Inside Look: Women’s Health Lab 2026
This year’s event, in partnership with Northwell’s Katz Institute for Women’s Health, discussed women’s health at a time when it couldn’t be more important.
Reported by Women's Health Magazine.
Women's health is not a niche topic. It is, as Women's Health executive editor Abigail Cuffey put it at the third annual Women's Health Lab, "the most pressing conversation of our time." The full-day symposium — co-presented with Cosmopolitan, Delish, ELLE, Oprah Daily, and Prevention, and held in partnership with Northwell Health and its Katz Institute for Women's Health — brought together doctors, researchers, patients, advocates, and public figures to work through the issues that medicine has historically underserved: cardiovascular health, brain health, menopause, respiratory disease, mental health, and more. According to Women's Health Magazine, the through-line of every conversation was the same urgent premise: women deserve better, and the system needs to catch up.
What the Experts (and the Famous) Actually Said
The morning opened with a conversation about strength — not the gym kind. ABC News chief medical correspondent and cardiologist Tara Narula, MD, alongside Tony Award-winning actress Sutton Brown, reframed it entirely: "Strength is resilience." From there, the day moved through sessions that connected lived experience to clinical reality. Actress Laura Dern spoke about caregiving for her mother, Diane Ladd, through seven years of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis before Ladd's death in November 2025 — alongside pulmonologist Rany Condos, MD, and a patient navigating the same diagnosis. Jessica Capshaw and Margarita Oks, MD, of Lenox Hill Hospital/Northwell Health drilled into fatigue as a diagnostic signal, with retired nurse Susan P. sharing her experience living with primary biliary cholangitis, a rare autoimmune liver disease that chronic exhaustion often masks. Meanwhile, endocrinologist Avani Sinha, MD, and dermatologic surgeon Michelle Henry, MD, got specific about what GLP-1 medications actually do to your skin — because that conversation was long overdue.
Brain health brought some of the day's most personal moments. Maria Shriver spoke with Cuffey about Alzheimer's disease and why women need to treat cognitive health with the same seriousness as heart health — a framing seconded by Jennifer Oleksiw of Eli Lilly, who noted the company's 35-plus years of Alzheimer's research and urged everyone over 55 to initiate that conversation with their doctor now. Keke Palmer covered entirely different ground with Gayle King — from reframing joy as resistance, to the proposed renaming of PCOS to PMOS, to what integrity actually looks like in practice. WNBA Champion Chelsea Gray brought it back to the body: motherhood, athletic identity, and why the league needs stronger protections for parents.
The closing argument came from two directions. Stacey E. Rosen, MD, executive director of the Katz Institute for Women's Health and volunteer president of the American Heart Association, called out the foundational flaw still embedded in medicine — that women continue to be treated with drugs tested predominantly on men. And Cuffey ended the day with a direct challenge to everyone in the room: don't keep this here. Take one fact, one shifted perspective, one stigma you're ready to drop — and pass it on.
One day of panels doesn't fix systemic gaps in women's healthcare, but it does something medicine often skips: it treats women like they can handle the full truth about their own bodies.
Read the original at Women's Health Magazine.
