Dr. Taghechian on women’s health and her experience with Bulkamid

In this interview, Shaya Taghechian, MD, discusses underappreciated/underrated aspects of women’s health as well as her experience with Bulkamid. Taghechian is a urologist with Georgia Urology.

Transcription:

What aspects of women's health do you feel are underappreciated/underreported?

Anything that has to do with sexual satisfaction, honestly. And then also, anything that has really to do in terms of pelvic health with perimenopause and menopause, it's just, again, not really talked about. I don't know why. Part of it may be just, the money doesn't go there. Who's in charge of the research money? I think we all know who's in charge there. But those are huge gaps in our knowledge and in our treatment, and even in coverage for those treatments. We may know what to do with the patient, but is insurance going to cover it? Most times, no. So it's big out-of-pocket costs for patients.

You have been designated a Bulkamid Center of Excellence. What have you learned about Bulkamid over time that has helped you to achieve this distinction?

I love Bulkamid. So what I know about women is, a lot of us have incontinence, especially after having children, getting older, collagen depletion. Many of us have problems with incontinence. But the other thing is, the gold standard for incontinence, even still, is putting in a mesh midurethral sling. But we don't want to have mesh in the vagina if we can help it. Even myself, I'd rather avoid that if possible. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't. For the longest time, that's really the only treatment that we had, so we couldn't really avoid it if we had to fix the incontinence. But number 1, we don't want mesh. And then number 2, we're all busy. We have children, we have jobs, we have careers, we're busy housewives, whatever. We don't have that downtime to recover from a major surgery like a sling surgery. So that would often get in the way of women pursuing surgery for incontinence. But since Bulkamid came along, it's really been a game changer for me and for my patients. It is a simple procedure; it takes 15 minutes to do. There is 0 downtime; you literally jump off the table and you go back to normal life. The success rate is amazing. So far, we know that the results last at least 8 to 9 years, maybe longer, but Bulkamid has only been around for 8 to 9 years. So we'll see how long it does last. But even when I speak with and counsel patients, all of them are in agreement that even if they had to get a simple injection every couple of years, it's still worth it for them to do that than to undergo mesh midurethral sling surgery. So I love it. In the last 3 or 4 years that I've been doing Bulkamid, I've only done 2 slings in all of that time. Two slings, and that's all I used to do. So it's been great, and my patients have loved it.

This transcription was edited for clarity.