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I had a patient last month, 55, newly single after 27 years of marriage, sitting across from me with a question she had never asked a doctor before. She wanted to know if her body could still do what it used to do, now that there was finally someone worth doing it with.<\/p>\n
In medical training, I was taught that vaginal tissue after menopause heads downhill, akin to a closed chapter, dry, thin, functionally finished, something to manage rather than restore. What I now know, from decades of watching this play out in my patients (and my own body) and performing research on how we support vaginal health, is that the framing is wrong in a specific and correctable way. <\/p>\n
Estrogen, blood flow, healthy bacteria, and regular use keep this tissue responsive. Take away any one of them and it stops responding. The longer it goes unaddressed, the more the loss compounds.<\/p>\n
\nYour vagina is the foundation of your <\/span>sexspan<\/em>: the years your body remains fully capable of arousal and orgasm, distinct from your lifespan or your healthspan. Your sexspan is built, or lost, by what you do in the years before and after your final menstrual period.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I am 59. I started my own version of the protocol below on my 45 birthday because I had read the research and refused to wait for symptoms to prove it right.<\/p>\n