The Pain Gap

Dr. Veronica Gillispie-Bell is one of the leading voices in maternal health, patient safety, and reproductive justice. Dr. G sits at the intersection of clinical care, public health, and policy, and this conversation is as urgent as it is eye-opening. From Black maternal mortality and medical bias to fibroids, pain dismissal, and the dangerous fragmentation of our healthcare system, she breaks dow...

Jennifer Dunatov is a healthcare ethicist and birth justice advocate dedicated to exposing the ethical failures embedded within America’s maternal healthcare system. In this powerful episode of The Pain Gap, Jennifer joins Anushay Hossain for an unflinching conversation about birth trauma, informed consent, obstetric violence, and why childbirth remains one of the clearest reflections of systemic...

Deeyah Khan was raised in Norway by Pakistani and Afghan parents. Deeyah reflects on growing up feeling caught between worlds and how art, activism, and music became both refuge and resistance. She shares how her early experiences shaped her Emmy and BAFTA-winning work documenting white supremacy, violent extremism, gender-based violence, and the dangerous rise of authoritarian movements around th...

Mara Santilli is a journalist and researcher asking some of the most urgent and uncomfortable questions about women’s health, power, and who gets to control our bodies. Mara is a leading voice examining the intersection of contraception, culture, and systemic inequality. Her work unpacks everything from the rise of “tradwife” content and anti-birth control rhetoric to the deeply rooted histories o...

We’re joined by Kellie Pean and Alyssa Convertini-Lindquist, co-founders of Brand New: A Collective, a bicoastal, award-winning marketing agency spanning creative, strategy, experiential production, and talent partnerships. But beyond building a powerhouse agency rooted in cultural insight, Kellie and Alyssa are redefining what leadership looks like for women, especially in industries that weren’t...

We’re joined by urologist, author, and one of the most unfiltered voices in women’s sexual health, Dr. Kelly Casperson. What started as one patient’s pain became a complete career shift, one that led Dr. Casperson to uncover just how deeply women are underserved, dismissed, and undereducated when it comes to their bodies, especially in midlife and beyond. In this conversation, we get into the syst...

Reed Beeley is a clinician working at the intersection of mental health, addiction, and ADHD, and what he's seeing points to something much bigger than individual diagnosis. It's a systemic gap in how ADHD is understood, identified, and treated in women. In this conversation, we unpack why ADHD is so often missed, starting with diagnostic criteria built around how symptoms present in boys, not gir...

Parul Somani was 31 years old, newly postpartum, and had just brought her baby home from the NICU… when she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer. What followed wasn't just a fight for her life; it was a complete unraveling of everything she thought she knew about control, success, and certainty. Because like so many women, Parul had done everything "right", the degrees, the career, the plan...

For millions of women, what we’ve been told is anxiety, depression, or just “getting older”… is actually something else entirely. Today, we’re talking about menopause, not just as a biological transition, but as a mental health crisis hiding in plain sight. Mandi Dixon is a therapist who began noticing a pattern: women walking into her office saying, “I don’t feel like myself,” after being dismiss...

Dr. Zed Zha is a physician, writer, and author of the forthcoming book Consented: A Doctor’s Call to End Medical Violence and Reclaim Patient Autonomy. In this powerful conversation, Dr. Zha takes us inside the hidden culture of medicine to expose how consent is too often treated as paperwork instead of an ongoing act of trust, transparency, and respect. We talk about what happens when medical tra...

Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs is a sociologist, 2x NYT bestselling author, and one of the sharpest thinkers we have on erasure, patriarchy, and the stories that shape power. If you've ever felt like women, especially women of color, are living in a version of history edited out of our minds, this conversation will hit home. Anna and I talk about what it means to be erased, not just from textbooks, but fr...

This week on The Pain Gap , Anushay sits down with acclaimed novelist and memoirist Darcey Steinke, author of Flash Count Diary and the new book This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith , for a deeply honest conversation about menopause, female pain, sexuality, aging, and what it means to stop performing and start telling the truth, finally. Darcey reflects on what it was like to enter menopaus...

Adrianne Nickerson is a healthcare operator and entrepreneur who built Oula after years of working inside major health systems and consulting on healthcare transformation. And if you’ve ever wondered why maternity care feels so outdated, so fragmented, and, too often, so unsafe, Adrianne is one of the clearest voices I’ve heard on what’s broken… and what a better system can actually look like. In...

