After more than two decades as a board certified OBGYN and over a decade as a specialist in sexual medicine and menopause, I have come to believe that one of the biggest obstacles in women's healthcare is not the absence of treatments or research. It is dismissal.

This is not just something I see in my patients. I have lived it too. I share a story from my own birth experience that I have not talked about much publicly, and it changed how I think about what it means to navigate a system that was not built to listen to women. If it happened to me, someone who worked inside that system every day, I think about what it means for women who do not have the same access or the same voice.

That is also what led me to write Brown Girls' Disease. The women who struggle most in this system are almost always the ones who have been told the longest that nothing is wrong, and I wrote this book for them. We talk about what is in it, who it is for, and why the title means so much more than it might seem at first.

My mission has always been simple. I want women to feel seen, heard, and believed. This episode is about why that still matters so much.

Highlights:

• Dismissal is one of the biggest obstacles in women's healthcare today.
• Why siloed medicine means women fall through the cracks.
• The story behind the phrase brown girls' disease.
• Why naming a condition can be part of patients healing.
• The movement to end dismissal in women's health.

About the Book:

Brown Girls' Disease: A Guide to Sexual Health and Empowerment Through a South Asian Lens by Dr. Sameena Rahman is available for pre-order now on Amazon, releasing October 6th.

The book covers foundations of sexual health, the intersection of culture, religion, and colonization with sexual dysfunction, medical bias and implicit bias, trauma and mental health, and conditions including vaginismus, persistent genital arousal disorder, libido and arousal concerns, vulvodynia, perimenopause, menopause, and postpartum sexual health.

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