“Dr. Sex Fairy” has a story to tell, and, no, it’s not the one about her popular podcast with listeners tuning in across six continents and dozens of countries.
Or her TikTok account with more than 110 million views and 850,000 followers.
Or the concoctions she’s developed to revive private parts and reignite pleasure.
Or the couple she’s helped transform into the geriatric Pam and Tommy Lee of sexual escapades.
Indeed, Dr. Kanwal Bawa, aka Dr. Sex Fairy, has a lot to say about her meteoric rise in the relatively uncharted world of sexual medicine and her ground-breaking techniques at Bawa Medical in Boca Raton to rejuvenate hair, skin and, well, ways to make for better whoopee.
But she’ll always embrace her roots as a physician—deep, sturdy and still emotionally charged from 13 years as an emergency room and trauma center doctor.
She doesn’t fight the tears in recounting one of the many moments—of survival and tragedy—she thinks about to this day.
Bawa had arrived for her evening shift at the ER of a Houston-area hospital and was briefed about a woman who had been there for several hours after hitting her head in a fall. But to Bawa, the woman did not look like a typical concussion patient.
“She looked gray,” Bawa says. “She looked like death.”
Bawa figured that something made her faint and fall. She quizzed the woman, who only had one thing on her mind.
“All she cared about was how soon she could leave because she had a disabled daughter, and she handled her meds,” Bawa says.
Bawa sensed that the woman’s condition was worsening and quickly pushed her gurney to the CT scan room, telling a stunned tech to take a stable patient off the table and immediately scan the head-injury patient.
Bawa thought the culprit was a blood clot in her chest, and her fears were confirmed in the most horrific way—a code blue signal while the woman was on the scanning table.
“I intubated her through the donut of the CAT scan,” she says. “We worked on her for two hours.” Despite Bawa’s spot-on instincts and painstaking efforts, the woman died. Bawa then pulled herself together to meet the family.
“I’m talking to them, and the daughter waddles into the room and says, ‘Momma,’ ” Bawa says. “I cried, the family cried … we all cried together.”
Bawa pauses, blinking back tears.
“Emergency medicine can really wear on your soul after a point,” she says. “I never lost my humanity … to this day I think about those people.”
So, how did this Nova Southeastern University College of Osteopathic Medicine graduate and Cleveland Clinic-trained emergency medicine physician transition from matters of life and death to podcast episodes with titles like “How to Get a Porn Star Penis”?
Well, as Bawa discovered throughout her career at ERs from Cleveland to Houston to South Florida, sex can trigger plenty of trauma.
Erection issues. Penis fractures. Assorted items stuck in orifices.
“In between saving lives and heart attacks and strokes and trauma helicopter rides,” Bawa says, “I was like the pied piper of sexual [incidents].
“If I showed up, the universe was just sending them to me.”
Long before—wince warning!—draining her first erectile-dysfunction-pill-induced, multi-hour erection or her inaugural expedition to retrieve a missing sex toy, Bawa already was considering a shift in her medical career.
She was inspired at age 17 to consider becoming an ER doctor after sustaining a concussion, broken collarbone and a leg injury when a truck hit her school bus in her native New Delhi, India, killing the bus driver and a student. Bawa marveled over the miraculous efforts of the physicians that day.
A not-as-tragic but nevertheless disturbing situation led her down the path to a career in what she has coined “rejuvenation from the inside out.”
No Turning Back
Years of tying her hair back tightly in hospitals resulted in a receding hairline. Bawa’s initial hair transplant procedures did not go well. Frustrated, she decided to train in hair-transplant surgery. From there, she started taking courses in skin-care procedures, but also on her mind were the sexual problems she encountered in emergency rooms.
“I got into rejuvenation, and it was a natural transition from there to helping people with their sexual needs,” Bawa says. “Now they had great hair and skin, but they wanted to have great sex, too.”
Bawa expanded her medical horizons while still working in the ER at Florida Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale before leaving her longtime career to open Bawa Medical in 2019.
Her rejuvenation education included a course with Dr. Charles Runels, whose name and Alabama practice went viral after no-less-a-cosmetically-created-queen than Kim Kardashian revealed details—and a pretty gruesome photo—about her “Vampire Facial” performed by Runels.
