By the time you arrive at FGI you have browsed the internet for solutions to fix your vaginal problem, you have likely exhausted your provider network. Meaning you have seen your primary care provider, several gynecologists and perhaps even a “specialist.” No provider has impressed you, nothing has worked, you may have been told that you may just have to live with it or that it’s in your head. At a minimum you are perplexed and frustrated, but more likely, you are angry and distraught because the symptoms can severely compromising your lifestyle. I know you may feel like, “this is destroying my life.” Because it is.
When you have one of these conditions you need the perspective of an expert who has been in the field of treating these conditions for decades. But the solution transcends the years of experience. The problem is that not all experts are alike. An expert could have decades of experience and still be clueless as to the underlying etiology let alone know how to successfully treat your condition. It takes decades of experience coupled by objective testing that can monitor the effectiveness of treatment independent of symptomatic response. This means the underlying etiology for the condition must be understood. It takes cutting edge diagnostic methods to surmount the problem of monitoring changes of the underlying etiology. If that’s what you hoped to hear, you have arrived. Information in this book took me twenty years to figure out and now you get to read it inside of several days.
I had the good fortune of doing my advanced medical training in Gynecology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. What a great institution, which I believe was divinely inspired. Thereafter, I was invited to join Mayo Clinic Arizona as a Consultant in Gynecology. I never did any obstetrics after passing my board certification, so 100% of my time was devoted to gynecologic problems. I’m probably the only one in our nation with this trajectory. I probably retired from obstetrics at the youngest age of any ob/gyn in the history of our country. At Mayo Clinic, I had hundreds of women referred to me in the Department of Gynecology for vulvovaginal problems. A routine obstetrician-gynecologist may see a women with vulvovaginal symptoms, like you, once every 6-8 months. That’s not enough to develop any expertise, let alone have the incentive to buy expensive laboratory equipment to properly evaluate a few patients per year. At Mayo Clinic I was seeing many women with vulvovaginal symptoms on a daily basis and began conducting clinical observations and research. Over two decades, I discovered the underlying etiology. The big surprise: many vulvar skin symptoms come from irritative secretions, not intrinsic to the skin itself but occur because of what’s going on inside the vagina. The standard of care in the US for a women who presents to a gynecologist with symptoms of vulvovaginitis is to preform a KOH & Saline Wet Prep. This technique is antiquated and has not changed in scope in over a 100 years!! This is still the diagnosis method of choice used by US gynecologists today. This technique evaluates for just four types of vaginitis. They are bacterial vaginosis (BV), yeast vaginitis, trichomonas and atrophic vaginitis. Things are different here at FGI. During 22 years of clinical observation and research at the Mayo Clinic, I discovered a spectrum of Altered Vaginal Microflora Patterns (AVMF) that proves the classification of only 4 types of vaginitis is a major mis-representation. I introduced to the medical literature an expanded spectrum of vaginitis. [ Fowler, R. Stuart. J Reproductive Med 2007;52:93-99]. Undergoing the VFA test is sine qua non for a successful treatment. FGI offers this advanced diagnostic testing known as Vaginal Fluid Analysis (VFA) testing which is used to diagnose and monitor response to therapy with the test results dictating most adjustments that need to be made to the therapy.