I am Wahiba Kartaoui, and I built the practice I always wanted and could never find.
I was born in Morocco. I arrived here at nineteen with very little, taught myself English and then Spanish, and built a life and a career out of will and long hours. I care for women now in English, French, Arabic, and Spanish, because every woman deserves to be understood in her own words. I tell you this because I want you to know who is on the other side of the screen. Not a logo. A woman who has had to find her way more than once.
For more than a decade I have cared for women across the whole body. Hematology and oncology at Duke and UNC. Primary care and internal medicine. Women’s health and hormones. Metabolic and weight management. Mental health. Aesthetic medicine. I was among the first in my region to use GLP-1 and GIP for women, before any of it became the trend. I am board certified and licensed in five states. I have led as well as practiced: Medical Director and Vice President of Operations, five clinics across three cities, the recruitment and the training and the care standards built from the ground up. I was named to the Top 100 Women Leaders in Business and appointed to the City of Durham Mayor’s Council for Women. I say this plainly, because for too long women were taught to make themselves small, and I am done doing that.
And then I became the woman in the chair.
I lived my own perimenopause. I received my own late ADHD diagnosis. I knew the science cold, and still I felt the grief of a change that no one prepares you for. I did what so many of us do. I thought it was only me. I internalized it. I carried the guilt, and I watched my confidence quietly fall, and for a while I lost my way. That is the part no clinic talks about, and it is the exact reason I built Vieora.
Here is the truth I want every woman to hear. We prepare girls for puberty. We sit them down and explain what is coming. We do not do that for women. Perimenopause and menopause arrive and we are left to wonder what is wrong with us, when nothing is wrong with us at all. In 2002 a single study scare pulled hormone therapy away from an entire generation and left women on their own with their symptoms and their shame. You are not broken. The system is. I built Vieora to change that.
This is the care I am building, and it is the care I would want for myself. The same clinician every visit, never handed off. No waiting rooms, no pharmacy lines, no two hours in a chair to be seen for five minutes by someone who does not know your story. Your medications ordered and delivered to your door. Your labs drawn near you or in your own home and reviewed by me, never a guess. Fully virtual across North Carolina, so you can be cared for from your living room or while you travel. The whole woman in one place: hormones, metabolism, mind, supplements, and the nutrition that makes medications like GLP-1 actually work the way they should.
And it is individual. No two women are the same. Perimenopause is a journey of years, and where you are on a Monday is not where you are a year from now, so your plan has to change as you do. So much of what gets called anxiety or depression is hormonal, and sometimes, underneath it, it is ADHD that was never named, the way mine was not. I will not look at one piece of you and ignore the rest. Everything is connected, and almost no one is treating it that way.
I love aesthetic medicine for the same reason. Not vanity. Confidence. When you feel good in your own skin you do it for yourself and no one else, and once a woman has that, no one can touch her. She can go conquer the world.
That is my mission, and it is bigger than my practice. I want every woman to know what is coming, so she is never blindsided by something this fixable. I want us to advocate for one another and to say it out loud. I want the men in our lives to understand it too, because the woman they love, the mother, the sister, the daughter, deserves to be understood. Share the word. Tell the women you love, and tell the people who love them. When women lift women, no one has to lose her way in silence again. I do not want this for my daughter. I do not want this for my granddaughter. I do not want it for any of us, not when there is so much we can do.
Because I do not believe this chapter is the end of anything. At forty six, I believe it is the beginning. This is when we have carried the family and the career, and we finally have the chance to thrive, to figure out what we want for the next several decades. Hormonal change touches all of it: the brain, the mood, the body, the confidence we hold so dearly. We are not our symptoms. We are not one body part. We are whole, and you have to care for the whole to heal the whole.
I am also an author. My memoir, Take Up the Room, is coming soon. The science and the story, together.
If any of this sounds like you, you are exactly who I built this for.
Become a patient at vieorahealth.com. For the complimentary perimenopause guide, just ask, and I will send it to you.
With you in all of it, Wahiba. Wahiba Kartaoui, MSN, FNP-C. Founder, Vieora Health.
This blog is for education, not medical advice. I am not your clinician or your provider, and reading this does not create that relationship. Please talk with your own doctor or provider before starting, stopping, or changing any medication, supplement, or treatment.