What happens between the moment women notice something and the moment medicine decides it is real?

In June 2026, women all over the internet started asking the same question: what happened to our periods?

That strange collective conversation sent me down a much bigger rabbit hole into menstrual cycles, the moon, women’s intuition, midwives and witches, unexplained infertility, and the long history of women noticing things before science had an answer for them.

In this episode, we explore:

• The menstrual mystery of June 2026 and what heat, light, seasonality, and even solar activity might (or might not) have had to do with it
• How observation becomes scientific evidence
• Why women’s bodies are rhythmic, even though medicine often studies them as static
• Whether women’s periods really sync
• Menstrual cycles and the moon
• How menstruation went from sacred and powerful to impure, pathological, and something women were expected to hide
• Midwives, women healers, herbal medicine, ergot, LSD, and the ancient roots hiding inside modern medicine
• What science can tell us about women’s intuition, interoception, pregnancy, and maternal knowing (and what it still can’t)
• How the witch became a symbol of dangerous female knowledge, and why she still matters
• Unexplained infertility and the important difference between there is no explanation and we haven’t found the explanation yet

The full episode transcript, citations and companion guide is available on Substack.

For more from me beyond the podcast, come hang out on Between Mind & Body on Substack, where I share full podcast transcripts and deeper companion content, essays, physician-created guides, emerging research, and the questions medicine has not quite answered yet.

Substack: Between Mind & Body
Instagram: @drmaryella
LinkedIn: Mary Ella Wood, DO, ABOIM

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