Dr. Thaïs Aliabadi was recently featured in New York Magazine’s “The Cut.” Learn how Dr. Aliabadi has crafted a unique formula for success, offering her patient’s cutting-edge medicine and unmatched empathy.
It’s mid-morning, and Dr. Thaïs Aliabadi is bustling around her Beverly Hills office in a pair of baby-pink scrubs. She’s busy, having recently taken time off to attend the everyone-who’s-anyone-was-there Ambani wedding in Mumbai. Her first appointment of the day is with a 27-year-old Scooter Braun employee. When the patient arrives, she seems slightly starstruck to meet the woman who will soon be giving her a Pap smear.
“My roommate loves you,” she tells Dr. Aliabadi. “She was like, ‘Dr. A could do brain surgery on me.’” The standard well-woman appointment usually includes a Pap and maybe some blood and urine tests; this is not that. Aliabadi calculates the patient’s cancer risk, performs a pelvic ultrasound, diagnoses her with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), prescribes her Zepbound for weight loss, and tells her she’ll drop 24 pounds in four months. “That’s the Aliabadi formula,” the doctor says.
The Aliabadi formula has become very popular in Los Angeles of late. Aliabadi is big on preventive care. She uses the MyRisk genetic test, a tool that weighs personal and family history to calculate a patient’s risk for hereditary cancers; she listens to her patients carefully for signs of endometriosis and PCOS; and she assesses the ideal time to freeze eggs.
Earlier this year, Olivia Munn credited Aliabadi with saving her life when those tests helped catch her breast cancer. When asked in an interview what her favorite thing about L.A. is, Rihanna said simply, “My gynecologist.” Aliabadi sees Olivia Culpo, members of various royal families, and the entire Kardashian-Jenner clan; she advised SZA to remove her dangerous breast implants and delivered Emma Roberts’s baby and, a month ago, Justin and Hailey Bieber’s son, Jack Blues.
Seeing her is not cheap. Aliabadi stopped taking insurance seven years ago, and appointments, which can book out over a month in advance, can cost thousands of dollars out of pocket. But even those who can generally afford this level of health care say they have never met another doctor like her. When she delivered Tatum Thompson, she offered to keep the baby until an emotionally overwhelmed Khloé Kardashian felt ready to pick him up. “I was like, What? Who does this? Who even offers that?” Kardashian said in an interview.
Aliabadi was born to a “very, very well-off” family in Tehran, she tells me after she has finished seeing patients. When she was 8, the Iranian Revolution upended their lives. The nannies, drivers, and lavish vacations from her early childhood disappeared, but the family didn’t leave Tehran until she was 17.
A teenager who spoke hardly any English in Los Altos, California, Aliabadi attended community college for two years and took “every ESL class on the planet” before transferring to UC Berkeley. She went to Georgetown University for medical school and, after her residency, hoped to land a job at Cedars-Sinai. “It was the most popular place, and I thought, This is where I want to be,” she says.
Four years ago, Aliabadi appeared on a Dr. Phil episode to speak about the dangers of drug use with a 34-weeks-pregnant woman struggling with heroin addiction. Afterward, she got the woman admitted to Cedars-Sinai and promised to deliver her baby free of charge. “I thought, I’m going to fix the mom; I fix everyone,” Aliabadi says. She delivered the woman’s baby, Coco, and ended up fostering her. The adoption was finalized last year; Coco is now the youngest of Aliabadi’s four daughters.
When she didn’t get any of the positions she applied for, she did the next best thing: She opened her own practice at the nearby Cedars-Sinai Medical Towers and picked up 24-hour labor-and-delivery shifts all around L.A. She also worked in clinics in less-affluent neighborhoods where she saw patients on Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program. Lines soon formed outside her doors.
Aliabadi bought one of the women’s clinics in 2004 and prided herself on giving patients the same level of care she offered at her private practice. She personally called patients with lab results; if she’d promised a delivery, she would leave in the middle of dinner to make it in time. As a fellow OB/GYN once told her, one happy patient will send you four others. “That’s how I grew,” Aliabadi says. In 2005, she sold the clinic. It was time to build out the Beverly Hills practice.
