Women Deserve Better Care

Rethinking Women’s Healthcare

What if we stopped treating women like a collection of separate problems?

Women are often very good at carrying things.

Pain they have learned to live with.
Changes they were told were normal.
Exhaustion they were told was part of being a mother.
Anxiety they were told to manage.
A body that no longer feels familiar.
Experiences they haven't found the words to explain.

And when they finally ask for help, they are often sent from one place to another.

One provider looks at the pain.
Another looks at the hormones.
Another looks at the diagnosis.
Another looks at the mental health symptoms.

But who is looking at the woman experiencing all of it?

That is the question that led us to create Clementine.

Women Deserve to Be Heard Before They Are Treated.

We believe good healthcare begins with listening.

Not listening long enough to fill out an intake form…actually listening.

What happened before this started?
What has changed?
What have you already tried?
What does this feel like in your everyday life?
What are you afraid of?
What have you been told that never quite felt right?
What does your body remember, even if you don't consciously think about it anymore?

Too often, women become experts at explaining away their own experiences because they've been told there isn't a clear answer.

When something doesn't make sense, we believe it deserves more questions, not dismissal.

Sometimes the right next step is another medical evaluation.

Maybe that would be a referral to OBGYN, Psychiatry, Acupuncturist, or Bodywork.

Sometimes it is more education, more observation, or simply having someone take the time to look at the situation differently.

And sometimes it is several of those things.

The Body Doesn't Always Leave the Past Behind.

There are experiences that change us physically.

And there are experiences that change the way we relate to our bodies.

Consider a woman who has an emergency C-section after a traumatic birth.

Her baby is safe. The surgery is over. She is told she is recovering normally.

But her experience may not end when the incision closes.

There is the scar.

The changes in the abdominal wall.

The sensation of being touched in an area that may still feel unfamiliar.

The way she moves differently afterward.

The possibility of pain, tension, guarding, or altered sensation.

And then there is everything that happened around it.

Fear.
Loss of control.
An unexpected emergency.
A birth that didn't happen the way she imagined.
A medical environment where she may have felt powerless.

The physical experience and the emotional experience happened to the same woman.

So why would we expect her to experience the aftermath as two completely unrelated things?

At times, the Disconnect Happens Inside the Body.

After a difficult or traumatic experience, some women describe feeling disconnected from parts of themselves.

They may avoid looking at a scar.

Avoid being touched.

Avoid certain movements.

Avoid intimacy.

Avoid thinking about what happened.

They may feel uncomfortable in their own skin without being able to explain exactly why.

For some women, the body can become a reminder of an experience they would rather forget.

For others, the opposite happens: they feel almost nothing at all.

Both experiences deserve to be taken seriously.

At Clementine, we are interested in that space between what happened to you and how you experience your body now.

That does not mean assuming that every physical symptom comes from traumatic experiences.

It means being willing to ask whether the history matters.

Because sometimes it does.

We Don't Believe Healing Happens in Neat Categories.

This is where our approach begins to look different.

Megan works with the physical body.

Robin works in psychiatric mental health.

Those are different professions, different areas of expertise, and different scopes of practice.

We aren't trying to erase those distinctions.

We're trying to create a place where they can exist beside one another.

A woman shouldn't have to choose between acknowledging what is happening physically and acknowledging what she has experienced emotionally.

She shouldn't have to prove that her pain is “physical enough” to deserve attention.

And she shouldn't have to prove that her emotional experience is “serious enough” before someone takes it seriously.

There is room for both.

When the Body Carries What We've Been Through..

We don't mean that every physical problem is psychological.

And we don't mean that every emotional experience can be solved through bodywork.

We mean something much simpler:

You live in one body.

Your experiences happen within that body.

Stress can affect sleep, breathing, muscle tension, movement, digestion, and pain.

Pain can affect mood, concentration, relationships, sleep, and how much of life you participate in.

A traumatic experience can change the way someone feels about being touched, seen, moved, or cared for.

A major hormonal or reproductive transition can affect both how a woman feels physically and how she experiences herself emotionally.

These things don't need to be forced into one explanation.

They simply deserve to be considered together.

Care Should Adapt to the Woman.

One of the biggest problems we see in healthcare—and in wellness—is the assumption that there is a standard answer for a standard problem.

But women are not standard.

Two women can have the same diagnosis and completely different lives.

Two women can have the same surgery and completely different recoveries.

Two women can experience the same traumatic event and carry it differently.

So we don't begin with:

“Which treatment do we use?”

We begin with:

“What is actually happening here?”

Then we determine what kind of support makes sense.

Our notes describe this as intentional, individualized, personal, safe, and consensual care—and emphasize understanding more than the physical aspect alone when developing a plan.

What We Hope Changes..

We aren't interested in promising women that one appointment will fix everything.

Real change is rarely that simple.

What we want is for a woman to leave with more understanding than she came in with.

More language for what she is experiencing.

More awareness of her body.

More clarity about her options.

More confidence asking questions.

More information to make decisions.

And, when appropriate, the support of practitioners who understand that another perspective may be important.

This Is the Future We Want to Be Part Of.

We don't think the future of women's healthcare is one practitioner trying to treat everything.

We think it's better communication between people who know different things.

A massage therapist who knows when something requires another professional.

A psychiatric provider who understands that a woman's physical experience may matter to the conversation.

Future practitioners bringing additional areas of expertise.

Women who are educated enough to participate in decisions about their own care.

And a physical environment where these different disciplines don't have to operate as completely separate worlds.

That is what we are building at Clementine.

Because You Were Never Just One Thing.

You are not a diagnosis.

You are not a symptom.

You are not your trauma.

You are not your pain.

You are not your hormones.

You are not your mental health.

And you should not have to divide yourself into pieces in order to receive care.

We believe the next generation of women's healthcare will ask better questions, listen more carefully, and look at more of the story.

That's the kind of healthcare we want to help create.

Not more care.
Better-connected care.