Ovary-Acting

Jen's guest is Sandra Adler Killen, RN, IBCLC, a friend of 25 years. They raised their daughters together. Sandra is an emergency room and pediatric nurse and an internationally board-certified lactation consultant, and since 2024 she has made repeated humanitarian medical missions to Gaza. She first went in as a trauma nurse. Local clinicians saw her lactation background in action and asked her t...

Dr. Jen Ashby brings on Dr. Thalia Kazakos Omar, L.Ac . — acupuncturist, doctor of Chinese medicine, founder of Muse Medicine in New York — for the conversation the beauty industry would rather you not have: your skin is not a surface problem. They start with the East Asian medicine face map and immediately complicate it. Under-eyes are kidney, the forehead is liver, the jawline is hormonal — exce...

Dr. Jen Ashby sits down in her living room with Oli Mittermaier — co-founder and director of patient care at CIT Clinics, and, in full disclosure, her husband. Jen asks the questions most people are too polite to ask: if it's a horse tranquilizer, how are people dancing on it? What actually happens in a session? And why does Oli, who makes his living giving people ketamine, open his TEDx talk by s...

\\ Five weeks after brain surgery, Dr. Jen Ashby takes both chairs — interviewer and interviewee. Her Chiari malformation type I, the decompression surgery, and the recovery she hadn't planned for: a long medication list, an ER detour, and coming off narcotics. Plus the gratitude that cracked her open, and the question she's still sitting with. FEATURED The Energy Prescription: Ancient Wisdom and...

Something different this week. Jen is taking a short beat to rest and recover before the next new episode — she's doing beautifully, and a proper update is coming in the next few weeks. In the meantime, a conversation many of you haven't heard: Dr. Jennifer Ashby as a guest on Simply Walk The Talk , hosted by Joshua J. Holland — trainer, holistic health coach, and author of The Awareness Shift . I...

A short, direct solo follow-up to Dr. Jennifer Ashby's conversation with Calista Wilson about parenting a neurodivergent child. Nobody hands you a manual when you become a parent — but most of us pick up a phantom pamphlet anyway: milestones, a rough script for how this is supposed to go. Then you have a kid who didn't read it. Jen speaks straight to the parent in that gap, with the sentence she s...

Dr. Jennifer Ashby talks with her friend Calista Wilson — a former fashion stylist turned writer, advocate, and "proud autism mama" — about parenting a child whose arrival sent her life on an unexpected one-eighty. Calista describes the mother-knowing she felt from the first minutes, a year of being dismissed through the pandemic, the fifteen-minute visit that finally produced the word autism, and...

This week Dr. Jennifer Ashby does something different — she shares the TEDx talk she gave a few years ago. Raised alongside an elephant, lion cubs, bears, wolves, and dozens of other animals, Jen learned early that the energy of every living thing moves in a natural cycle of balance, harmony, and healing — and she spent 30+ years in East Asian Medicine turning that lesson into something usable. Sh...

Dr. Jennifer Ashby talks with Grace Kraaijvanger — founder of The Hivery, the Bay Area women's coworking space and inspiration lab — about the restless yearning so many women feel and can't quite name. Grace first felt it at 27, as her dance career was ending; she's felt it in grief and again at 51 as an empty-nester. Out of that "wrestling" came The Hivery and a mission to elevate the voices of w...

In this solo episode, Dr. Jennifer Ashby explores your yoni — your "jade gate" — through the medicine she practices. Why the clinical word we grew up with comes from the Latin for "sheath for a sword" (named by men, for men), why "yoni" (Sanskrit for source, sacred space, origin) fits better, and how East Asian Medicine has mapped this tissue across a woman's whole life: the four channels that mee...

Dr. Jennifer Ashby talks with nurse midwife Erinn Lance, CNM — a close friend and the midwife who was in the room when Jen birthed her last baby — about vaginal health across a woman's whole life: why the vagina is a self-cleaning organ, the microbiome and common infections, how discharge changes from first period through menopause, GSM (genitourinary syndrome of menopause) and vaginal estrogen, p...

An East Asian Medicine lens on breast health — not a replacement for screening, but a powerful addition. In this solo episode, Dr. Jennifer Ashby explains how your breasts sit at the crossroads of the liver, stomach, and Chong Mai channels, quietly tracking your stress, emotions, hormones, and how well your body clears estrogen. She covers three clinical patterns, left vs. right symptoms, xenoestr...

Dr. Jennifer Ashby talks with UCSF physical therapist Dr. Hidelisa Manibusan, DPT, MBA, about breast health beyond breast cancer: the rehab no one mentions after breast surgery, why posture and the core are the foundation, how to keep the lymphatic system moving, breastfeeding ergonomics, the stress–breast connection, bras, and knowing your "normal" so you catch changes early. The Energy Prescript...

In this solo episode of Ovary-Acting, Dr. Jennifer Ashby unpacks the Epic Eight — her BOOM (Basic Optimal Outcomes Method), rooted in East Asian medicine and modern science. Learn the eight daily lifestyle tools — diet, hydration, sleep, breath work, constitutionally appropriate movement, gut health, finding joy & awe, and tools to not embody stress — that boost immunity, stabilize mood, influ...

Welcome to the very first episode of Ovary-Acting. Dr. Jen Ashby is interviewed by her daughter Lily about the wild road that shaped her: growing up among exotic animals, falling for acupuncture and East Asian medicine, and 30 years of clinical work from county jails to UCSF. The Energy Prescription: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science for Thriving Through Menopause distills her EPIC8 method into a...

This is the beginning of something. Welcome to Ovary-Acting — the podcast where we take women's health seriously, but ourselves not so much. In this preview episode, Dr. Jennifer Ashby introduces herself, the show, and exactly why she built this space for you. Expect real medicine. Real talk. And the kind of humor that makes the hard stuff easier to handle. Dr. Jennifer Ashby is a doctor of East A...