What’s Coming
A Letter from Dr. Yamicia Connor
I have been deliberately vague about our plans for the past year because I did not want to promise what I could not deliver. Small team. Self-funded. No margin for error. I would rather under-promise and over-deliver than the reverse.
But we are past the point of vagueness.
What I am about to tell you is real, it is built, and it is coming.
🌐 THE WEBSITE
The Labora Collective website launches very soon.
Substack has been our home, and it will continue to be how we reach you.
But Substack was never designed to hold what we are building.
The website is where the depth lives. The Packs and Playbooks. The research intelligence. The clinical resources. The full architecture of what the Labora Collective actually is, not just the essays that float on top.
When you visit the site, you will see thirty-one domains of women’s health — the complete map of what we research, what we track, and what we report on. Each domain is populated with signal cards: discrete pieces of clinical intelligence that are tagged, cited, and connected to the broader picture.
This is not a blog with categories.
This is a clinical intelligence system with a public-facing layer.
📦 PACKS & PLAYBOOKS
Every woman should have access to the kind of information that I give my own patients. That is the premise of Packs & Playbooks.
A Pack is a collection of clinical knowledge organized around a single topic — rupture of membranes, preeclampsia, postpartum hemorrhage, GBS, preterm labor. Each Pack contains: Articles, Evidence summaries, Patient-facing guides, Clinical atomic units.
A Playbook is the action version: when you are in the situation, what do you do? Step by step. With scripts. With timelines. With the specific words to use when you feel like no one is listening.
Our first Pack — ROM (rupture of membranes) — has one article ready to publish, six more drafted, and four that require my clinical voice from actual patient encounters. The evidence base is built from ACOG, Cochrane, CHAP, and primary literature.
🔬 THE INTELLIGENCE
I trained as a researcher before I trained as a physician. My PhD is in medical engineering and medical physics. My undergraduate work was at MIT.
Our research intelligence is not a literature review.
It is a cross-cutting, multi-domain analytical framework that examines how women’s health data is generated, who generates it, what it measures, what it misses, and who is harmed by what it misses.
We have identified that the majority of the data the U.S. government produces on women’s health comes from sources that are Tier 3 and Tier 4 in our trust hierarchy. We actively seek Tier 1 and Tier 2 sources — primary research and international bodies — to triangulate against what the government reports.
🤖 THE AI
We are training AI systems on our own clinical intelligence — not on the internet, not on Wikipedia, not on whatever ChatGPT scraped from medical forums. On our intelligence. Our verified, cited, equity-framed research.
The result is a queryable database that our subscribers will be able to access. Ask it a question about your pregnancy. It answers from our evidence base, not from the internet’s. It tells you what the research says, who funded the research, and what the research does not say.
💌 A PERSONAL NOTE
Some of you know that I also write fiction. I write under a pen name, and I publish on a private Substack and on the Powerhouse Novelas platform. I write what I call intimacy fiction: stories about power, desire, and the negotiations that happen between people who love each other in a world that makes love complicated.
I hid this for a long time. There are professional implications for a physician who writes about sex and power. But I have recently decided that hiding is worse than the risk, because the fiction and the clinical work come from the same place:
A belief that women’s bodies — their pleasure, their pain, their autonomy, their survival — deserve to be taken seriously.
🙏 WHAT I AM ASKING
I am asking you to stay. I am asking you to be patient with a small team that is building something enormous with almost no institutional support. I am asking you to invest — not because we need your charity, but because what we are building has value. I am asking you to share our work with someone who needs it.
We are not going anywhere. We are consolidating, refocusing, and building the thing we always intended to build.
More to come. Soon.
With gratitude and an unreasonable amount of ambition,
Dr. Yamicia Connor
Dr. Yamicia Connor, MD, PhD, MPH
Founder & CEO, Diosa Ara | Creator & Editor-in-Chief, The Labora Collective
The Labora Collective publishes at the intersection of clinical care, policy, and innovation — because only 10% of your health outcomes come from the exam room. The other 90% is what we cover.
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