A letter from Dr. Carine-Ange Tagni
Before you read anything else, I want to say something to you.
Maybe you’ve told yourself this is just what happens after children, or after a certain age. That you have a good life, and you should be grateful, and this isn’t something to complain about.
I’m not here to tell you that you’re wrong for feeling that way. I’m here to tell you it doesn’t have to be this way.
I'm a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist and surgeon with specialized training in intimate and cosmetic gynecology. I built my practice on one belief:
Intimate health is women's health.
For years, I've watched women go from one doctor to the next, dismissed with "that's normal at your age." Never given the space to say what's actually happening, not to their doctor, sometimes not even to their closest friend.
Maybe you know exactly what I mean.
The liner you now wear every day, “just in case.” The way you cross your legs before you sneeze. It’s a reflex now. One hard laugh with your girlfriends and there’s that warm, damp feeling again. So you’ve stopped laughing quite as hard as you used to, and nobody knows why but you.
Maybe intimacy used to be something you looked forward to. Now you’re tired all the time, and it has become one more thing to do. When it happens, it’s dry. It takes effort. You can’t remember the last time you actually enjoyed it instead of simply getting through it.
Or maybe sex hurts, and you’ve started going to bed after your partner is already asleep just so the question never comes up.
What gets me is how quickly women learn to adjust.
We buy the lubricant. We wear the liner. We find the bathroom before we need it. We quietly change our lives around our bodies and call it getting older.
Meanwhile, there may be a medical reason for what is happening.
Pregnancy and childbirth can change your pelvic floor. Hormonal changes during perimenopause and menopause can affect your sleep, desire, sexual function, and the health of your vulva, vagina, bladder, and urinary tract.
Sometimes it’s hormonal. Sometimes it’s pelvic. Sometimes it’s both.
And there are treatments that can help.
I’ve had the privilege of watching women finally address things they had lived with for years. And I’ve watched what happens afterward.
They laugh without crossing their legs first. They travel without thinking about the bathroom before the destination. They reach for their partner because they want to, without a second thought.
But it’s the part underneath all of that that stays with me.
The joy. The spark for life. The restoration that happens when a woman no longer has to plan her life around her body.
I get to watch that happen again and again.
Maybe that is why I care about this work as much as I do.
Because intimate health isn’t a side conversation in women’s health.
It is women’s health.
Talk soon,
The physician behind the work
Carine-Ange Tagni, MD, FACOG
Dr. Carine-Ange Tagni is a board-certified OB-GYN, menopause and intimate wellness specialist, and labiaplasty surgeon with a decade of clinical and surgical experience.
Her work sits at the intersection of hormones, sexual health, pelvic health, and intimate wellness, bringing together concerns that women often experience at the same time but medicine too often treats separately.
At the heart of her work is the conviction that women deserve to live full lives.
We know how to care for women through pregnancy. We deliver their babies. We diagnose gynecologic disease. We operate when surgery is needed.
But that same woman may also be living with painful sex, bladder leakage, hormonal changes, loss of sexual function, or changes in her body that are profoundly affecting her quality of life.
Dr. Tagni believes those concerns deserve the same medical attention.
That perspective shapes her clinical practice, research, writing, and speaking, and her work advancing a more complete conversation about women's health across reproductive transitions.
Credentials and Recognition
Board-Certified OB-GYN, FACOG
Published, The Journal of Sexual Medicine: The Intimacy Blind Spot: Why Menopause Care Must Evolve
Contributing Author, Springer: An Obstetrician/Gynecologist's Path
Featured in Forbes
Speaker: Women's health, menopause, hormones, sexual health, pelvic health, and intimacy
There is more to women's health than what fits into a ten-minute visit.