Today’s episode is part of a special one-on-one series featuring some of the most urgent and incisive thinkers of our time. And this conversation is exactly that. I’m joined by writer and feminist theorist Soraya Chemaly to talk about rage, resilience, and what she calls male supremacy, not as a buzzword, but as a belief system that shapes our politics, our culture, and our most intimate relations...

There’s a moment so many women, especially women of color, know in their bones: you finally try to put yourself first. You say no. You set a boundary. You admit you’re not okay. And suddenly, you’re labeled: selfish, dramatic, ungrateful… bad. Today, I’m sitting down with Tracy Vadakumchery, known as the “ Bad Indian Therapist,” to unpack what “bad” really means within rigid cultural expectations,...

Stefanie O’Connell joins The Pain Gap for a fiery, deeply validating conversation at the intersection of women’s health, financial health, and power. A leading voice on money, ambition, and gender equity, Stefanie breaks down what she calls “the ambition penalty”: the reality that ambition is praised and rewarded in men, but often penalized in women, at work, at home, and in public life. Together,...

Becca Rea-Tucker (aka The Sweet Feminist) joins The Pain Gap for a disarming, deeply human conversation about abortion, stigma, and the radical power of emotional support—served, of course, with cake. Becca shares how it took years after her own abortion to say the word out loud, and why reclaiming language (“abortion isn’t a bad word” and “pro-abortion”) became central to her activism. Together,...

Renee Bracey Sherman is an abortion storyteller, researcher, and movement builder, for a clear-eyed conversation about what gets erased in mainstream abortion narratives, and why reclaiming truth is part of the fight for bodily autonomy. Renee explains why “people of color have always had abortions,” how history has been intentionally distorted to serve white supremacy and population control, and...

This episode marks the launch of One on One with Anushay, a new series born out of this moment, when staying quiet is no longer an option. While women’s health remains at the center of this show, the crises unfolding around us demand that we zoom out, get informed, and begin organizing together across movements. Joined by Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action and author of Fired Up, for a r...

What if the most damaging phrase in modern healthcare isn’t “it’s all in your head,” but “your labs are normal”? In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Efrat Lamandre (Dr. E), a nurse practitioner, integrative medicine expert, and self-described “medical disruptor”, to talk about the space most of us live in but the system doesn’t know how to treat: not sick enough to code, but too unwell to ignore...

This week on The Pain Gap , we sit down with Samantha Hadadi, women’s health and hormone coach and author of Hormone Goddess: How to Live in Harmony with Your Cycle, for a grounded, honest conversation about what hormone health actually looks like in real life. Samantha shares how years of heavy periods, cystic acne, insomnia, anxiety, miscarriage, and PTSD led her to connect the dots between chro...

This week on The Pain Gap, we sit down with trauma therapist Allison Kirvan, whose work centers on trauma, EMDR, complex PTSD, and the often invisible emotional patterns that shape our adult lives. Allison helps clients untangle childhood dynamics, understand their nervous systems, and rebuild a sense of safety and self-worth, especially for those who grew up navigating chaos, gaslighting, or...

Dr. Sheryl A. Ross, aka “Dr. Sherry”—Ob/Gyn, author, and health expert—has been a fierce advocate for women’s health and reproductive rights for over 30 years. Her book, She-ology: The Definitive Guide to Women’s Intimate Health. Period and she-ology, the she-quel, Let’s Continue the Conversation, were all award-winning bestsellers in women’s health. She co-hosts the highly anticipated podcast Pai...

Dr. Alopi Patel and Dr. Meera Kirpekar, better known to their patients and followers as the Female Pain Docs, are anesthesiologists and pain medicine specialists who met during training and quickly realized they shared more than just a career path. They shared a mission to make women’s pain visible, measurable, and treatable. Together, they founded The Female Pain Docs, a platform dedicated to edu...

Alex Taylor, Co-Founder of Perelel, the first OB/GYN-founded vitamin company built to support women through every hormonal stage from preconception to perimenopause. After being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in her twenties and facing her own fertility challenges, Alex realized how deeply the women’s health research gap fails patients. She turned that frustration into action—building a clin...