A patient once told me she had been having severe period pain for eleven years. Every month, the kind of pain that kept her in bed. And for eleven years, her mother, her mother-in-law, her neighbours, all told her the same thing: "It is normal. We all go through it. Bear it."
She had endometriosis. It was diagnosable. It was treatable. Eleven years.
I am a dentist by training, which means I am also someone who has spent years watching people delay care because they were taught that pain is something you earn your right to complain about only after you have tried everything else first. Women especially. Women in India most especially.
The health myths that circulate in our communities are not harmless folklore. They are barriers that sit between a woman and a diagnosis she deserves.
Women are told not to enter the kitchen or the temple during menstruation because they are "impure." Girls are told that period pain is normal and that if it is severe, they are simply weak. Women with iron deficiency are told to eat more and rest more, which is good advice that treats a symptom and not the condition. Women with thyroid disorders go years without knowing the word "thyroid" because the fatigue, the hair fall, the weight changes, they get explained away as stress, as age, as "you are just not taking care of yourself."
I cannot tell you how many times I have heard that last one.
This is what the Myth ya Sach series at Udaan Foundation is built to address. Not in textbook language. Not in the clinical register I use in a consultation room, which is correct but is not always useful in a community where women did not finish secondary school. In the language of a conversation between two women where one of them happens to know medicine.
Each episode picks one belief that is common enough to be dangerous and addresses it directly. Is period pain normal? Here is when it is and here is when it is not. Is anaemia just tiredness? Here is what anaemia actually is and here is what to ask your doctor. Should you stop eating certain foods when you are pregnant? Let us talk about that specifically.
When a woman gets information she can actually use, she uses it. She does not go back to the old answer. She asks better questions at the next doctor's visit. She does not let her daughter be told the same thing she was told.
That is the only thing I want from this work. Better questions. Because a woman asking better questions is a woman who will find better answers.