Karla Loken

Dr. Karla Loken is a physician and women’s-health leader who founded Loken & Associates, a medical-affairs consultancy. An osteopathic OB-GYN (DO, FACOOG), she practiced and cared for patients for more than two decades before moving to the industry side of medicine, where she has held senior clinical-development, safety, and medical-affairs roles spanning medical devices, diagnostics, and pharmaceuticals, including at Hologic, FEMSelect, and HerMD.

Loken is also a longtime women’s-health and vaccine advocate. She lost her sister to meningitis at sixteen and has campaigned for vaccines and disease prevention throughout her career, and she works on women’s-health advocacy and fundraising nationally.

Loken appeared on Open Door Salon twice. She first joined a conversation with pharmacist and patient advocate Tina Valbh on the gaps patients fall through, where she argued that medicine’s silos leave no unified source of truth and that industry “patient journey” maps miss most of the touchpoints because patients are never consulted. She returned for a one-on-one conversation after being diagnosed with a rare appendiceal cancer, going public with her diagnosis to help others.

As both a physician and a patient, Loken’s recurring theme was access. She described how her medical training, physician spouse, and industry network connected her to expert second opinions within hours, then named the survivor’s guilt of knowing the average patient has none of that. No one fits a cookbook, she argued: every patient becomes an “N of one,” and what the system most needs is more navigators to translate complex medicine into terms patients can act on.