Behind By Her Word

I’m Emma. I’m the woman who’s asked ChatGPT whether magnesium actually does anything, sent my sister podcasts about the benefits of staring at the sun first thing in the morning, and spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out whether fertility wearables are revolutionary or just really good marketing.

Before I became said woman described, I grew up in Hawaii (yes, I know). During which time my mom had a cough for twelve years. Doctors chalked up to allergies and asthma from the humidity and foliage, and she’d always go home with a new inhaler. When I was 18, and about to leave for college, she was diagnosed with leiomyosarcoma in her abdomen, a rare soft tissue cancer. She spent the next five years fighting it.

Losing my mom changed the way I think about health. It made me realize how much of healthcare depends on asking the right questions—and how hard it is to ask questions you didn’t know existed.

We have more information now than ever before: AI, wearables, supplements, TikTok, startups, studies, and endless opinions.

But information is not the same as clarity. And having access to answers doesn’t help much if nobody tells you what questions are worth asking in the first place.

That’s why I started By Her word. For my mom. For the girl I was when she was sick. And for the woman I am now. The one trying to separate evidence from marketing, possibility from probability, and genuinely useful information from noise.

I am not a doctor. I’m a researcher, strategist, and lifelong question-asker (I can be very annoying about it—truly a little sister at heart). I studied Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford—which taught me to ask not just what the evidence says, but who built the system it lives in and why.

My goal here is to track the science, interview the founders, and follow the money—and translate what I find into something you can actually use.

Because sometimes the question you don’t know to ask can matter more than the answer you’re given.