Dr. Yohann
Dabi

Endometriosis is not a rare disease. It affects approximately one in ten women of reproductive age — yet for decades it remained at the margins of medicine: under-researched, under-diagnosed, and too often dismissed. That injustice is what drew me to it, and what has kept me there.

I currently lead the Centre Expert Endométriose at Tenon Hospital (AP-HP) in Paris — one of the most active and recognised referral centres for endometriosis in France. Day to day, this means managing the most complex presentations of the disease: patients who have often already undergone multiple surgeries, who carry severe multifocal disease involving the bowel, urinary tract, and pelvic nerves, and who arrive having exhausted other options. These are the cases I have built my surgical career around.

My surgical approach is defined by three principles: radical completeness, nerve preservation, and the relentless pursuit of fertility when it is the patient's wish. Bowel resection, ureteral reimplantation, nerve-sparing parametrial dissection — procedures performed laparoscopically or robotically, because I believe that the complexity of the disease must never come at the cost of the patient's recovery.

In research, my focus has been on closing the diagnostic gap. The average delay between a patient's first symptoms and a confirmed diagnosis remains, scandalously, close to seven years. My work on salivary microRNA biomarkers — including a publication in NEJM Evidence — is a direct attempt to change that, bringing non-invasive molecular diagnostics from the laboratory into everyday clinical use.

A truly holistic approach to endometriosis cannot rest on surgery and research alone. I have always valued my close collaboration with patient associations, whose role I consider indispensable — they carry the lived experience of the disease, amplify voices that medicine too often overlooks, and help us build care pathways that are genuinely centred on the person, not just the pathology.

But numbers and techniques are only part of the story. The patients I care for most deeply are those who arrive having already spent years being told that their pain is normal, or psychosomatic, or simply something to endure. Rebuilding their trust in medicine — and in their own bodies — is the part of this work that no paper can capture, and the part I find most meaningful.