Most cardiologists are trained to look for patterns but what they were not trained to question is the baseline those patterns were built on.
In a recent episode of Blindspot Capital, I sat down with Carolin Lerchenmüller, Switzerland’s first Chair of Gender Medicine and one of the most quietly disruptive voices in modern cardiology.
Much of what we call “normal” in cardiology was never designed around female biology. That realization came to Carolin in many moments during her career. One of those moments came from a patient whose symptoms refused to fit the textbook.
She was a young woman experiencing episodes of severe heart palpitations. She sought care and underwent multiple invasive cardiac testing but each time, the tests came back inconclusive.
She kept repeating one detail: the episodes always happened right before her period. For a long time, that detail was treated as incidental until someone listened closely enough to take it seriously.
When clinicians finally timed the diagnostic test to the precise hormonal window, the palpitations appeared immediately. It could be localized and treated. And once it was, it never came back. Her biology hadn’t been mysterious. It had simply been ignored.
That story captures a much larger blind spot. When hormonal biology is excluded from cardiology, disease doesn’t disappear. It becomes harder to see, harder to diagnose, and more expensive to treat. Health systems absorb avoidable costs and preventable risk accumulates silently over decades.
We talk about:
Why pregnancy complications like preeclampsia and gestational hypertension are early predictors of lifetime cardiovascular risk
Why menopause represents a critical (and largely missed) window for cardiovascular prevention
Why cardiovascular disease remains the number one killer of women globally and why most women still don’t know it
This episode doesn’t offer easy answers but it offers something better: a reframing.
If you’ve ever been told your symptoms were atypical, vague, or just part of “being a woman.”
If you’re navigating pregnancy, perimenopause, or menopause and wondering what’s happening beneath the surface.
Or if you care about how science, medicine, and capital decide which bodies are worth designing for, this conversation will change how you see the heart.
🎧 Watch the full episode on YouTube
📄 Learn more about the Women’s Heart Health Program at University Hospital Zurich
📚 Follow Professor Lerchenmüller on LinkedIn
And share this episode. With a founder. With a policymaker. With a friend.
