IUD Insertions Are Notoriously Painful. A Doctor Just Made It Her Mission To Change That.

For decades, patients getting IUDs, the small T-shaped contraceptive devices inserted past the cervix into the uterus, have been told to take ibuprofen beforehand and manage the pain as best they can, a recommendation that patients and researchers alike have long recognized as inadequate given how significant the discomfort can be for many people. A simple, well-established solution already exists: the paracervical block, a targeted local anesthetic injected around the cervix before the procedure that can dramatically reduce pain. It is not new, it is not experimental, and it works. But it is rarely offered, partly because many clinicians were never trained to administer it and partly because research into IUD pain management has historically been underfunded and overlooked. Dr. Roshni Kakaiya, a family medicine physician in San Diego, decided to fix the training problem herself.

Over the past two years, Kakaiya has developed and patented a training model that allows clinicians to practice paracervical blocks before performing them on patients, offering both a beginner-level silicone cervix to learn the technique and a more realistic advanced model for refined practice. The kit costs $150, and since launching last November she has sold 80 kits and compiled a long waitlist of interested buyers, with national attention now following from healthcare providers who say they want the skill but had no easy way to develop it until now. Kakaiya said that if clinicians are not trained to perform paracervical blocks, they cannot genuinely offer patients a full range of pain relief options, and the result is a system where patients are implicitly told to simply endure a procedure that does not have to hurt as much as it often does. The push to make paracervical blocks standard of care for IUD procedures is part of a broader reckoning in medicine with the long-documented pattern of undertreating pain in women, and advocates say the fact that a $150 training kit could meaningfully change the experience for the approximately 10 million Americans who use IUDs is perhaps the most striking part of the story.

Source:https://slate.com/technology/2026/06/iud-birth-control-painful-solution.html