Kate Helen Downey
Kate Helen Downey is the host and creator of the podcast CRAMPED, and co-founder of NYC science comedy spot Caveat.
Describe your podcast in 10 words or less:
An investigation into why we know so little about period pain
What inspired you to create this series?
My own debilitating period cramps (I call them “death cramps”). For 22 years, I asked doctor after doctor what could be causing them and what could help me, and doctors would either shrug it off, tell me it was normal, or ask if I’d tried taking ibuprofen (I wish I had been able to respond with this meme but it didn’t exist yet and I had to make this one myself).
Over the years, I started opening up to other people about my death cramps, and I found A LOT of people who experienced the same thing. Enough people that it started to be very hard to believe doctors when they acted like they’d never heard of this before and couldn’t help me. It got more and more frustrating and obvious as I moved to bigger cities like New York and LA, and finally, like most research nerds pissed off about something very specific, I started a podcast.
You’ve produced some incredible podcasts (Wondery’s Diss & Tell, Glamorous Trash—to name a few). What has it been like stepping in front of the microphone?
First of all, thank you! I loved working on those shows. When I was planning the podcast, I was really worried about getting in front of the mic - I’m very comfortable behind the scenes, developing and shaping ideas and supporting the people doing the public-facing work. Once I started recording, that kind of just went away. I think that has a lot to do with the material - it turns out I’ve been saving up so much to say about cramps and the medical system, and saying it into a mic is very satisfying. If you asked me to just talk into a mic and be interesting, I’d get very self conscious. But if you want to hear about how the majority of medical studies are done on male rats and mice, you can’t shut me up. It’s always much easier for me to be in front of a mic when I have information that I’m excited to share.
What was the research process like? Did anything surprise you along the way?
EVERYTHING surprised me. Just how little we know about menstruation, a process that happens to about half the population for half their lives. It’s surprising to me how incurious science and medicine has been about period pain, which affects up to 90% of menstruating people. Historical things surprised me, like how many plants and herbs have been used for menstrual pain and have been passed down through generations of female healers, then lost.
I started my research by reading books like “For Her Own Good” by Barbara Ehrinreich and Deirdre English (a bedrock feminist history of women’s health first published in the 70s) and Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez. I had long evenings perusing medical studies on the NIH’s website, and frantically texting my scientist friends to make sure I understood them. I tried to answer a question as much as I could with research available to me via books or scientific studies, and when I hit a dead end, I’d find an expert to ask my questions to.
The show perfectly blends science, storytelling, and dark humor—how did you land on that tone, and why was it important to approach the topic that way?
Haha well I think a large part of that is just my personality, which is mostly science, storytelling, and dark humor. I would lose my mind if I had to research and digest and find a way to talk about this topic without humor.
I’ve wondered if the way I approach this topic is kind of naive - I’m basically asking “why are we all ok with women being in so much pain all the time??”, and like…we know about the patriarchy, right? But I’m weirdly fascinated by the fact that we all live in and operate as part of a system that we all agree SHOULD help everybody who’s in pain and needs help, but we also know that it doesn’t, and we just…keep going. So I feel like a little kid going “no but WHY?” over and over again until I understand where it all went wrong. And I think normal people maybe don’t need to understand unjust systems in this granular, specific way, but I do! I need to be angry in the correct direction, y’know?
How has hosting and producing CRAMPED impacted you personally?
It’s very lucky that I happened to choose a topic to create a podcast about where the number one thing we can do to improve the situation is talk more openly and publicly about the topic. Really makes me look like I planned that, but I didn’t.
First and foremost, I now have a diagnosis. After 22 years of being shrugged off and hitting dead ends with doctors, I finally know why I’m in debilitating pain for 1-2 days out of the month. I had to track down a specialist and pay SO much money, which I probably wouldn’t have done if I didn’t have a podcast keeping me accountable. It’s a common diagnosis, something that 1 in 10 people with uteruses have, and yet it takes on average 10 years to be diagnosed in the US. Which is INSANE.
For so many years in my teens and early 20s, I felt so alone and isolated about my period pain. I was in excruciating pain, and yet doctors were telling me nothing was wrong with me - it felt like my sense of reality was split. It felt like no one could help me, and this was just something I had to deal with alone and scared. Once I started talking to people around me about it and finding others who understood, that isolation burst, and it felt so amazing just to not be alone - even if none of us had more information or ways to treat it. Come to find out, there’s research that’s been published that the simple act of talking about period pain with other people who experience it MEASURABLY lowers the pain you experience!! Talking about our period pain IS pain relief, to some degree! So being able to offer this information to other people, so hopefully no one has to feel alone like I did, that’s the real mission for me.
What do you hope listeners take away from the show, and what conversations do you hope it sparks?
I hope I can deliver an understanding to people of just how little medicine actually knows about female bodies, and how stupid that is. It’s easy to go to a doctor with a problem and take their answer as the be-all-end-all, but ultimately doctors are just people, and they’re part of a deeply broken system that was never built for us in the first place. I want people to fully understand how much of an afterthought we are in medicine, so we can place our experiences in the medical system within the right context, and not blame ourselves in any way. There’s just so much information about our own bodies that we have to go out and get ourselves. Is that fair? No. But it’s crucial to our survival and our quality of life. So I want people to understand the stakes there, and hopefully provide some resources and directions people can go in to find the information so they can get what they ultimately need.
What didn’t I ask you that I should have?
What helps my period pain! My toolbox for period pain is deep and wide, and right now what’s helping the most is:
starting to take ibuprofen prophylactically (before my cramps start), 48 hours before I’m due to start my period
drinking red raspberry leaf tea the week before my period (studies show it can be as effective as ibuprofen if taken BEFORE cramps start)
taking a valium if the cramps are starting to get death-y
using period underwear or a pad instead of a cup or a tampon the whole first day
a wireless heating pad/TENS machine
Thanks, Kate!