The “Vampire” involves injecting Platelet-Rich Plasma from a patient’s own blood into the skin. Runels taught Bawa a similar procedure to improve function through a priapus shot for the penis and orgasm shot for the vagina. The objective is to use a patient’s own bodies to stimulate their stem cells.
Now, Bawa is in the process of trademarking her own brand, BawaShots, to rocket-boost stem cell growth. Her breakthrough formula combines Dysport, a Botox-like toxin, with exosomes harvested from umbilical cord tissue and platelet-rich fibrin matrix from a patient’s blood. Imagine fortifying your morning caffeine jolt by adding a shot of espresso and vial of Red Bull to your Starbucks venti Veranda Blonde Roast and you get the idea.
She’s also been successful in developing custom-made shots that include facial fillers to address a common request from clients—penis enlargement.
Bawa offers a list of services the size of a Cheesecake Factory menu on her website with treatment names like BawaLift Labial Rejuvenation, images of drop-dead gorgeous male and female models, and before-and-after photos of actual patients forewarned by a nudity warning. She estimates that 70 percent of her practice is now devoted to sexual medicine with the rest divided between facial aesthetics and hair restoration.
She was tickled when several satisfied customers praised her for an ability to spread sexual “fairy dust.” Then one day, as her orders for PRP kits grew, her PRP representative wanted to know, “just how many facial, microneedling treatments are you doing?”
“Haven’t you heard, darling?” Bawa replied, “I’m the Sex Fairy … No, I’m Doctor Sex Fairy.”
Bawa immediately spun around to her computer, locked up the domain name and nailed down a number of social media handles. Dr. Sex Fairy was in the house and, shortly afterward, she launched the Dr. Sex Fairy podcast from a leased studio in Boca Raton (she now produces it from her office). The podcast ranks in the top 1 percent globally for most popular shows across all categories, according to Listennotes.com.
“What made me unique was that I was a Cleveland-Clinic-trained doctor talking about sexual issues that were very scary to people, profound and very embarrassing,” Bawa says. “But I was saying those things and discussing those topics with dignity.”
To be sure, while Bawa might inject a touch of humor into a discussion of, say, injecting penises and vaginas to improve performance and appearance—her How Fast Does Semen Fly Out Of Your Penis? segment on TikTok features background music from Top Gun—she avoids the kind of off-color jokes or rim-shot innuendo used by other sex-help hosts.
“I’m funny. I joke about stuff,” she says. “But I have maintained my dignity in a field that doesn’t always lend itself to that. Also, I never want people to think that I was ever making fun of them.
“I’m more likely to make fun of myself than to make fun of somebody else’s physical problem.”
Bawa, who as a teenager modeled for Cosmopolitan magazine, also is careful to maintain a professional appearance, shooting her TikTok videos in a traditional white lab coat.
“I know I could get more TikTok views if I sexualized myself,” she says. “I refuse to make it racy. Sexual medicine does not need to be sexualized.”
Still, you do want to grab an audience’s attention, so the titles of her podcasts and TikTok segments are hardly anything you’d find in the American Journal of Medicine: The Sex Position Most Likely To Break Your Penis. Shocking Sex Secrets of the Amish. Loose Women: How to Tighten Your Vagina.
Bawa’s podcast guests sometimes include patients eternally thankful to once again be active in the bedroom or, in the case of Jim and Cindy of Boca Raton, anywhere or anytime they get the urge. Jim, then 69, and Cindy, then 70, both took BawaShots, and Jim also was treated with soundwave therapy to improve blood flow to the penis.
“They say they’re having sex twice a day and sometimes nooners,” Bawa says with a laugh.
Bawa points out that not all patients will receive successful results from treatments that have had clinically proven effects and might still be in the experimental stage.
“I’m not going to do anything that I think will hurt my patient,” she says, “but I am willing to take a chance. We have an honest discussion that this is not something that there’s any FDA approval for, but I would like to try it on you.”
Trading Places
Two years ago, Bawa became a patient herself—and it was far more serious than anything encountered in her practice. She discovered a lump in her breast in 2017, but doctors kept assuring her—even after two mammograms confirmed the mass—that there was no need for a biopsy or concern.
