01
Setting the scene
While scrolling TikTok, I came across a creator named Nina Pool. While I usually followed her for her makeup dupe content, in one video she started talking about how Pepcid makes her PMDD symptoms disappear. This make my ears perk up because Pepcid is also a treatment for an under-recognized condition called Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS).
I began to wonder... could PMDD and MCAS be related?
02
The problem
I began to do some research and found that both MCAS and PMDD are under-diagnosed, under-researched, and it can be difficult to find providers who specialize in these conditions. Their symptoms also heavily overlap. Also, many doctors never learned about MCAS in medical school. How are people supposed to know if they have PMDD, MCAS or both?
03
Competitive analysis
I began doing a competitive analysis of PMDD tools. From my competitive analysis I found that most products assume that PMDD is purely hormonal, and don't take into account how increased histamine impacts PMDD (increased histamine is a key component of MCAS). There is a trend in women's health tech right now to provide tools for patients to make their doctor's appointments more effective - this trend seemed applicable in the "PMDD, MCAS, or Both?" question.
04
Creating a mental model
I created a loose mental model for the AI to use, aiming to create a tool that will make diagnosis easier for medical providers while also empowering patients.
05
Time to vibe code
After creating the mental model, I fed it into a vibecoding tool. The tool created a functional website as a first draft that I can continue to iterate on.
06
Pending: User feedback
I plan to share this tool with Reddit users in the r/MCAS and r/PMDD subreddits, then make iterations on this tool as users provide feedback.
Try out the app yourself
Use the AI tool below to see how it works.