Welcome to OBGYN Champs, the show where no question is off limits. Join host Morgan Allen and board-certified OB/GYN Dr. Suny Caminero, MD as they tackle the topics women are often too embarrassed, afraid, or unsure to ask about. From hormones, menopause, and sexual wellness to pregnancy, pelvic health, cosmetic gynecology, and everything in between, each episode delivers honest conversations, expert advice, and practical insights to help women take control of their health with confidence.
Whether you’re in your 20s, navigating motherhood, approaching menopause, or simply looking for trustworthy answers, OBGYN Champs is your place for real talk, myth-busting, and empowering education. Tune in, ask your questions, and join the conversation because your health deserves to be talked about.
Dr. Suny Caminero, MD, OB/GYN
Founder of Cosmetic Gynecology Florida
Website Address: https://cosmeticgynecologyfl.com/
What is vaginal rejuvenation?
Dr. Suny:
Vaginal rejuvenation is really getting the vagina back to pre-childbirth, or kind of like rejuvenating the skin of your face. You mean the rejuvenation of the skin of your face. You can rejuvenate the skin of the vagina. So there’s different ways of doing it.
It can be surgical, but it can also be with different technologies like laser therapy, electromagnetic therapy. There’s so many different ways of doing it, but it depends on what your needs are, whether you go the machine route, the laser route, or the surgical route.
Morgan Allen:
Are there creams and things that help, or is it just laser and surgery that are the best?
Dr. Suny:
That’s actually a great question. Creams, for example, vaginal estrogen and hyaluronic acid, which are for lubricating the tissue of the vagina, actually help for women who are usually in their 40s. But before then, it really doesn’t help with that because a young woman already has estrogen in the vagina. They don’t really need that. As we get older, we start to have thinner tissue, and so supplementing it with some vaginal estrogen would help significantly, not only for the vagina but also for the bladder.
What does the rejuvenation process look like after having a baby?
Dr. Suny:
There is a myth that women’s bodies, that our vagina goes back to normal after having a baby, which is not true. And the vagina just doesn’t go back to normal after having a baby.
It doesn’t make sense that it would, if you think about it. The muscles of the vagina, we have pelvic floor muscles. And these muscles, you have a right and a left muscle, and they’re kind of hammocking your pelvic floor. To have a baby, all of these muscles have to relax. They have to open to allow for a six-pound, seven-pound, eight-pound, sometimes 10-pound, sometimes 11-pound baby to come out. Those muscles stretch a significant amount, and they never actually go back to normal.
The amount of stretch is different based on the pelvis and based on the size of the baby, but they never go back to normal. And women do notice that. And they notice it because there’s more looseness. They notice it because the bladder is now responding. They’re having some urinary incontinence. And so it doesn’t go back to normal. The more babies you have, the less back to normal that goes.
That also applies to C-sections, believe it or not, if you’ve never had a vaginal baby, which a lot of people are surprised about. Because what happens is when you’re pregnant, the baby is pushing on your bladder. Anybody that’s been pregnant knows you get that push in the bladder. And really, the bladder is the roof of the vagina. And that pressure through the entire pregnancy is putting pressure on those muscles. And so those muscles do get affected even if you never had a baby vaginally. Not to the extent of a vaginal delivery, but it does get affected.
The things that we typically do for a woman, when we’re talking about vaginal rejuvenation, depends on the degree of laxity to those muscles and depends on whether there’s urinary incontinence there, too. So if the degree of laxity is significant, then we have to do a surgical correction. If there’s not much laxity and it’s just maybe a little bladder involvement and it just needs a little tightening, the lasers work really well for that.
What are all the things that lasers can do to help you?
Dr. Suny:
One, lasers don’t hurt a lot of times. There’s different lasers. The main ones that are used in the vagina are CO2 laser and radiofrequency laser.
The lasers tighten the tissue and also help you have more collagen. The more collagen, the better the tissue is, we all know that. If you have it in the face, more collagen, the more plumper that skin is, thicker the skin is. Similar it is for the vagina.
For some laser treatments, it’s a five-minute procedure. For some of them, it’s a 20-minute procedure. But at the end of the day, it really doesn’t hurt. And it’s just completely worth having a laser vaginal rejuvenation procedure done and really help you with your bladder and sensation and lubrication and all of that that comes with that rejuvenation.
Now, do you have to shave before getting a laser procedure done?
Dr. Suny:
It depends on what you’re rejuvenating. If what we’re doing is the vagina itself, which is the canal, the part where the bladder and the bottom part is where the rectum is, then you don’t have to shave. If you’re doing the skin because the skin is lax right now, you lost some volume, the skin is kind of hanging, then yes, you would have to shave so that we can get to the right areas and hit the skin right. That part can hurt because the skin does hurt. And for that, we do numb it. The inside you don’t have to numb.
So let’s talk about how long the results last from vaginal rejuvenation or from the laser treatments?
Dr. Suny:
Laser treatment typically lasts about 12 to 18 months, depending on the health of the person. If we’re doing the surgical procedure to rejuvenate either the inside or the outside, it’s a permanent fix.
You can equate it to kind of if you do laser of the face. When you do laser of the face, the next three months, six months, it looks wonderful. And then you have to maintain it. So the lasers, you do have to maintain.
What are some other physical attributes that someone may want to change?
