions instead of asking the one question that might help us: Why is this happening in the first place?
But my medical background and the situation I found myself in put me in a unique position: I had the means to investigate what I was being told and see if there was more to say.
It turned out to be the case.
A blind spot with a price tag of billions
The more I looked at the available research, the more it became clear to me that recurrent UTIs are rarely just a bladder problem. They often indicate an imbalance elsewhere in the body, such as the microbiome, hormones or the immune system. Additionally, I learned that taking antibiotics, dose after dose, can actually make these imbalances worse.
What I kept coming up against was the scale of the problem. The fact that UTIs affect millions of women each year means they cost our healthcare system billions of dollars each year. And yet, the medical community does not seem to consider this a priority. Instead of funding more research and innovation, our culture tends to view UTIs in women as too private to discuss and not serious enough to prioritize.
There is no way to explain this except as a cultural blind spot that has persisted throughout our medical history. Until the 1990s, most drug trials were based only on male subjects. This means that we have built most of our medical knowledge on the male body.
In this context, it is not surprising that the condition of so many women remains so poorly understood. Recurrent UTIs are just one of countless problems that live in the divide created by this bias.
The rewards of meeting a need everyone else has ignored go far beyond business
It would have been easy to get upset at this disparity, but I always thought determination was a more productive emotion. So my co-founder and I decided to do something.
The idea was to create a company that addresses women’s intimate health without shame, embarrassment or excuses. We wanted a way to publicly acknowledge that sex, pleasure and quality of life are important to women, and to show that it was possible to prevent recurrent infections without relying on endless antibiotics and their downstream consequences.
This is how Good Kitty was born. Instead of focusing on antibiotics that UTI-causing bacteria clearly tended to ignore, we developed a supplement aimed at blocking these bacteria while supporting the bladder lining and rebalancing the microbiome.
Ironically, though, the process of creating and growing Good Kitty taught me something far more important than how to prevent UTIs. My experience as a founder out of left field has connected me to other women in ways I could never have imagined.
I saw first-hand how many women had symptoms, frustrations, and health issues that someone had told them were “normal.” And I’m encouraged to see another cultural shift slowly starting to happen, as more and more women refuse to accept that answer.
In this way, my experience in the field of women’s wellness perfectly illustrates a lesson that applies to business enterprises in virtually every industry: progress does not automatically happen when a problem is identified. This only happens when people decide they no longer want to ignore one.
Dr. Meghan Blake is a physician and co-founder of Good kittya female wellness company focused on intimate and urinary well-being. Board certified in diagnostic radiology and trained in sports medical imaging, she spent the first decade of her career in clinical practice before turning to the neglected science of women’s health. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
