Period, pain, endo and You feeling alone. Not _any_more.

Or why Izzy, the chatbot, could be your best buddy tackling issues around reproductive health.

Period tracking is important in women’s lives for many different reasons. When creating Izzy, a supporting companion for women, we already knew that we wouldn´t stop here. Many users requested us to go beyond menstruation and add symptom tracking as a feature. Some of these girls and women are suffering from strong menstrual pain. This pain can even go beyond the reproductive cycle and seriously affect everyday life, an experience made by patients with the disease endometriosis.

“Endometriosis feels like a ripple of sudden, twinge-like pain….If you need to imagine the pain, think of the raw, sharp pain of a toothache, and imagine that feeling stuck perpetually somewhere (or perhaps many places) deep inside your abdomen.” Michelle on EndoHope

Menstrual pain is often considered a ”women´s problem” that is given by nature. Something we just have to accept. Indeed, menstrual pain is common: depending on the country, up to 81% of menstruating women claim to experience painful periods. But ‘common’ does not necessarily mean normal, especially when the pain becomes unbearable.

Why is endometriosis a big deal at all?

The disease is far from being rare: one in 10 women of reproductive age has endometriosis and it is also seen post menopausal. In endometriosis, tissue similar to the one that normally grows inside the uterus occurs in other abdominal regions, such as the ovaries, the fallopian tubes (that carry the egg cell from your ovaries to the uterus), the area behind the uterus, and the bowels or bladder. It reacts to the hormones of our monthly cycle and can cause a number of symptoms. Most common is pain that appears in different forms: very painful menstrual cramps, pain in the lower back and pelvis, and intestinal pain. A survey we carried out with around 100 women suffering from endometriosis revealed abdominal pain to be the most common form, experienced by 96% of our participants. 83% of them reported severe menstrual cramps and 70% felt pain during or after sexual intercourse. Endometriosis can further lead to bleeding or spotting inbetween periods and even cause infertility in 30–50% of endometriosis patients.

The incredibly high prevalence seems hard to imagine, since most people claim they have never heard of endometriosis before. Affected women are often unaware of being sick and the average time until they get properly diagnosed is 7–10 years. The problem is that symptoms are diverse and even many doctors are not informed well enough about endometriosis. Jessica Duffin has been living with endometriosis since her teenage years. She runs the blog This EndoLife and a podcast to empower other women with this disease to live a happier life.

“ I know first hand how endometriosis patients can go dismissed and undiagnosed for years, and even not taken seriously when they are diagnosed. ” Jessica Duffin

Mission Impossible? We don’t think so.

Severe menstrual pain is not okay and if it seriously affects life quality — relationships, work, school, and normal day-to-day life — it is time to change something. Along our journey with Izzy, we constantly improve the product and extend its content. Since endometriosis is not a harmless “women’s problem” but rather a serious disease, we want to send out Izzy to raise attention and support women who suffer from recurring pain. So we recently extended Izzy´s features by pain tracking and pain management and added extensive content on endometriosis. To enable early stage detection, Izzy even offers an endo quick test.

The general response to Izzy´s new pain management was overwhelmingly positive. Jessica Duffin kindly shared her opinion:

“I think Izzy is an amazing tool and resource for those suffering with endometriosis or suspect they may have the condition. I often find myself wanting to track my symptoms, but find a lot of the period tracking apps I have used don’t provide the options needed to log everything that’s happening to my body. Of course, trying to do this manually is tricky because you have to keep paper or a diary with you at all times, wheres Izzy is just on your phone.

This could really be pivotal to being able to demonstrate to doctors what’s happening to our bodies and just how severe our symptoms are…. Having a tool that helps us prepare our information and really track what’s happening arms us with the knowledge and confidence to communicate our needs to doctors.”

We are on the right track(ing)

To receive the most constructive feedback we invited beta-testers who suffer from the disease to give us quality feedback. It made us happy to hear their widely positive opinions: 84% of our testers rated Izzy´s new features as helpful. As one of Izzy’s fans said:

“This is a godsend. Thank you so much for this. I don’t feel so alone anymore”.

Please share your opinion on Izzy’s pain tracking as well by filling out this survey. We also learned that having a caring companion like Izzy is of huge value and our product successfully provides support to women who suffer from pain. And this is the mission that we work for: that women never have to feel alone again.

“Izzy is the perfect tracker, educator, and robot lady friend”

…was recently posted by Fela M´Tima Dunfee on Endotwins, a non profit that publishes newsletters each month relating to Endometriosis. Her powerful and touching articles are definitely worth a read!

Izzy is not just a simple friend but rather a superhero in the pocket whom you can always count on. She dismantles the shame that is around reproductive health discussions, and we know that she will succeed in helping many women in the world to not feel alone but always supported.

If you like what you read be sure to 💚 it — to the writer it means everything.