The DTA Podcast

Amy is joined by Jess Haney, who runs Binge-Worthy Studio with her partner Franco (the team behind this podcast,) and works as a fractional CMO for six-figure online business owners. For most of her life, her period barely registered: the smallest tampon, no cramps, a cycle she hardly thought about. Then, four or five years ago, things started to shift, with cramping, anxiety that took days to shake off, and an adult ADHD diagnosis. Within the last two years came mornings when she’d wake up certain she needed to burn her entire life to the ground and moods sh...

Shannon Gallagher was a Smitherey Style customer for eight years before she bought the company. She first showed up when her body had changed after her first baby and she had four things in her closet she could actually wear. Now she runs what she calls Canada’s only and largest “shop your shape” online retailer, built on one idea: there are six main body shapes, and stylists have been keeping that to themselves for years. Amy and Shannon get into why your shape can change more than once in a lifetime, and why you should treat getting dressed as sel...

Dr. Sarah Shaw’s path into women’s health started at 12 years old, in a body cast, after a spinal surgery — watching how little room healthcare left for the actual patient in the room. That question followed her through a career as a social worker, then a developmental psychologist running outreach for street workers in Nova Scotia, then research at Harvard studying young women who self-harm, before she finally went to medical school and spent 17 years as a family doctor. Now she’s one of four women who built Lume Women’s Health in Toronto, a clinic designed around a simple a...

Sandra Ghaly, founder and clinical director of Makewell Health, sat through two to three days of pelvic floor education in physio school and thought (along with every other woman in her class) "no chance am I ever doing that." She built an entire career in orthopedic physio instead — until she kept meeting patients who told her they leaked when they squatted or felt heaviness she had no idea how to treat. It took her own two pregnancies, one vaginal delivery and one C-section, both requiring her to fight for her own answers, to realize how deep the gap in wo...

Shirlee Williams ran a successful yoga and spin studio for 14 years — she was in the wellness industry and still spent her first year of menopause convinced she was dying. Joint pain, funky blood work, a mysterious itch her doctor kept treating as a yeast infection four rounds running, before anyone thought to check for lichen sclerosis. She even went to her family doctor certain she was pregnant, only to find out she was actually in menopause. It took years of being told she was "fine" before she finally started hormone therapy — and cried the day she began it, feeling like...

Nicole King — known as Ms. King, of Ms. King's Kitchen, serving caribbean-inspired meal prep, catering & events — spent over a decade on birth control before anyone asked why she was in pain in the first place. It took passing out mid-catering-job on a 300-person boat ride, a fallopian tube destroyed by endometriosis before anyone told her, and a parade of doctors offering the same three "solutions" — birth control, painkillers, or go get pregnant — before she landed anywhere close to real answers. She's since been declined for a specialist referral four times. Amy and Nicole get into what it's like to become "...

Erin Beattie spent twenty years bleeding through her clothes, flooding through overnight pads in a two-minute car ride, before anyone said the word endometriosis out loud. Then, in the middle of an 18-month wait to get diagnosed, she was found to have breast cancer — three surgeries in nineteen months, including a bilateral mastectomy and a total hysterectomy that finally revealed stage three endometriosis along the way. Now, almost a year into acute surgical menopause with almost no map for what she's going through, she's built Nila: an app born out of her own research spiral, designed for the other 23 ho...

Marnie Rabinovitch Consky, Founder & CEO of Thigh Society, didn't set out to build a company — she got mad. Seventeen years ago, after a lifetime of yo-yo dieting and being told her thighs touching was a problem to fix, she went looking for something to stop the chafing and found nothing that wasn't marketed like a consolation prize for not being thin enough. So she built it herself. Today Thigh Society has sold over three million pairs and basically invented the long-leg underwear category — but this conversation is about a lot more than fabric. Amy and Marnie get into the real...

Amy is solo in this episode — and in her underwear — fired up after hearing a radio ad for the common cold and realizing the word "common" isn't a feeling, it's a number. It's a regulatory scale, printed on every drug label, that decides what gets studied, funded, and believed. So she runs the numbers on endometriosis, PMOS, hysterectomies, and surgical menopause against that same scale, and it breaks the chart entirely. Amy lays out exactly how far off from "believed" these conditions are compared to conditions men live with, backed by funding figures that are hard to sit with (to s...

