She sat in my office and told me about that dinner like she was admitting to a crime. The shame was coming off her in waves.
She wouldn't look at me. She kept apologizing. At one point she said she was sorry for wasting my time because she knew it was probably just a hygiene thing.
It wasn't a hygiene thing.
It's NEVER a hygiene thing⦠I just wish more women knew that.
And she was the fourth woman that month who sat in that chair and said the exact same words to me.
I'm Dr. [Name], and I am tired of watching women apologize for a problem their own doctors should have fixed years ago.
Sarah had seen three doctors before me. Every one of them did the same thing: swab, diagnose BV, prescribe Metronidazole, see you in two weeks.
When it came back, they prescribed it again.
When it came back after that, they prescribed it again.
One of them told her to wear cotton underwear and practice better hygiene, which is the medical equivalent of telling someone with a broken leg to walk it off.
She'd been on this antibiotic merry-go-round for three years. The antibiotics knock it out for a couple weeks, then it comes back. Then the antibiotics give you a yeast infection, so you treat that, and the BV comes back on the other side of it.
Just a hamster wheel of the same thing over and over again.
Three years. Four doctors. Same prescription every time, like it was finally going to work this time.
Not one of them told her why the antibiotics kept failing.
Most of them don't even know because they never look deeper than the surface level.
And the ones who do know still don't have anything better to give you, because the treatment guidelines for this condition haven't changed in thirty years.
They are handing women the same drug that fails more than half the time and calling it the best they can do.
So Sarah did what every woman in her position does.
She started Googling and trying every other βsolutionβ she could get her hands on.
She tried boric acid because she saw it on Tik Tok⦠and boric acid is actually registered as cockroach poison! She shoved garlic capsules inside herself because someone on Reddit swore it worked.
And she spent hundreds on feminine washes and probiotics she saw on Instagram.
None of it worked, because every one of those things treats the symptom while the thing actually causing the moisture and the smell keeps growing and growing and growing.
Unfortunately none of her doctors told her why. Yours probably hasn't either.