Dr. Léger’s new Women’s Health Program at Extension Health hopes to rewrite women’s health.
Extension Health
“Your Labs Look Normal.”
You’d think that’s good news. Only it’s not — not when your body feels like it belongs to a stranger, you’re losing enough hair in the shower to make a wig, and skipping a meal somehow translates to gaining 5 lbs of water weight around your midsection. And don’t even get me started on the luteal phase. Since when was I only a functioning human being for half the month?
Conversations with the women in my life made me realize I wasn’t alone. Many of us were unwell, just not unwell enough to receive a diagnosis from our primary care doctors.
For Dr. Kathleen Léger, that’s a systemic failure and a fixable one.
“The major issue with traditional Western allopathic medicine is this: we’re taught really well what normal looks like, and really well what abnormal looks like and how to treat it. But there’s a huge gap. We’re not taught how to prevent normal from becoming abnormal,” she said, in a sit-down interview in New York.
Standard of care looks at your numbers, which are based on population averages, not your individual baseline. A TSH that’s normal for someone else may be too high for you, indicating you’re actually hypothyroid. That’s why, Dr. Léger says, it’s so important to listen to the patient and address symptoms, not just look at numbers.
The problem runs deeper than clinical habit. For most of modern medical history, the default human body in research has been male. Women weren’t legally required to be included in clinical trials until 1993. This means that decades of drug dosages, diagnostic criteria and treatment protocols were developed on men and then applied to women by default. The consequences of that are still being untangled.
Conditions that present differently in women, like heart disease, were routinely misdiagnosed because the “classic” symptoms were classic only for men. The clitoris wasn’t fully mapped and published until March 2026. It’s one of the least studied organs in the human body. Endometriosis takes an average of 7 to 10 years to diagnose. Autoimmune diseases disproportionately affect women. The gaps in women’s healthcare didn’t happen by accident. They were built in, one male study participant at a time.
The Doctor Who Became the Patient
Dr. Léger isn’t just an advocate for women’s health in theory. She’s lived it.
“I was diagnosed with PCOS when I was 17,” she says. “I remember the care I received was very abrupt. The doctor said, ‘okay, you’re gonna start birth control pills,’ and that was it. What they didn’t say was that PCOS is actually associated with numerous other conditions, including metabolic syndrome, increased risk for endometrial cancer, hyperandrogenism, mood disorders and obesity. PCOS is often limited to complications with fertility or abnormal menstrual cycles, but it’s much more complex than that.”
Dr. Léger learned the full picture of her own condition while she was in medical school, years after her diagnosis.
According to the World Health Organization, between 8 and 13% of women of reproductive age suffer from PCOS. Dr. Léger says roughly 70% go undiagnosed worldwide. For a condition that touches everything from metabolism to mental health to cancer risk, that’s not a gap in awareness. It’s a crisis.
“Women have been historically neglected in the healthcare space,” she says plainly. “We make up half the population. Preventative care for women has been severely lacking for a long time.”
That conviction is the reason she created the Women’s Health program at Extension Health, a New York-based practice built on the belief that women deserve medicine that anticipates their health needs, before the first set of symptoms even appears.
A Program Built Around the Whole Woman
The Women’s Health program at Extension Health has two arms. The first, Future Her, is designed for women 35 and under – most of whom are healthy but all of whom are building a roadmap.
“We’re ensuring we catch things like PCOS and endometriosis early, because those conditions come with a whole host of other health issues and should be diagnosed and tracked as soon as possible,” Dr. Léger explains. Baseline diagnostics include comprehensive biomarker panels and an extensive family health history covering thyroid conditions, cardiovascular disease and cancer history. The point isn’t just to screen. It’s to establish what your normal looks like, so that when you enter perimenopause, you’re not starting from zero.
The second arm addresses perimenopause and beyond, a phase that arrives earlier than most women expect and carries consequences that extend far beyond hot flashes. Dr. Léger cites a striking set of statistics about high-performing women in this phase: 42% report reduced career ambition, 27% don’t pursue promotions due to lack of energy and depression becomes 2 to 4 times more likely. The peak of the perimenopause-menopause transition also coincides with the highest rate of women-initiated divorce.
“The women I treat are inspirational, in every aspect of their lives. They are used to being exceptional,” she says. “But a major blind spot I often see in high-performing women is self-blame. When they’re not feeling well, they chalk it up to not taking care of themselves enough. And even when I tell them it’s truly not their fault, they have a hard time believing me.”
That disbelief, too, is something the medical system built.
Why We Blame Ourselves
Many high-performing women are conditioned to believe that if something feels “off,” the problem must be them. Not their hormones. Not their thyroid. Not burnout. Just a lack of discipline. So instead of pausing, they push harder.
Jhanelle Peters, a psychotherapist I spoke with for this piece, sees this pattern constantly in her practice. “A lot of us grew up in environments that praised pushing through the mud,” she says. “We were taught that there’s a bigger reward waiting if we can just keep going, even when we’re tired, depleted, and running on empty.” Rest was rarely modeled as part of success. Instead, it was framed as weakness – or worse, laziness. “But the reality is, when you keep going without checking in, you don’t arrive at the finish line fulfilled,” Peters says. “You arrive burnt out, exhausted, and disconnected from yourself.”
The connection to the medical system is direct. When decades of research have overlooked how women’s bodies actually work, and cultural conditioning teaches women to push through discomfort, self-blame becomes the default. “It feels easier to think ‘I need to do more’ than to ask, ‘What does my body need right now?'” Peters says. “Reframing that question can change everything.”
What Comes Next
When I ask Dr. Léger what question she wishes more women were asking, she doesn’t hesitate. “Why were concerns regarding women’s health dismissed for so long, and what are we doing to ensure they don’t continue to be ignored in the future? It’s a loaded question. But when you try to answer it, it actually points you in the right direction toward what needs to be done next.”
For her, that answer is the program itself. For the rest of us, it might start with refusing to accept “your labs look normal” as the end of the conversation.