Dr. Suny:
Often hemorrhoids. So many women have hemorrhoids. Any pregnancy can cause them, and any mode of delivery. You can have hemorrhoids from just being pregnant alone. Many women do not like the way they look.
You can have some staining, too. Sometimes women feel like it’s not clean. They can’t clean enough, and there’s some kind of staining that happens. Often they’re told, “Just leave it alone. It’s normal. It’s too painful to fix it.” So they live with this hemorrhoid, but they hate the hemorrhoid. That is something that we can actually easily fix, too, and be done with that problem.
Morgan Allen:
So for those who aren’t familiar with hemorrhoids, it’s in the rectum, right?
Dr. Suny:
Yes.
Morgan Allen:
There’s no other place for them, right?
Dr. Suny:
Right. Correct.
Morgan Allen:
What do they look like?
Dr. Suny:
I call them flowers of your rectum. They look like an ugly flower, really. They’re normal to the rectum, meaning you can have them on the outside, you can have them on the inside. The ones on the outside are the ones that are not aesthetically pleasing, and they are the ones that you want to clean. You don’t feel like you’re clean because there’s always stuff stuck there. They just look like balls, bulges that come out.
Sometimes they come in and out, and sometimes they get more irritated than other times. If somebody has a lot of constipation, they come out. If someone has a lot of diarrhea, they come out. At the end of the day, it’s more of women don’t like them. Sometimes they’re uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s hard to keep that area clean because of the amount of hemorrhoids that some women may have.
For aesthetic purposes or, like, for intimacy purposes, many women just don’t like the way they look when they’re trying to be intimate. And so that’s something that can certainly be fixed.
What’s one thing that women are shocked to learn about after a treatment?
Dr. Suny:
When it comes to laser vaginal rejuvenation on the inside, one of the things that they’re shocked to know is all of a sudden they are not having that urinary leakage when they cough, sneeze. It’s like, “Oh, you know, when I was doing this, when I coughed, I didn’t leak myself anymore. When I exercise, I didn’t have a drip anymore. Or if I lifted something really heavy, I didn’t have a drip anymore.” That’s a positive.
The other one is the lubrication. Now, that comes with the lasers. Those are the two things that people notice the most.
And the urinary urgency. I have to go to the bathroom two or three times at night, or have to, like, pay attention to where the bathrooms are when I go to the store because I don’t know when that urge is going to come. That’s one of the things that they notice changes after the CO2 laser.
When it comes to a surgical procedure itself, what women do notice is, one, the incontinence often is gone, and they can have a normal bowel movement. And they just say, all of a sudden, like, “I didn’t know that people poop this. Like, I didn’t know this was the right way to poop. Oh, it just feels better.”
And then also when it comes to intimacy, whether it is with yourself or with your partner, having that friction makes a huge difference when it comes to feeling. I’ve had so many women that say, “When I’m having intercourse, I just go, ‘Where is he?'” And I think, okay, now I know what you’re talking about. Now I know exactly what I need to do.
We just take things like that for granted. Can we fix it? Can we not? Well, we can fix it, it doesn’t have to be that way.
And you don’t lose any sensation. That’s the other thing that people think. They feel like, “Am I going to lose my sensation? Is it going to hurt? Am I going to lose sensation?” You don’t lose sensation because it has to be done the correct way. If it’s done the correct way, knowing the anatomy, there is no sensation loss of anything. You gain sensation because now there’s friction there to actually feel it.
Do yoni baths/yoni steams help with vaginal rejuvenation?
Dr. Suny:
I don’t understand them very well because the vagina itself cleans itself. It has its own lining, self-cleaning mechanism. Some of those kind of home things are to bring more moisture to the area, and when you bring more and more water, then it helps it kind of clean out more. Essentially, the vagina does that on its own without necessarily needing anything.
The other thing, too, is that if you put anything in the vagina, you can actually clear out your normal bacteria that you need in there. Initially it feels better because initially you don’t have whatever odor you’re trying to treat or whatever it is that makes you feel cleaner. Well, now you’ve cleaned out all that bacteria, the normal natural flora to the vagina. A week or two later, you’re back to having bacterial vaginosis or a yeast infection. Then you do the same thing again to clean it out, and it’s like this just round and roundabout. And it’s not fixing the problem. It’s actually making the problem worse because you’re getting rid of your good bacteria.
How should women wash/clean down there?
Dr. Suny:
There’s different thoughts in that, actually. There’s a more naturalist thought that you just use water, and that’s it. I prefer soap and water, actually, but with no scents. Those things can be very irritating to the skin of the outside of the vagina, so no scented soaps.
It’s better if it’s hypoallergenic, like things that you would buy for somebody that has allergies. That would be a better type of soap down there. But definitely nothing that is irritating, that has tons of fumes and tons of toxic things.
Coconut soap works really well. It just is coconut oil, essentially, or coconut milk. Those work really well. And coconut has a property of being anti-yeast, so that works really well, too.
Morgan Allen:
So would you recommend coconut oil for intercourse or not?
Dr. Suny:
Yeah, so there’s a caveat there.
One is you shouldn’t need any lubrication for intercourse because you should be making your own lubrication. So you shouldn’t need any. If you need any, it means that there is something going on that we need to fix so that you don’t have to have any lubricant.
Now, if you just got married and you’re having sex three times a day, yes. At the second, third day, you’re going to need some lubrication. And at that point, coconut oil actually does work really well, too. None of this stuff that you read and has more than just coconut oil.