Dr. Olga Bougie is the Head of Research in Endometriosis and Chronic Pelvic Pain Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, an Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Toronto, and a minimally invasive Gynaecologic Surgeon specializing on surgical management of advanced endometriosis as well as other complex benign gynaecologic conditions. For years, she's been watching patients bounce between five to seven specialists before reaching her, all while endometriosis remains chronically underfunded compared to other conditions affecting women. In this episode, Dr. Bougie talks about why endometriosis has been historically dismissed, what the biases in women's health research...

Michelle Withers is a peer health navigator, a patient advisor with Ontario Health, and dedicated advocate for pelvic health from Mississauga. Michelle spent 28 years bouncing between doctors, being dismissed, misdiagnosed, and left without answers... until she took her health into her own hands and created the solution that was missing. From chronic UTIs, vulvodynia, endometriosis, pelvic floor dysfunction, and a lupus diagnosis discovered years too late, Michelle's journey is one of relentless self-advocacy. She left her career in marketing and graphic design when the pain became unbearable, and instead of giving up, she founded The Happy Pelvis—a peer-led pl...

Aimee Debow is the founder of Menovate, a corporate menopause education company, and a former telecom executive who spent 25 years climbing the corporate ladder. For 10 years, she suffered silently through perimenopause and menopause while seeing female colleagues experience the same struggle in complete secrecy. One pivotal moment during a major presentation to senior leadership forced her to make a choice, because she couldn't remember anything despite being the expert. She left corporate, took a year to rebuild her health through sleep, nutrition, exercise, and mental health, and came back transformed. Now she's on a mission to bring menopause education...

Katherine Glyde is a 36-year-old from just outside London who had a total abdominal hysterectomy after a cervical cancer diagnosis. What started as a routine smear test led to discovering fibroids that had degenerated into cancer, requiring an emergency total hysterectomy. Now on HRT with minimal medical support, Katherine is navigating surgical menopause in her thirties while most of her friends are navigating completely different life stages. Out of that loneliness, she created the Surgical Menopause Club—a community space for younger women facing this transition. In this episode, Katherine and Amy talk about the gap between women like th...

In today's episode, Amy is joined by Simon Salt. Simon is a speaker, writer, certified menopause coach, and creator of The Quiet Transition—a Substack dedicated to helping men understand and support the women in their lives through perimenopause and menopause. Eight years ago, his wife entered perimenopause and spent four years being dismissed by doctors before finally getting a diagnosis. That experience nearly broke their relationship. Instead of walking away, Simon dove into research and discovered there was virtually no information written for men trying to understand what was happening. In this episode, Simon talks about his journey fr...

In today's episode, Amy is joined by Melissa Melia Dunn—a registered psychotherapist in Hamilton, Ontario, with a private practice supporting teens, adults, and couples. She has a specific niche: women and couples experiencing chronic pelvic pain and endometriosis. She wasn't always a therapist—she spent years in event planning, working with organizations like Free the Children and Lululemon before making the shift to therapy during the pandemic. What drew her to this specific work was her own 20-year endometriosis diagnosis journey. In this episode, Melissa breaks down how the nervous system works, why pain persists even after surgery, and...

Shayne Henderson is a Registered Massage Therapist from Collingwood, Ontario, who spent 25 years helping women recover from trauma—especially postpartum and C-section trauma. She's also a licensed finance broker in the insurance sector. What connects these two seemingly different careers? Her belief that everything—our bodies, our nervous systems, our relationship with money—is interconnected. She didn't plan to become a finance broker. A health scare forced her to get her own financial house in order, and what she discovered was that women are ghosting their finances the same way they're ghosting their bodies. In this episode, Shayne talks about...

Lily Thrope is a licensed clinical social worker and certified intuitive eating counselor with a private practice in Manhattan. She specializes in eating disorders, body image, and women's health—and she came to this work because she lived it. She got her period at 10, spent two decades battling an eating disorder that no doctor caught, and it wasn't until a friend finally named it that she began recovery. Throughout college and her early twenties, she lost her period for months at a time, saw multiple doctors, and not one of them asked the question that mattered: Are you eating en...

Amy is joined today by Melanie Sutherland — the CEO and founder of Body Co, a multidisciplinary clinic in Toronto. She is also a recognized pelvic health & perinatal physiotherapist. Melanie started her clinic 12 years ago because she got tired of being shuttled between different practitioners who never talked to each other. She never planned to work in pelvic health — until a humbling moment in training made her realize her own pelvic floor wasn't what she thought it was. Now she watches women suffer from untreated perimenopause and pelvic floor symptoms because they don't know the care exists, that it's covered by b...

