I started using social media during my fellowship with one goal: close the education gap. I believed that if people could actually understand their own bodies, they could advocate for themselves in the health care system, in their daily lives, and against systems of abuse. Education felt like the most direct way to hand people back their power, and social media was the most direct way to deliver it.

And it took off. It was fun. I was teaching in all the ways I never could in residency, and I won't pretend there weren't small hits of dopamine along the way, engaging with the community, answering questions, watching something I posted actually help someone. From my small corner of the world, I was reaching people everywhere, and they were getting real answers to real problems through education alone.

A Label That Never Fit

But with the following came a label: med influencer. I never liked using it. It never resonated with me, because an educator is what I actually was, and educating is the entire reason I was on social media in the first place. Influencer carried a whole host of connotations I never signed up for, the popularity contest, the pressure to perform, all of which diluted the way I wanted to teach and pulled against the very thing I had set out to do. My goal was never to be a med influencer.

The Real Scope of the Problem

As a physician who treats sexual health across all genders, I get to see up close how differently men and women experience the health care system. Once you see those gaps clearly, you understand that closing them will take full reform at nearly every level of the system.

Education reform—so patients and clinicians learn this material instead of stumbling into it after years of dismissal. 

Access reform—so getting seen doesn't depend on your zip code or income. 

Training reform—so residency actually teaches vulvovaginal and sexual health instead of treating it as an afterthought. 

Medication reform—because women need more treatment options. Insurance coverage has to expand to match them. 

Policy reform—because we need less legislation and less policing of how medicine is practiced.

Research reform—because the science itself has to catch up.

Underneath all of it: grassroots organizing, informed patients, public campaigns, new research feeding the whole cycle. That is the actual infrastructure it takes to close the gap. Education was only ever the first step.

The Algorithm

Then the algorithm changed, and thoughtful education slowly stopped being possible. Attention windows kept shrinking, and what got rewarded was no longer depth. It was whatever was snappy, eye-catching, or controversial enough to stop a scroll. Over time, everyone started sounding exactly the same.

And meanwhile, women are still suffering. All that content, all those voices, and we are still nowhere near where we need to be.

So for a long time I sat in this uncomfortable place, trying to figure out what my relationship with social media even was anymore. I couldn't land on it. The tool that had once carried my activism no longer fit the work, but I didn't yet have language for what should replace it.

Now I finally do.

Finding the Framework

Over the past year, I have been lucky to be surrounded by people who do social impact work for a living, especially through my Echoing Green community. Through them, I have been learning what community organizing actually is. The more I learned, the more I realized: this is what I have been trying to do in women's health this whole time. I just never had the framework for it.

Organizing is built on community rather than an individual voice. It is systems thinking. It starts from the understanding that everyone in a community has a role to play, and the work is designed so all of those roles fit together.

What This Scale of Reform Actually Requires

Physicians are famously bad at organizing. It is not that we can't, it is that we were never taught to. We don't have a union in most of the US, which, for a profession this exhausted and squeezed, is wild. Nurses understand collective bargaining, and it is exactly why they have won gains.

And yet organizing is precisely what women's health needs, because reform at this scale is going to take far more than doctors. It will take policy experts and behavioral scientists. Lawyers and funders. Statisticians and researchers. Artists and media. Students, mothers, housewives, allies, people who understand the problem from every angle and people who simply refuse to accept it any longer. It is going to take a lot of us.

No one person can change an entire system, and honestly, no one person should try. But collectively, we can band together, and that vision sits so much better in my heart than any follower count ever did. It is also, simply, how real change works: cohesive, structural, addressing the full problem instead of scattering point solutions across it.

Trying On a New Identity

So I am retiring an identity that never fit and trying on one that does. Not a med influencer. A community organizer. I am excited to keep learning what that looks like, feels like, and sounds like, from the people who do it far better than I do.

And if organizing is something you know, something you do, or something you want to be part of, reach out to our community: maria@vulvai.co