Gynaecologist and obstetrician, graduated in Medicine and Surgery from the University of Extremadura. Voted the best gynaecologist in Spain for three consecutive years by the Doctoralia Awards. This year her clinic, MiriamGine, won the award for the best gynaecological clinic in the country. The author of several books, she has more than 392,000 followers on social networks.
With a fresh, authentic, revolutionary, empowering and unmistakable style, it carries out important work in the fields of gynaecology, sexuality, wellbeing and women’s health. Always with a comprehensive and humanistic vision of gynaecology, her aim is to provide, in a didactic way, the necessary knowledge for women to have well-being and control over their bodies, and for men to know and understand the wonderful and complex universe that is women.
The gynaecologist Miriam Al Adib Mendiri has been practising in Extremadura for many years, from where she has opened clinics in different parts of the country, thanks to the fame she has achieved for her work and her efforts to inform through social networks. She is the author of several books, including Hablemos de vaginas (Let’s talk about vaginas), Hablemos de nosotros (Let’s talk about ourselves) and Hablemos de adolescence (Let’s talk about adolescence). In these books she tries to clarify some of the issues and problems related to sexuality, especially female sexuality.
When did you take the initiative to go beyond patient care and provide information about female sexuality and reproduction in such an original and colloquial, yet precise and valuable way?
I like to explain things during consultations, and when I started working as a gynaecologist in my city, in the National Health Service, where I worked from 2002 to 2017, I didn’t have time to do everything a patient needed, because of the pressure of the health service. So, I started a blog to disseminate information about what I didn’t have time to explain in the consultation, recommending that patients read my articles so that they had total clarity about their conditions, and I had the peace of mind that I had given them comprehensive care.
Because education and health go hand in hand; the more educated you are, the healthier you are, because you know what’s normal and what’s not, when you need to see a professional and when you don’t. That allows you to take control of your health. And in the case of sex education, it’s the same thing: more sex education, more sexual health.
Then, more than ten years ago, I started to spread through Facebook in a slightly more serious tone than now. And then came TikTok and Instagram, and there I give myself the freedom to be more fun but always aiming for the informative part. Well, I don’t think that professional rigour is contradictory to educating while having fun and laughing for a while.
In 2018 I published my first book, Hablemos de vaginas (Let’s talk about vaginas), and since then I haven’t stopped publishing books, but at that point I had already been doing outreach on these taboo topics for a long time in a different way.
What are the most common misconceptions about women’s health that affect women today?
Anything to do with hormones and especially anything to do with poor quality of life. The typical scenario is a woman who has something wrong with her and is told that she has nothing wrong with her. Whether it’s dyspareunia, premenstrual syndrome, painful periods, itching or chronic itching of the vulva. That’s the worst there is and it’s quite common. Maybe loss of sensation or tiredness, weakness, and she’s told it’s psychological, maybe there’s an undiagnosed pathology behind it.
All the qualitative aspects, the quality of life of women is the great forgotten in medicine. In other words, you have something that will not kill you, but it will not allow you to live well, and it seems that each professional concentrates on his own area. Some women do not even go to the doctor because they do not know where to go, what to do and they start to normalise what should not be normalised.
Is more work needed from educational institutions or more strategies to normalise talking about sexuality and reproduction from school on?
I think we would gain a lot if certain concepts of sexual health and health in general were taught. There are a lot of health education topics that would be great for empowering people to know how to differentiate between what’s normal and what’s not normal, when you need to seek professional help and when you don’t. This could be addressed in some way in secondary schools, so that from adolescence they learn very basic concepts and are not so uninformed and vulnerable. If much more complex concepts, such as biology, are taught in secondary school, why not these concepts that are useful for life?
When it comes to women’s sexual and reproductive health, should men be taught more than women?
Literacy should be taught to everyone. Because often we don’t even understand what’s happening to us. And sometimes they don’t understand women because they say we’re crazy.
The fact is that we are different and perhaps we have normalised that what is normal is the linear male pattern and not the cyclical nature of women. During the fertile age we have periods of the cycle where we are one way and others another and that does not make us crazy. At other times there is a pathology or a disorder when you have premenstrual syndrome which becomes a problem.
There is a polarity, a tendency to pathologize things that are normal and to normalise things that are pathological. This is because we do not understand women’s health and it is something that everyone should be educated about.
What changes or advances in health professional training would be valuable to improve comprehensive care for women?
The biopsychosocial, humanistic and multidisciplinary perspective is very important in professional training.
The system is highly specialised and sometimes it fails. For example, a woman who has pain during intercourse may not have an organic pathology. And doctors, if there is no organic pathology, we have no basis to work on. Maybe it’s a functional problem of the pelvic floor muscles and the pelvic floor psychotherapist is working on that. Maybe it’s a sexual trauma that has caused central sensitisation and vulvodynia, so you must work with a trauma psychotherapist. Or suddenly it is a change in the microbiota, and she has desquamative inflammatory vaginitis or incipient lichen.
In other words, there are organic pathologies that are very underdiagnosed. And all that differential diagnosis and knowing where to refer the patient when you don’t know what to do from your specialty is what you have to do.
That’s why I always believe in a multidisciplinary approach, because I can’t have all the specialities in the world. But I can have contact with other health specialities than my own; at the end of the day, all the professionals should revolve around the patient and not have the patient jumping from one place to another without knowing where to go.
What does it mean to be recognised three times as the best gynaecologist in Spain by the Doctoralia Awards, based on patient opinion?
To be awarded the best gynaecological clinic in the country and also to have more than 392,000 followers on social networks means that there are a lot of people interested in learning and talking about women’s gynaecological, sexual and reproductive health.
Going viral has opened a lot of opportunities for me. I am a very restless person, I am always learning, and I am not satisfied with the approved medical protocol, but I go to the source, to the scientific evidence studies. And I filter all this knowledge to disseminate it through simple language. Problems that are difficult to solve in patients become a challenge for me. At this point, follow-up, traceability and empathy are very important.
I have also worked in a multidisciplinary way. This means that whenever I can, I learn from the physiotherapist, the sonopelvic therapist, the sexologist, the psychotherapist and the nutritionist. I look at all aspects of women’s health in an interdisciplinary way. And often the problem with medicine is that you focus on one area and if what is happening to the patient is not in your area, you tell them you have nothing more to offer. But I am very good at referring patients. If something is not in my field, I refer them to the right professional or the right place, because often the solution to a health problem is not even medical.
That is why many people trust my work and come to the clinics.
What is your next big project or goal in the field of gynaecology and dissemination?
I’m in a stabilisation phase. I’m still very much into dissemination and working on a project called ‘Que no te la metan’ (Don’t let them screw you over) with Diana Al Azem, who is an educator and writer specialising in adolescent issues.
*Miriam Al Adib Mendi can be found on TikTok and Instagram as @miriam_al_adib and @clinicasmiriamgine