In 2014, a cardiologist told her about a new medication called Trulicity, which he said decreased patients’ appetites. Aliabadi tried out the drug on a family member, who soon lost 50 pounds, so she began prescribing it to her patients, too. “Ozempic blew up in this country partly because of me,” she claims. So many people were coming in specifically for the drug that she worried her practice would accidentally transform into a weight-loss clinic.
It was changing a little anyway. Celebrities had started trickling through her doors as soon as two years after she opened — “This is L.A.,” she says. But back then, “there was no social media.” When patients did start posting, others of their ilk made appointments. In 2017, Kylie Jenner, then pregnant with her first child, came in.
Khloé delivered with her soon after. Within a year, the rest of the family had joined them, effectively ending their relationship with their former OB, Paul Crane (who, incidentally, delivered Beyoncé’s twins). Soon, Aliabadi’s patients began bringing cameras into her office for reality shows. She gamely made appearances on Keeping Up With the Kardashians and TLC’s The Culpo Sisters.
During the pandemic, Kylie donated a million dollars to Aliabadi’s fund to supply COVID-protection equipment to ICU doctors and nurses in L.A. “You are my hero,” the doctor wrote on Instagram to Kylie after the donation. The reality star responded, “You’re an angel on earth.”
Aliabadi invites me over for dinner with her family after she’s finished with her patients for the day. In the car, she tells me about a famous patient she saw the day before, and as we pull into her gated driveway, I wonder if she should have.
She worries often about discretion — earlier, she told me about the time she accidentally tipped off TMZ to the fact that Khloé was in labor by posting a nondescript selfie from the lobby of the Cleveland hospital where she delivered. Hundreds of paparazzi showed up. “It was so traumatic,” she says. “I started texting Khloé, ‘I’m so sorry. I swear to God.’ She said, ‘Don’t worry — I saw your post, it was so innocent.’”
But as her public profile grows, Aliabadi’s role in the background seems harder to pull off. What happens when a celebrity doctor becomes a celebrity in her own right? She becomes a brand, of course.
Her range has certainly become Kardashian-esque. In March, Aliabadi debuted a podcast called SHE MD with her friend the designer Mary Alice Haney. The duo invite other doctors, as well as Aliabadi’s celebrity patients, to talk about various women’s-health issues.
And she’s set to launch an app called Ovii, which includes a risk assessment to determine one’s likelihood of PCOS and a supplement for managing its symptoms that Aliabadi developed with a pair of scientists. Her team says it’ll work as well as Metformin, the diabetes drug popular with billionaires like Sam Altman for its potential ability to slow aging.
Her house in Bel Air sits behind an automated wooden gate, fenced in by walls of shrubbery. She designed the house herself — her side hobby is interior decorating. “When I’m home, it’s heaven. I have the nicest family on earth,” she says. We’re soon joined by her husband and four daughters, a member of her marketing team, her mother, her niece, a cousin’s teenage son, one of her daughters’ friends (“I delivered him,” she says), and enough Persian takeout to feed a dozen.
In the kitchen, patterned with Sicilian tile, Aliabadi slices a papaya and suggests I stay in L.A. longer to try ketamine therapy; she thinks I’ll really respond to it. “You’re more than welcome to stay with me,” she says.
Written by Bindu Bansinath, a writer for The Cut who covers news, culture, and relationships. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Electric Literature. She was previously an assistant editor at Harper’s.
Read the whole article at The Cut.
Take control of your health: contact Dr. Aliabadi
Dr. Aliabadi has been a practicing OB/GYN in Los Angeles since 2002. She serves as an official gynecologist for many royal families and “celebrities,” as well as instructing Cedars Sinai Medical Center residents and medical students at the University of Southern California. She and her compassionate team are experts in women’s health care.
When you’re treated by Dr. Aliabadi, you’re guaranteed to feel safe, heard, and well cared for.
We invite you to establish care with Dr. Aliabadi. Please make an appointment online or call us at (844) 863-6700.
The practice of Dr. Thais Aliabadi is conveniently located for patients throughout Southern California and the Los Angeles area, near Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, West Los Angeles, Culver City, Hollywood, Venice, Marina del Rey, Malibu, Manhattan Beach, and Downtown Los Angeles, to name a few.
Supported by her warm professional team, Dr. Aliabadi treats women through all phases of life and cherishes the special one-on-one relationship between patient and doctor.