Bawa was skeptical of the diagnosis, but between going through a divorce, adjusting to life as a single mother of twin boys, still working in the ER and taking courses toward opening her practice, she trudged on.
Then, another mammogram revealed growth in the lump and cancer was confirmed through a biopsy. Bawa sought treatment at the University of Miami’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center. More than three years had passed since she had first noticed the lump.
“I truly think my doctors at Sylvester saved my life,” she says. “I was Stage II, but Grade 3. Very aggressive cancer.”
She began chemotherapy treatments, and by then Bawa Medical had been open for a year. Bawa would go for a treatment and return to the office, “puking, everything, but never sitting at home,” she says. “I never gave myself a chance to be a cancer patient. I didn’t have time. I was working.”
She also was preparing to achieve a major goal in her quest to summon strength for herself and others.
Sometime before her diagnosis, representatives of the Ms. Florida beauty pageant for women ages 28-and-older reached out to Bawa about participating. No thanks, she replied.
But during her first oncology appointment, she had an off-the-wall question for her doctor: “Would it be entirely crazy if I signed up for a beauty pageant?”
Cancer was not going to crash her pageant party. One day, Bawa’s chemo nurse approached her in tears.
“That’s not a good sign when your hardened chemotherapy nurse is crying. My labs were not good. I was so sick. But I said to her, ‘I’m not sure why you’re crying. In just two or three months, I’m going to be on stage—and I’m going to win Ms. Florida.’ ”
She had her mastectomy in early May 2021; a month later Bawa was crowned Ms. Florida in Stuart, taking the stage long after chemo had reduced her flowing, jet-black mane to a cropped cut. She wore a gown purposefully plunged just enough to reveal the scar of her intravenous port.
Her best friend had to zip her dress, and her boys buckled her shoes.
Bawa savors the memories of that evening and, despite her skin-reviving skills, has no plans to erase her scar.
“I’m keeping this,” says Bawa, who turns 45 in May. “It’s my battle wound.”
Flying High
“My goal was that I wanted to inspire people to not be limited by adversity,” Bawa says. “It doesn’t matter what the adversity is; it’s the concept, not just cancer.”
Bawa became an ambassador for the American Cancer Society’s ResearchHERS initiative, and she devoted podcasts to life after breast cancer and testicular cancer.
“I want to have those tough conversations, too,” she says. “Those are not sexy conversations.”
Bawa lives with her sons, Arjun and Akal, in Boynton Beach. The twins turn 13 in May, and they’re aware of Dr. Sex Fairy. In fact, they’re the ones who encouraged her to expand her reach through TikTok.
If only Mom would stop trying to have the ewww factor talks with them.
“I have conversations with them about sexuality, and they’re not always enthralled,” Bawa says.
These days, Bawa’s schedule is filled with office appointments—she estimates that 80 percent of her patients are from elsewhere in Florida, around the country, and across the world, including Southeast Asia, England, Italy, Australia, South America and the Caribbean islands.
She also produces at least two podcasts and a couple of TikTok videos each week. In addition, she’s ironing out plans for a line of supplements and a second office located in Miami. Oh, and she’s working on designs for a penis pump.
Side note to potential engineers—you’re gonna need a bigger pump.
“I make men bigger,” Bawa says, “and so the average Amazon pump is not really big enough for my guys.”
Will there ever be time for her other childhood dream? Bawa’s paternal grandfather was a general in the Indian army and her maternal grandfather was a Boeing-trained aeronautical engineer.
Hence, her desire to become a fighter pilot. It may seem a little late for takeoff, but never say never to Bawa. She’s determined to reach for the sky.
“My goal now is to get a pilot’s license,” she says with the kind of exhilaration that likely precedes Jim and Cindy’s daily afternoon delight.
“How crazy would it be to have Dr. Sex Fairy on the side of a fighter jet?”
No crazier than a veteran ER doctor becoming a worldwide phenom in the field of sexual performance.
“I felt like I was saving lives, but I wasn’t enhancing them,” Bawa says. “I had a great, noble career, but what are you doing to make lives better?”
She continues, but not before a smile and laugh.
“This is a whole other realm of making lives better.”
Photography by Eduardo Schneider
Makeup by Gaby Ojeda