Alicia Tone is a PhD in ovarian cancer biology, the Director of Research at Ovarian Cancer Canada, and the founder of Run for Her—a trail running event that's raised over $120,000 since 2020. What started as a solo half-marathon fundraiser during COVID turned into something bigger: a community-driven event that brings together patient advocates, local businesses, and women who want to change outcomes for people living with ovarian cancer. In this episode, Alicia talks about what she's seeing in women's health research funding, why her work as a scientist matters less without the human stories behind it, and the productive ra...

Jill Mueller is a pelvic floor physiotherapist from Hamilton, Ontario, and she has endometriosis. She had surgery to treat it... and it didn't work. Instead of accepting that, she went looking for answers and discovered something that changed everything about how she treats women with endo: the nervous system. Now she's not only treating patients but has co-founded an interdisciplinary program, Endometriosis360, bringing together specialists who actually talk to each other. In this episode, Jill will challenge everything you think you know about pain, tells you what doctors don't tell us, and explains why the missing piece in women's...

In this episode, Amy is joined by Marie Berry, the founder of YVO — a women's wellness brand focused on bone health. It all started with an osteopenia diagnosis; Marie was active, athletic, doing triathlons and playing tennis, but a scan revealed something that didn't add up: her bone density was way lower than it should be for her age. So, she started walking with a weighted vest to build bone strength and the trend exploded. Women were asking which vest to use, and Marie realized none of them were designed for female bodies. So she built one herself—and in t...

Rashidah is a registered nurse, certified nurse midwife, lactation consultant, and doula from Chicago with 30 years in women's health. She spent decades in labor and delivery, taught nursing students for 20 years, and recently retired to do what she's always wanted—be a postpartum doula and lactation consultant. But Rashidah also has her own story. She spent years managing heavy periods and fibroids, refusing surgery until Covid made the decision for her. In this episode, she talks about the village we need to build around postpartum moms, why "bouncing back" is a myth, and why women need to stop keeping th...

In this episode, Amy is joined by Noa, a 23-year-old college student from Chicago living with PCOS. At 13, she and her identical twin sister gained 50 pounds overnight with no change to diet or exercise. After a year and a half of being dismissed by general practitioners—told to just exercise and eat better—a gynecologist finally put the pieces together. It turns out PCOS runs in her family. Her twin, older sister, and mom all have it too. Now at 23, Noa is an expert in her own treatment, piecing together knowledge from TikTok, Mayo Clinic and years of trial-and-error with...

Wendy Petties is a native New Yorker, psychologist, and founder of Sexy Money—built on one radical belief: pleasure can save your life. In this episode with Amy, Wendy holds nothing back. After 11 years fighting for fertility, a hysterectomy at 40, bankruptcy, and harassment at work that left her unable to get out of bed, Wendy reconnected with what she'd known in her 20s about pleasure. Not just sex—the daily, intentional kind. She became a millionaire, learned to ask for plenty instead of just enough, and now she gives women permission to talk about what nobody talks about: sex, mone...

In this episode, Amy is joined by Laura, a marketing executive in Toronto, who spent three decades managing a secret that controlled every decision she made. Starting with pre-cervical cancer surgery in her 20s, she had five surgeries in her 30s and 40s to remove polyps and fibroids—all while climbing the corporate ladder and dating as a single woman. She couldn't tell anyone at work for fear of losing promotions, relied on painkillers just to get through the day, and unconsciously kept relationships at arm's length because she wasn't sure she could give a partner biological children. Three ye...

In this episode of Down There Aware, Amy is joined by Yolanda, who shares her nine-year infertility battle—3 IVFs and 2 IUI's, and not a single pregnancy. No doctor ever told her that egg quality crashes at 35, so she delayed family planning for career and didn't start trying until 37. After three failed cycles at her first clinic, she switched to a second one that discovered she has three rare blood clotting mutations that prevented embryo implantation. She shares about daily blood work and ultrasounds while hiding it from her corporate job, receiving "you're not pregnant" calls at work, losing three 20-y...

Seanna Thomas, a holistic nutritionist and TV personality on Meal Prep Mondays (CP24), joins Amy to break down the nonsense about women's nutrition in perimenopause. Instead of promising perfection, Seanna teaches practical, moderation-based nutrition—protein, fiber, hydration—without the guilt. She talks about her journey from "buzzkill hockey snack mom" to building a business that fuels busy families, navigating perimenopause while raising three teenagers, and why going easy on yourself is the real game-changer. A refreshingly honest conversation about eating chicken legs AND french fries, supplements that actually matter (magnesium, calcium, omega-3), and why the 30-grams-of-protein-per-meal rule is actually doab...

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...

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 wome...

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 p...