Women's health is a very special topic. Classically, women think that they have to go to an OBGYN for their women's health appointments, and that is perfectly reasonable. However, a lot of people don't know you can go to your primary care provider if they're a family medicine physician, and a lot of them will offer women's health. That's the way that I got into it and found my passion for it. Women's health appointments can be kind of what you make of them. They can contain lots of different things, or they can be very simple and straightforward.
For women who are twenty one through the ages of typically sixty five, they can have things like a Pap smear, which is your routine screening for cervical cancer. But for any other women, even with their Pap smear, we can talk about birth control. We can talk about symptoms that you're having related to, you know, abdominal pain or anything discharge, sexual intercourse, things such as diet, exercise, hormonal changes. That is all part of your overall well-being, and women's health can play a huge factor into that.
I actually got into women's health because a lot of women, in the rural area that I did my residency didn't realize that they could go to a family medicine physician for that care. They thought they had to have a separate appointment. And when you live in a rural area, it's really hard to to find those appointments, and it's really hard to access that care. But if you can get all of your care in one place with your primary care provider, such as a family physician, it makes it a lot more convenient to get all of your care in one place.