ENDOMARCH DAY 2026 – SATURDAY, MARCH 28, 2025
Global Endometriosis March to End Endometriosis Healthcare Inequities
Join tens of thousands of Endometriosis Resistance Fighters Survivors and their families from around the world for the 12th Annual Worldwide EndoMarch Virtual March, being held online on Saturday, March 28, 2026, as we unite together for #EndoMarch2026, to demand an end to the decades-long Endometriosis healthcare inequities that are causing so much loss of life and other severe harm to Endometriosis Survivors on a global scale.
ENDOMARCH 2025 CALL TO ACTION – CHANGE THE MED SCHOOL CURRICULA
Here’s the text rewritten in past tense:
ENDOMARCH 2025 CALL TO ACTION – CHANGE THE MED SCHOOL CURRICULA
In LAST year’s Call to Action, we focused on outreach to medical schools and medical societies from all disciplines, to help expedite the global campaign to change the outdated and discriminatory medical school curricula around the world that was one of the root causes of perpetuating harmful endometriosis & adenomyosis myths, year after bloody year.
Participants were also able to interact with leading endometriosis surgeons and advocates from around the world, as well as learn about the incredible advocacy work of Endometriosis organizations from 70+ countries, who fought for urgently-needed health care policy reforms and standards of care guidelines that reflected patient-identified needs.
TAG US ONLINE
On EndoMarch Day, Saturday, March 29, 2025, participants tagged us on Instagram (@wwendomarch) or on TikTok (@worldwide_endomarch) to help share their views and join forces with hundreds of thousands of advocates around the world who participated that year in the Global EndoMarch Movement.
HASHTAGS
#EndoMarch2025 #Endometriosis #EndoEqualityNow #EndEndoInequality #EndoJusticeNow #EndometriosisReformsNow #changetheguidelines #changethecurricula #UpdateMedSchoolEndoEdu #ForwardWeGo
ABOUT ENDOMETRIOSIS, A WHOLE-BODY, SEVERE CHRONIC CONDITION
Endometriosis was an incurable, whole-body (systemic) chronic, inflammatory disease that could potentially cause incapacitating pain anywhere in the body & any time of the month, along with potentially multi-organ failure, infertility, and other severe and sometimes life-threatening medical consequences if inadequately treated.
Described as one of the top ten most painful conditions on record, Endometriosis was also potentially one of the most destructive chronic diseases known to medicine, reigning as the leading cause of school absences in girls and a leading cause of hospitalization and severe disability worldwide in women, girls, and persons assigned female at birth. (An unmeasured number of cis men, intersex, transgender, and non-binary individuals also suffered from endometriosis & continued to face especially onerous barriers to proper care).
Contrary to popular beliefs, Endometriosis was not a reproductive tract disease or “just a bad period”, but one which could potentially cause severe chronic symptoms throughout the entire body, such as system-wide crippling pain, severe chronic fatigue, immune & endocrinologic dysfunction, and damage to multiple organs and tissues, including the bowel, bladder, ureters, diaphragm, muscles, musculoskeletal structures, nerves, lungs, and liver.
UNLAWFUL DISCRIMINATION & BARRIERS TO CARE CAUSING PREVENTABLE HARM
Serious barriers to adequate care and a broken health care system also contributed to significantly worse health outcomes for people with Endometriosis, including multiple failed surgeries, multiple failed medications that caused more damage & severe side effects, and even so-called never events of actual wrong-organ surgeries (such as removing perfectly healthy organs while leaving the actual diseased tissue behind).
Many of these preventable adverse outcomes were the result of decades-long dismissive, discriminatory treatment which left the vast majority of patients facing years of outright discriminatory denials or insurmountable barriers to specialist, gold standard care because Endometriosis continued to be dismissed as ‘normal’ or ‘just a bad period’, when its potential for body-wide destruction also included increased risk of many life-threatening comorbidities, including an almost 4 to 10-fold increased chance of developing certain cancers (it was associated with approximately 10% of ovarian cancers, the most deadly form of gynecologic cancer in the U.S.).
Life-threatening kidney failure, life-threatening chronic lung collapse, increased risk of life-threatening cardiovascular disease, increased risk of early onset neurodegenerative disease, crippling degenerative bone disease, severe tooth decay, loss of many organs & fertility, and even preventable premature mortality, were all also part of the potential life sentence that was endometriosis.
African American Endometriosis sufferers experienced even worse outcomes than White Endometriosis patients, including higher mortality rates of certain Endometriosis-associated ovarian cancers and significantly longer diagnostic delays. Nonbinary, intersex, and Endo siblings from LGBTQIA+ communities also experienced increased discrimination, including outright denials of care, all of which led to significantly worse outcomes as well.
The tragic part about this was that most of these severe, adverse health outcomes could have been preventable if Endometriosis patients had received the recognized standards of care at symptom onset, rather than being left writhing in excruciating pain for up to 7-11 years while the disease rampaged unchecked throughout the entire body. A nationwide shortage of qualified Endometriosis specialists, along with questionable repeat insurance denials for medically necessary care, contributed to this ever-growing global public health crisis. As a result of these systemic health care failures, Endometriosis patients died or were seriously injured from suicide, accidental opioid/pain medication overdoses, preventable surgical complications, or severe adverse side effects of inappropriately prescribed medications.
Considering that Endometriosis was not a rare condition at all, but had a prevalence nearly on par with diabetes (in the U.S.), with an estimated 15-20% of women, girls, & persons assigned female at birth affected, which worked out to an estimated 400 million worldwide (Nezhat et al), one had to question why such a prevalent & potentially crippling chronic disease was not receiving the attention it deserved in terms of medical school training, NIH funding, public health awareness campaigns, and health insurance coverage. In sum, Endometriosis care in America was truly a public health catastrophe and millions of people were left paying the price for the nation’s decades-long neglect of one of the most painful, destructive conditions on record.
As these statistics made clear, they were utterly unconscionable and the Endometriosis Community demanded immediate action to address these severely dehumanizing and destructive healthcare inequities. Action was needed so that the next generation had a fair chance at living a healthy life, instead of losing decades of their lives and livelihoods to preventable disease progression.
ABOUT THE GLOBAL ENDOMARCH MOVEMENT
Worldwide Endometriosis March® (Worldwide EndoMarch®) ignited a global endometriosis movement to help fight for urgently-needed Endometriosis Health Care Rights & Reforms. The EndoMarch Movement was the largest internationally-coordinated awareness campaign in the world and was founded by Dr. Camran Nezhat, Dr. Farr Nezhat, Dr. Ceana Nezhat, Dr. Azadeh Nezhat, and Barbara Page. They were also the proud original founders of the ‘No pharma in Endo Advocacy’ movement, which started in 2013, when Worldwide EndoMarch became one of the earliest US-based Endometriosis Advocacy nonprofits to prohibit funding from pharmaceutical companies or any other companies which would have represented a conflict of interest.
FOOTNOTES
*Footnote 1: Some EndoMarch Teams held their live events on a different date. **Footnote 2: Prevalence rates were unknown for men, boys, and persons assigned male at birth, as well as intersex, nonbinary, and transgender individuals. Work was ongoing around the clock to help change these appalling knowledge gaps by providing research grants to support epidemiological studies that focused on these specific healthcare inequities and neglected fields.
Comments are closed.