Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud: For decades, women have been taught that our pain doesn't matter, that our bodies are too complicated, that we should suffer quietly and be grateful for whatever scraps of medical attention we get. I'm done with that. And if you're listening to this, so are you.

Hi, I'm Amy Milne, and I know what it's like to be dismissed by doctors who didn't believe my pain was real. But here's the thing: I'm not special. This is happening to millions of women right now. Women being told their pain is in their heads. Women waiting years, sometimes a decade for a diagnosis, women whose careers, relationships and lives are being destroyed while the medical system shrugs and says, "mmm, that's just how periods are."

That ends here. That ends now.

Welcome to the Down There Aware podcast, where we're getting loud about women's below the belt health. Every week I dare to bare it all as I sit down in my undies with the people who are changing the game. Doctors and researchers sharing breakthrough insights, fitness coaches with practical strategies for women's health, advocates fighting for change, and real women sharing their stories. The struggles, the victories, the truth about what's really going on below the belt.

We're going to get real, and we're going to get uncomfortable because getting uncomfortable is where change happens. We'll laugh when it's appropriate, we'll rage when it's necessary, and we will never again accept the status quo.

It's bold, it's honest, and it's the conversation women's health has been waiting for. Whether you're in the middle of your own health battle, supporting someone who is, or you're just ready to join a movement that's making women's health impossible to ignore, this is your space.

This is the Down There Aware podcast. Show us you care: Subscribe and share.

We're done with the whispers. It's time to get loud.

👉 Click here to join the movement at downthereaware.org

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🤘 Podcast produced by Binge-Worthy Studio

Welcome to The Down There Aware Podcast with Amy Milne. In our first episode, Amy opens up about her deeply personal journey through three decades of undiagnosed endometriosis. From speaking up as a rebellious teenager to battling medical gaslighting as a young woman, Amy takes you through the misdiagnoses, the surgeries, the medications, and the moment a female doctor finally believed her. She shares how her tenacity led her to motherhood despite the odds, why she eventually chose a hysterectomy, and why she's now launching the Down There Affair—a radical fundraising walk in underwear—to demand better for women's below-the-belt health care.

Key Components

• How early outspokenness became her superpower: Amy's refusal to be silenced as a teenager, though labeled "difficult," ultimately enabled her to advocate for herself when the medical system failed her.
• The power of one doctor who listened: When Dr. Vicki Davis believed Amy's story instead of dismissing it, everything changed—and led directly to her eventual path to motherhood.
• Why the "kids cures endo" myth is bullshit: Amy challenges the outdated narrative that pregnancy ends endometriosis, sharing her continued pain journey after becoming a mother.
• The Down There Affair as activism: Amy's new fundraising movement and why women's below-the-belt health receives only 7 cents per healthcare dollar while Viagra comes in chewable form.

"For us to demand more and better care, we must put our money where the memes are. We must raise our own money because of the dollars raised in health care today we see about seven cents on the dollar go towards our health concerns. How is there a chewable—not just swallowable but chewable—Viagra, but no cure for endo?"

👉 Click here to join the movement at downthereaware.org

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🤘 Podcast produced by Binge-Worthy Studio

In this episode of Down There Aware, Natalie Jeanson joins Amy to share her devastating 10-year journey of being dismissed by doctors despite meticulous self-documentation and persistent advocacy. Natalie opens up about dismissive allergic reactions to birth control, a traumatic IUD insertion, PCOS diagnosis, and the workplace discrimination that comes with invisible chronic pain. She talks about the healthcare system's refusal to listen even when she showed up with detailed symptom logs, why being told "it's just normal" destroyed her confidence, and how imposter syndrome almost kept her silent. A raw conversation about being forced to educate the system about your own body.

Key Components

• How medical gaslighting starts in adolescence: Natalie's symptoms from age 13—heavy periods, cyclical pain outside her period, pain during exercise—were normalized and dismissed as "just how it is," setting the stage for years of suffering in silence.
• Doctors don't listen even when patients do the work for them: Despite meticulously logging every symptom, meal, and activity for months and presenting this evidence to doctors, Natalie was given an IUD instead of answers.
• How Natalie's workplace experience reveals how employers—and the healthcare system—don't acknowledge what they can't see, forcing her to fight for basic accommodations like wearing comfortable pants instead of following restrictive dress codes.
• Overcoming imposter syndrome to speak her truth: Natalie grapples with self-doubt despite being articulate and knowledgeable about her own body, showing how invalidation for years creates a silence many women experience even when desperate to be heard.

"The healthcare system tries to put you in boxes before you get that diagnosis that you need because they need to rule things out. But that process of putting you in boxes for five years just to get a diagnosis means you're suffering for five years with chronic pain."

Connect with Natalie on Instagram:
@natalie.raae
@remmie.collective

👉 Click here to join the movement at downthereaware.org

🩲 Subscribe, like, and share to show us you care!

🤘 Podcast produced by Binge-Worthy Studio