August 6, 2026
Tonight: The reality of the training pipeline for abortion providers, a uterine scan that may hold up for Black women, and more.
— Meghan McCarthy
WHAT WOMEN TELL REDDIT BUT NOT THEIR DOCTOR
Women increasingly sort out what's normal and what's alarming about their bodies on Reddit before they ever book an appointment, according to a survey of about 890 women that Reddit commissioned with PR firm Weber Shandwick. It's a self-interested report, but the numbers are big: 81% said they're more comfortable discussing sensitive health topics on Reddit than with family or friends, and seven in ten walked into appointments feeling better prepared. Traffic backs it up, with the over-60 women's subreddit up nearly 2,000% in a year and r/menopause up 53%. Researchers tie the shift to a real gap: only 11% of NIH priority projects between 2018 and 2020 focused on conditions specific to women.
FIBROIDS DON'T BREAK THE ULTRASOUND FOR BLACK WOMEN
Clinicians often assume transvaginal ultrasound can't reliably rule out endometrial cancer in Black women because fibroids can obscure the view, sometimes leading to more invasive biopsies. A Montefiore and Albert Einstein team found otherwise: in a diverse cohort published in JAMA Network Open, the scan visualized the endometrium 76% of the time in Black women and, when completed, still excluded cancer with excellent accuracy. Completion rates ran lower for Black women, mostly because of fibroids, but the test held up when it did run. That matters because Black women die of endometrial cancer far more often than white women.
HALF THE COUNTRY IS SHORT ON MATERNITY CARE
Nearly half of the US now sits in a maternal-health workforce shortage, and the National Governors Association just mapped how states plan to spend their new federal rural-health dollars to close the gap. The report tracks first-year plans under the Rural Health Transformation Program, which sent money to all 50 states: Delaware is opening its first medical school and a "train here, stay here" residency, Alabama is wiring rural clinics for telerobotic ultrasound and emergency deliveries, and Georgia wants to add GLP-1s to a Medicaid program for women at risk of dangerous pregnancy complications.
ANOTHER THING DIABETES MAY WORSEN: MENOPAUSE SYMPTOMS
Women with type 2 diabetes or prediabetes reported more menopause symptoms, and more severe ones, than women without it, according to a study of nearly 300 midlife women published in Menopause. The gap reached statistical significance only after menopause, and the cohort was entirely Korean, so treat this as an early signal rather than a settled finding. Still, the authors and The Menopause Society's medical director argue it's a reason to fold symptom checks into diabetes care, since midlife weight gain and hormone shifts already push the two conditions to feed each other.
45% OF OB-GYN RESIDENCIES NOW SIT IN BAN STATES
Independent clinics train many of the country's future abortion providers, and roughly 100 of them have closed since the fall of Roe. Those clinics perform 58% of US abortion care and double as the only place to learn skills that many nursing and medical programs skip. And it’s getting harder: 45% of OB-GYN residencies and 30% of family-medicine programs now sit in states with severe restrictions or outright bans, forcing trainees to travel cross-country. Training one provider through Repro TLC has climbed from $3,500 to about $10,000, and the group turns away six of every ten applicants.