Endometriosis is a disease afflicting up to 10% of women, hundreds of millions worldwide. It is the underlying cause of approximately 85% of cases of pelvic pain in women, and the cause of approximately half of all cases of female infertility. While that’s bad enough, endometriosis goes further still, accounting for high percentages of cases of gastrointestinal issues, and potentially spreading its impact to vital organs, such as the liver, lungs, and even the brain. The myriad symptoms of endometriosis can lead to permanent disability, physical and emotional agony, and years of life effectively lost.
 
So why do we hear so little about this dire condition? Endometriosis, despite its shocking commonality, is extremely difficult to diagnose, and curative surgery is difficult and time-consuming, making treatment for the disorder less than profitable for hospital systems and health insurers.
 
There are currently no approved drug treatments on the market for endometriosis, though hormone therapy is often utilized to some effect without addressing the underlying condition. This lack of viable treatment options may be due to lack of public awareness, which tends to correlate to research spending.
 
As an example, in 2022, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) spent $16 million on endometriosis research, less than an eighth of NIH’s spending on ovarian cancer, and a scant sixteenth of what was spent on prostate cancer. As NIH awards funding based on proposals from the researchers themselves, it appears little research is demanded and less is conducted.
 
It’s time to change that.
 
We will soon introduce a resolution not only designating March 2025 as Endometriosis Awareness Month in Pennsylvania, but also calling on Congress to request funding into the detection and treatment of endometriosis through the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program and any other avenues for designated medical research funding which they find prudent, and also to order a review of Health Care Procedure Coding System codes to ensure that the gold-standard surgical treatment – laparoscopic excision – is sufficiently reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid.
 
This disorder certainly affects someone you know, though they may not even know it – lack of public awareness leads the average patient in America to suffer for as many as ten years before receiving a diagnosis. Please join us in this work of raising awareness of this horrifying, disabling, and all-too-common yet unrecognized and understudied disease.