One actionable step you can take TODAY for your bones, women's health, and the advancement of science

New dawn, new day, but nobody's coming to "protect" us nor spend money studying our bodies. My own small form of resistance will be to provide opportunities for you to do this, whenever possible.

This is an AI-generated illustration of what osteoporosis looks like inside us.

Unexpectedly, my 3:45 am plaintive wail into the November 6th dark went viral. For self-preservation, I only allow comments under these posts from paid subscribers—I left twitter and its unrelenting trolls and Russian bots the minute Elon Musk took over for the same reason—but what I didn’t realize is that trolls and bots can simply show up in and comment under a post of one of my posts. Doh. Which means this morning I woke up to hundreds of vile and unintentionally ironic messages from MAGA men mansplaining to me why my grief over the results of this election and call for support from men is stupid, why I’m stupid, and why all the other women feeling sad about these election results are stupid, too. Here’s just one of the many lovely and thoughtful messages I received. Plus an AI-generated image of a “cow towing” under it. You know, for no reason.

“Cow towing”

First I started erasing the messages and blocking each man, one by one, but then I quickly realized this would take hours, and you can’t kill off whole colonies of cockroaches by smushing each of them, one at a time. You have to set off a roach bomb, then leave the premises for several hours until the chemicals dissipate, and who has time for that right now? Plus cockroaches and misogynists will survive long after I’m dead, and we have work to do to make sure the women in this country are actually protected and not “protected whether we like it or not.”

So today, right now, here’s one actionable step you can take, aside from stocking up on Plan B and birth control pills, if you’re feeling hopeless about the results of this election: protect older women’s bodies and bones, too, by giving to the UCSF Pharmacology Discretionary Fund.

Why bones? And why this particular lab in the letter above? Because by age 80, 70% of women will have osteoporosis. 70% of us!!! Whether we like it or not. And the survival rate for women following a hip fracture is worse than most cancers: half will be dead in five years. And while men do get osteoporosis as well, hip fractures due to osteoporosis kill women in far greater numbers, and the disease has also been woefully under-studied for lack of funding. Funding which I can only imagine will further decrease if not abate completely under the next administration. Especially given that Orange Clown has vowed to put vaccine-denying RFK in charge of women’s health. (I’d laugh if I weren’t too busy crying.)

I refuse to pay for a subscription to a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, but if you have a subscription to the WSJ, just click this photo, and it will lead to the story.

In my research for this story in the Guardian on osteoporosis, I came across a study of CCN3, the so called maternal brain hormone, and I also interviewed Dr. Muriel Babey, the paper’s lead author. In a nutshell, CCN3 is produced by lactating mammals, to protect their bones while they’re nursing their young. Older and osteoporotic menopausal female mice who were given CCN3 completely built back their bone strength and reversed bone loss. In my humble opinion, CCN3 has the potential to be the cure for osteoporosis in human women, too, especially given the inefficiencies, need for medical “breaks,” and sometimes life-threatening side effects of many of the other pharmacological BandAids for osteoporosis.

But Dr. Babey and the other women studying this breakthrough hormone have had to move at a snail’s pace for dearth of funding.

So if you’re feeling as hopeless today as I am about the future of this country, women’s bodies, and women’s health, please donate whatever you can—I donated $100, but any amount, even $25, is a vote of confidence for their work and much appreciated by this all-women team—to Holly Ingraham’s lab.

Dr. Ingraham, who makes a cameo appearance in this interview I did with Dr. Babey (at timecode 13:53), is the lead researcher at UCSF who is in immediate and critical need of more funds to study the human applications of CCN3 in menopausal women. The majority of her funding comes from the NIH, but it is not enough to properly conduct the research they need to conduct in a timely fashion. And if you’re around my age, 58, you’re gonna want CCN3 sooner rather than later, especially if it works as well in human women as it does in female mice.

Look, maybe the image of a cow towing a tractor today is actually less of a joke and more unintentionally apt. Our fields need to be plowed. Our country’s tractor is broken, with no plans to repair it for at least another four years, if democracy holds, or heaven forbid longer if it doesn’t. Which leaves us lactating mammals, who hold up the world in so many other invisible ways already, to pull it along with our own brute strength.

We have the power to do this. We can each effectuate positive change in so many domains—women’s health and otherwise—baby step by baby step. It’s the only way forward. And when the world feels dark and bleak, let’s be the stars Kamala Harris mentioned in her concession speech: “Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”

Me last week, after scattering a friend’s wife’s ashes in Montauk. ©Townsend Davis