Dr. Nasha Winters was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer at 19, after years of conditions like endometriosis and PCOS that doctors treated with drugs instead of investigating root causes. Her illness led her to study how life circumstances and biology intertwine, and now she helps patients build personalized treatment plans rather than accept standard protocols.
Chapters
How did you get into oncology and why? I got there because of my own journey. So at the age of 19, just 2 weeks shy of my 20th birthday, I was diagnosed with end-stage terminal ovarian cancer. What? Been 6 months in and out of the ER. I started menstruating at the age of 9. No one questioned that at that timeframe. I started on the birth control pill at 11 to deal with my PCOS, my endometriosis. By the time I was 14, I had cervical dysplasia. 16, I was diagnosed with IBS. I was diagnosed with, um, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. I had a lot of thyroid issues, cystic acne, which was related to the PCOS diagnosis. I was on a lot of different pharmaceuticals to just deal with all of those symptoms. And the weirdest part is I say that out loud and I do not sound like I was a healthy person, but no one ever, myself included, thought I was unhealthy. It was just like, oh, here's a script for that. Just take that, you'll be fine. And so it was so normalized that I never asked why, and, and I just trusted the doctors. For me, it became a journey of curiosity, of asking different questions, of expecting different answers, and of persistence and resilience and resourcefulness, which has been also my life story. It's not like there's one way and there's not one way for every person. And so that's where my expertise is, is helping people understand the biology and the biography relationship to understand the, the why you're expressing in this moment to help then determine the patterns to determine the best how to deal with it in this moment and to iterate and adjust accordingly. It's not just like, get on this one thing and do this one thing. It takes a lot. To examine one's life externally and internally to know how to move the next path forward.
