I’ve been thinking about three women.
The first had a hysterectomy decades ago, in a time and a place where nobody offered hormone therapy afterward. She managed what came next on her own, because that’s what women did.
The second is the kind of woman everyone describes as having it together. A world-class athlete. Organized. Always fine. For years she was quietly living with endometriosis, planning her life around pain she never mentioned, because it isn’t the kind of thing you bring up, even with your friends.
The third spent most of her adult life suspecting her hormones were telling a story no one bothered to finish reading. She had the signs of what we now call PMOS (formerly PCOS). Nobody ever worked it up. Now her cycle has changed in ways it never did before, the night sweats arrived without warning, and she has a new question: is this perimenopause? Nobody who saw the first chapter is around to read the second.
I know all three well. Three women, three stages of life, one pattern.
For the first, the care barely existed then. For the other two, it exists today, but it’s scattered, and managing it is a full-time job. Find the right doctor. Repeat your history. Chase the results. Start over with every move and every new stage. Their primary care physicians and nurse practitioners weren’t trained for this. In a survey of residents in family medicine, internal medicine and OB-GYN published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, only 6.8 percent felt prepared to manage menopause. Their OB-GYN visits were a year apart and a few minutes long, and nothing gets solved in a few minutes. So the pattern held. Nearly half of women with PCOS see three or more health professionals before anyone names it. Women with endometriosis wait an average of 6.7 years for a diagnosis, and most of that waiting happens in primary care. More than once, these women heard what so many women hear. It’s stress. It’s your age. Come back if it gets worse.
I’m sharing these because they’re ordinary. Every woman reading this has a version.
Then, in May, something happened that gave me the words for it. PCOS was officially renamed polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, PMOS. The old name pointed at the ovaries. The new one says what women with the condition have known for decades: it’s hormonal, it’s metabolic, and it reaches nearly everything, from weight to mood to heart health. According to the Endocrine Society, it affects about 1 in 8 women, more than 170 million worldwide.
The rename matters well beyond PMOS. A woman’s hormonal and metabolic health is never one diagnosis. It moves with her. The woman managing PMOS at 28 may be managing endometriosis at 35 and perimenopause at 45. More than 2 million American women reach menopause every year, about 6,000 a day, according to Mayo Clinic Health System. And at every stage, she usually starts over. New provider. New intake form. Her whole story, again, from the beginning.
Why we built it
Somewhere in those three stories, I stopped seeing bad luck and started seeing a design flaw. None of those women lacked doctors. The care existed, but it existed in pieces, each one built for a single condition. Their conditions never came one at a time. They overlapped, fed one another, and changed as the years went on. What these women lacked was someone reading the whole story who knew how to help: a physician who already knew everything that came before, labs followed over years instead of taken once and filed away, and one record that held all of it together. Our system treats one condition at a time, one visit at a time. A woman lives with all of it at once, for her whole life.
The pieces to fix this already existed. Specialist physicians who can see her anywhere. Labs she can get done close to home. Software that holds her whole history in one place and keeps it current. Nobody had put them together for women’s hormonal and metabolic health in a way that starts from her data instead of from a product. So that’s what we built. This week, after six months of quiet work, SPHERE HEALTH opened in early access.
How it works
A woman might come to us for PMOS, endometriosis, perimenopause and menopause, or metabolic health. Whichever door she walks through, the experience is the same. It starts with her: an assessment, her history gathered in one place, and a lab panel built for her specific pathway, not a generic one. A board-certified physician who specializes in women’s hormonal and metabolic health reads all of it. If she has more than one thing going on, one physician looks at both together instead of sending her to two.
From there, her record travels with her. Every consultation picks up where the last one left off, so she never starts over, and as her life changes, her care changes with her. Nothing is decided before she’s been seen. Treatment comes out of her assessment, her labs and her physician’s judgment. We don’t make money on medication, so our incentive is her health. And our prices are on our website, in full, before anyone signs up.
Behind every care plan is Rosalyn, our intelligence platform. We named her for Rosalyn Yalow, the Nobel laureate whose work made it possible to measure hormones in the blood. Rosalyn uses AI to pull a woman’s labs, history and assessment into one view and prepare insights for her physician. That’s where the AI’s job ends. AI organizes everything. The physician decides.
Why we started here
Hormonal and metabolic health is the wiring underneath women’s health. It touches metabolism, heart, sleep, mood and bone, and it shifts at every stage of a woman’s life. Get that foundation right, and you can finally see the whole woman. That’s where we’re starting. It won’t be where we stop.
Women don’t live their health one condition at a time. Starting today, their care doesn’t have to either.
Learn more at spherehealth.com.
Mida
Founder & CEO
SPHERE HEALTH
