Why Menopause Patches Are Stuck in the Past & How Lorai Health Plans to Change That

Millions of women rely on hormone therapy patches to survive menopause, yet Big Pharma has essentially decided that fixing the global patch shortage isn't profitable enough. What happens when the system fails women, and two midlife founders decide to rewrite the rules of healthcare themselves? In this episode, Maaike sits down with Johanna Wicks, co-founder of Lorai Health, to expose the frustrating reality behind the global patch shortage and the regulatory question marks surrounding decades-old formulas. Johanna shares her own harrowing battle with undiagnosed perimenopause and reveals Lorai's ambitious, unconventional two-patch strategy to disrupt the market, navigate the brutal world of female-founder funding, and secure a shocking quarter-million-dollar lifeline. If you are ready for a masterclass in science, fury, and pure resilience, this is an episode you cannot afford to miss. Tune in now to find out exactly how Lorai Health plans to get patches back on the shelves in record time.Key Takeaways:Find out what two years of unexplained symptoms, repeated doctor visits, and a diagnosis that should have come much sooner taught Johanna and how it completely rewrote the path her career would take Discover the uncomfortable truth behind why menopause hormone therapy patches are in chronic global shortage and why the pharmaceutical companies that could solve it keep looking the other wayLearn what Laorai Health's two-patch strategy actually involves and why the timeline for getting a better patch into women's hands is shorter than you might expect Find out why manufacturing a hormone therapy patch is far more complicated than it sounds, and how a surprisingly small number of facilities worldwide are even equipped to do it Learn what Johanna and her co-founder Raisa experienced when they took their vision to venture capital and why the reality of female founders in the funding world is even more sobering than the statistics suggest Find out how a GoFundMe, a Channel Nine news story, and a stranger on the Gold Coast set off a chain of events that resulted in a quarter-million-dollar donation and what it signals about where true support for women's health actually comes from Discover why Australia's sophisticated investor rules may be quietly shutting the very women who believe in Lorai Health out of the opportunity to back it and why Johanna thinks the whole system needs a rethink