Hi Melanie,
Responding to your call for subscriber experiences with Tia, the women’s health clinic. I was a founding member at its first brick-and-mortar in NYC back in 2018. I have strong and mixed feelings about my experience. I want to preface this letter by saying I totally get the Tia allure, and I think that Tia is doing some interesting work! I’ll also note that my direct experience ended in 2020, and it’s entirely possible that some of these things have substantially (not just optically) changed.
But here’s my hot take: I personally found most of its allure to be hype, and after two years, decided to leave. I was exhausted by its weak promises, not to mention the recurring feeling I had that I wasn’t good enough for its world.
Tia sells itself as many things. But it’s important for folks to know that Tia isn’t some utopian place. It’s still just a doctor’s office. If anything, it’s imperfect perhaps because it sells itself as more than what it is.
I do want to touch on some positives. It wasn’t all disenchanting. In addition to Tia’s talk, I do think a few of Tia’s products are unique and walk the walk. I was impressed by its patient portal. I’ve never seen one that’s so seamless. It’s easy to access records and make appointments online, and that’s awesome. I also love that patients are assigned a specific care coordinator with whom they can develop a relationship. That’s so special, and I had a great one while there.
When I found Tia, I was desperate and sold on its promise of care. Since I was a teen, I’ve had a slew of chronic health issues. I’ve seen doctor after doctor and tried treatment after treatment, yet I remain a question mark to specialists in the field.
In 2018, Tia was just starting up, casting itself as an integrative medical center for women’s health. And Tia took insurance. Which, like, man. That’s the stuff of dreams. So I did my research. I read about the health journey of one of Tia’s founders. On a path that felt pretty lonely and demoralizing, I suddenly started to feel seen, to feel hope.
But I knew better than to trust marketing. I didn’t want to waste my time, and I also couldn’t afford to waste my money. To join Tia, you have to pay a monthly membership fee of $15 a month or $150 a year in addition to what you might pay for treatment, depending on what your insurance covers. I had already spent so much on false healthcare leads, and I was on a tight post-grad budget.
So I reached out to Tia’s other founder to share my challenges and medical history. I needed to confirm that Tia would be different from other healthcare providers before signing up. I didn’t need to know Tia would solve my problems—no one can promise that. I just needed to know I’d actually be considered.
I was skeptical, but in our email exchange, I was emphatically promised that I was the perfect candidate for Tia. I was excited, and I was sold.
And initially, I got great care! I worked with a practitioner who saw me and heard me. She did research outside of our appointments. She trusted my body’s intelligence. She followed my lead. She followed up. We worked together for a year. It was unreal. And then she suddenly left.
Around that time, Tia’s system had started changing. There were more providers, and you wouldn’t necessarily meet with the same one each visit. Given my issues, I wanted provider continuity. I requested it, and Tia allowed me to make appointments with different practitioners until I found one I wanted to stick with. I cycled through a few, but none of them were it. Appointments were average: Quick and impersonal. As is standard in the healthcare system, I felt like a patient, not a person.
A year or so in at this point, I started to feel tired. It takes a lot of energy to continue advocating for your health when the path forward is unclear and you’re forging it entirely on your own. But I continued showing up to Tia. I had invested. I asked to work with the company’s medical director, a specialist.
During our appointment, the doctor and I chatted. He reviewed my bloodwork. He agreed my situation was complicated. He wanted to refer me out. I was bummed, but open—that is, until he told me the specialist’s name.
Everything suddenly came to a halt. I felt my fight flush out of my body.
I already knew her name. I’d seen that specialist before coming to Tia, and she’d had no idea what to do with me. I told him this. He made a friendly joke to ease the tension and recommended another name. But that specialist didn’t take insurance. And when I called her, she wouldn’t see me. My care once again became an impossibility.
The conversation just sort of ended there.
I don’t think he did anything wrong. He did what so many doctors would and in most cases should do. He didn’t know me, and he knew his limitations..But I’d joined Tia to try and find a respite from the conventional health system. Instead, it followed me there.
Another trouble spot for me was Tia’s aesthetics.
I was definitely attracted to Tia’s look at first. It’s hard not to be drawn to pretty shapes and colors. Come on—I’m but a cuspy Gen Z-millennial.
Tia's hyper-aesthetic is in diametric opposition to the fluorescent-lit beige office that most of us know well.
I’ve felt the anxiety that comes with the typical beige, sterile doctor’s office, so I thought Tia’s cool, colorful office might be a nice change of pace. The doctor, but make it fun! But at Tia, I also felt anxious, just for different reasons.
At Tia, everything is curated and vibey. The waiting room feels like walking into the For You page of an LA cool girl (a $5,000 face but an effortless personality). The allure pulls you in, like a targeted ad—which you will now probably see, from Tia, in your feed. But from my first appointment onward, I felt sort of out of place.
The staff and other patients always seemed perfectly curated and dressed to the nines. I’m just so obviously not that person. Don’t get me wrong, everyone was always incredibly bubbly and nice, too. But even that could sometimes feel a bit much. I didn’t actually know anyone there. Yes, those other bland, drab waiting rooms are boring—but in that dullness, everyone fits in. Is there perhaps a compromise between Tia’s vision and most of America’s depressing waiting room reality?
Fitting in isn’t usually a top goal for me. But the doctor’s office, of all places, should be a space where you can show up as you are, no matter how together or shitty or messy you feel, and feel worthy of receiving care.
On a few occasions, I brought friends, some of whom are WOC, to a few of Tia’s community events. These included panels on topics like diet culture, sexual wellness, and PCOS, with member meet-ups to discuss those topics in a more informal setting. My friends independently shared that they felt out of place amongst the predominantly thin, white, expensive-looking women. My friends did appreciate what I also appreciated about Tia—that Tia is pushing the envelope when it comes to the conversation around women’s healthcare. But comparatively, we all felt that their talk was bigger than their walk.
But maybe that’s part of what Tia is trying to do. The shift around the conversation on women’s health has to start somewhere. And that shift takes hard work and time. No start-up will do anything perfectly, especially not at the beginning. When leaving Tia, I had a conversation with one of the co-founders who remembered me from the beginning. She wanted to hear my feedback. I’m not sure if anything came of our debrief, but she was open to it.
Overall, I appreciate that Tia is pushing the women’s health conversation forward. But, to me, its aesthetic can feel distracting and superficial, masking over an average standard of care. It also doesn’t seem like Tia provides appropriate services for folks with more complicated health profiles—it’s probably much better suited for someone who’s generally the picture of health.
With that said, I know many other folks have had great experiences there, and I even have a friend who works there part-time now and loves it. So, this is my experience. Take from it what you will.
Thanks for the invitation!
SB
