Female Physicians See a Problem and Launch a New Business to Fix It

By HALLIE SMITH | Aug 29th, 2018

Necessity is the mother of invention. Accordingly, these physicians’ healthcare-related inventions came out of specific needs — those of their patients and their own, as women juggling motherhood and medical practice.

For all of them, the motivation to make their invention a reality was that it had the potential to help their patients.

...Dr. Shannon Klingman, an OBGYN, wanted to decrease incorrect diagnoses with Lume, a deodorant for underarms and private parts. After seeing how many patients were being sent away with antibiotics to treat bacterial vaginosis, Dr. Klingman had a hunch that not all of them were not correctly diagnosed. For some, their problem was simply that they had an external odor in reaction to normal daily activities. Dr. Klingman was familiar with women coming in complaining of the odor, and she realized she herself was experiencing the symptom one day at work, around the time she and her husband were trying to conceive.

“I knew I didn’t have BV (bacterial vaginosis) and I said, ‘This is an external odor,’” Dr. Klingman remembers.

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