by Dr. Meghan Blake, co-founder of Good Kitty
I never planned to start a company. I’m a physician. I spent the first decade of my career working as a radiologist, analyzing imaging for athletes at Cal Berkeley Sports and the Oakland A’s, and I was content. Co-founding a women’s wellness brand was nowhere on my list.
But that was before I got eleven urinary tract infections within the span of a single year.
That number alone was shocking, but even more baffling was that I had no idea why. I had done everything women are told to do to prevent UTIs from happening. I drank plenty of water. I went to the bathroom after sex. I took antibiotics, then more antibiotics, then antibiotics prescribed simply to head off the next round.
While this was happening, I also watched my gut health unravel, developed infections that stopped responding to the usual drugs, and slowly found myself dreading intimacy, which is something that I have always believed should be an ordinary and healthy part of life.
But these problems, as serious as they were, weren’t actually the worst part. The worst part was how completely normal everyone but me seemed to think my situation was.
A Problem Hiding In Plain Sight
Even as a doctor, I got the same shrug so many women get when they seek out advice on what’s happening to them. The prevailing attitude seemed to be that what I was experiencing was just an occupational hazard of womanhood.
To be fair, UTIs among women are common. More than half of all women will have a UTI in their lifetime, and one in every eight women experience three or more UTIs every year. These are not rare events.
But in spite of how common UTIs are, much of the guidance for women who get them amounts to little more than telling us we need to learn to live with the discomfort.
Sadly, that’s what many of us do. Some of us stop dating, or avoid intimacy altogether. We learn to live with constant low-level anxiety or cycle constantly through prescriptions instead of asking the one question that could help us: why is this happening in the first place?
But my medical background and the situation I was in put me in a unique position: I had the means to investigate what I was being told and see if there was more to the story.
As it turned out, there was.
A Blind Spot with a Price Tag in the Billions
The more I looked at available research, the clearer it became to me that recurrent UTIs are rarely just a bladder problem. They often point towards an imbalance elsewhere in the body, such as the microbiome, hormones, or the immune system. What’s more, I learned that taking round after round of antibiotics can actually make these imbalances worse.
What I kept coming up against was the sheer scale of the problem. The fact that UTIs affect millions of women every year means they cost our healthcare system billions of dollars annually. And yet, the medical community doesn’t seem to consider this a priority. Instead of funding further research and innovation, our culture tends to treat UTIs among women as too intimate to discuss and not severe enough to prioritize.
There is no way to explain this except as part of a cultural blind spot that has persisted throughout our medical history. Until the 1990’s, most drug trials were based solely on male subjects. That means we built the bulk of our medical knowledge on male bodies.
In that context, it’s no wonder that so many women’s conditions remain so poorly understood. Recurrent UTIs are merely one of countless problems living in the gap this prejudice has created.
The Rewards of Fulfilling a Need Everyone Else Has Ignored Go Well Beyond Business
It would have been easy to get angry about this disparity, but I’ve always believed that determination is a more productive emotion. So my co-founder and I decided we were going to do something about it.
The idea was to build a company that approached women’s intimate health without shame, embarrassment, or apology. We wanted a way to publicly acknowledge that sex, pleasure, and quality of life matter to women, and show that it was possible to prevent recurrent infections without relying on endless antibiotics and their downstream consequences.
That’s how Good Kitty was born. Instead of focusing on the antibiotics that UTI-causing bacteria were clearly evolving to ignore, we developed a supplement aimed at blocking this bacteria while supporting the bladder lining and rebalancing the microbiome.
Ironically, however, the process of founding and growing Good Kitty has taught me something much bigger than how to prevent UTIs. My experience as an out-of-left-field founder has connected me to other women in ways I never could have imagined.
I’ve seen firsthand how many women have been carrying symptoms, frustrations, and health concerns that someone told them were “normal.” And I am encouraged to see another cultural shift slowly beginning to take place, as more and more women refuse to accept that answer.
In this way, my experience in women’s wellness perfectly illustrates a lesson that applies to business ventures in practically every industry: progress doesn’t automatically happen whenever a problem is identified. It only occurs when people decide they are no longer willing to ignore one.
Dr. Meghan Blake is a physician and a co-founder of Good Kitty, a women’s wellness company focused on intimate and urinary wellness. Board certified in diagnostic radiology and fellowship-trained in sports medicine imaging, she spent the first decade of her career in clinical practice before turning her attention to the overlooked science of women’s health. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
