Marian Steininger, MD

I am incredibly proud of going out on my own and creating the business on my own, especially in the sphere of healthcare where everything is becoming so corporate, so big. Corporate medicine is getting in the way of providers being able to just treat our patients, to just listen to our patients, to meet people where they are and hold their hand on their journey and their next steps. The thing I'm proudest of is kind of stepping off that path and creating a company that allows me to cut through all of that and just be present with people where they are, and help use my knowledge to help them reach a better quality of life. I don't view menopause necessarily as a problem to be fixed. It's not an illness to be cured. It is a normal process in life. And so it's more of a journey that we can go through together. I can use my wisdom and my experience to help people.

I always loved science and math growing up. I was blessed with wonderful teachers who helped inspire me to just dive in and fly as far as I could, as well as my parents. I had a lot of mission experiences when I was younger. I was very lucky to see the need in the world. Those whom much is given, much is expected, so I took that to heart and said, okay, well, let me use the tools that I am best at. I'm good at people, understanding people, communicating with people. I'm good at science and translating science and math to people. So, how about I take that and try to help people in the ways that I can? And that led directly to becoming a physician. My program director, George Wendell, was the reason I became an OBGYN. Him and Barbara Hoffman are the two reasons I went into OBGYN. Both of them are so grounded, patient, and have a deep sense of self and just an even-keel patience of character. They are so dedicated to their profession and slowly chipping away at whatever problem is in front of them and changing the culture of medicine, that being around them, I couldn't do anything but choose my profession the way it is.

When I was younger, I wish I had known how powerful networking is and how important it is to continue those multi-generational relationships and to connect with mentors, and to not be afraid to call upon them and ask them questions, even later in life. There are so many young people now that I am older, there are so many young people that don't reach out to me, even when I open the door. And I wish I could tell my younger self, don't be afraid to utilize that relationship, that wisdom, that that mentor has. You are not a burden when you ask for help from somebody who's walked that path before.

Because I am new and just started this company, what I need is exposure, more than anything. I just need people to know I exist. One of my tenets is education and empowerment. At any time, I have a prepped menopause in the workplace lecture ready. I am very grateful for my colleagues who are in perimenopausal and menopausal medicine putting out incredible research. Especially in the last decade, there's been a lot coming out, and a lot of new tools that we can use. But all of that conversation takes time, and I realized as a mainstream OBGYN delivering babies and taking call, my schedule just didn't have time to have the in-depth conversation and the empowerment and education that is really needed to have a perimenopause menopausal conversation. The research is coming out so fast, which is beautiful and wonderful. It's like drinking from a fire hose because we're trying to catch up on 50 to 70 years of research that has happened in every other specialty of medicine but hasn't happened yet until now on menopause.

If I could have a thesis for life, my mission statement is I want to leave the world slightly better for me having been in it. And that, to me, is what gardening is, right? It's cultivating and nurturing something better. When I was at my lowest moment, when I didn't know if I was going to survive breast cancer or not, I didn't know if I was gonna die at my age if it was gonna defeat me or not. Gardening fed my soul so much, because it gave me such hope to plant things that could possibly outlive me, that could bear fruit in the future. I am on the board of directors for Send Hope, a nonprofit that runs a children's home on the Mosquito Coast in Honduras. We help medically fragile children who their parents don't have the resources to care for. We help babies who would otherwise die of a cleft lip, cleft palate. We also run a nutrition program because we found the issue was the children would starve, and the parents would preferentially feed the children until the parents died and the children became orphans. So in order to keep the number of orphans down, we started feeding the children so the parents could concentrate on feeding themselves and keeping themselves healthy to care for the children. We change lives. That's a powerful statement, and it sounds corny, but it's awesome.