360 degrees of treatment!
Working as a PT over the last 15 years has been a fascinating learning curve for me! I started out with a very tiny focus at the beginning of my career, when I was only concerned with the ‘location of the problem’. Have pain? It ‘must be this muscle, or that ligament’. My whole body focus wouldn’t extend beyond the fascia: ”your fascia spans from your head to toe”, I would often tell my patients, in an attempt to explain why, to treat their shoulders, I needed to work on their backs. (My understanding of full body treatment did not extend beyond fascia)
As I continued working under the purely biomedical model of healthcare, where the focus is primarily on the tissue and the physical body, I could not fully understand why some of my patients took longer to heal than others despite receiving the exact same physical/medical treatments. I belonged then to the school of thought that if the patient wasn’t getting better, it is probably because they are not trying hard enough to exercise, or not maintaining that perfect posture. I was SO wrong!
I realized what I was missing as soon as I started working, exclusively, in the world of Pelvic Health. As I noticed a huge variation in my patients’ subjective symptoms with the same condition across different cultures, I began to understand how a person’s thoughts, belief systems, past memories, interpersonal relationships, lifestyle, could all impact their health. I decided to learn more about pain neuroscience, and started working with a strong inter-disciplinary team of physicians, functional medicine doctors, therapists, sex therapists, health coaches, acupuncturists, yoga teachers and fitness instructors.
My focus now has expanded so much since the beginning of my career, that it now includes the patient’s entire life, NOT just the symptoms they came to me with.
I take pride in nurturing my patients to create a support-system that allows them to integrate the bio-psycho-social aspects into their health. This is the defining philosophy of ‘the pelvic connection’, where health is seen as a whole that is much greater a sum of individual parts.
I do understand that, even as I zoom out my focus and understand the person as a whole, I also need to zoom in to get a deeper understanding of the root cause of a problem. Sometimes the roots are quite widespread, and that’s when I collaborate with other practitioners to provide my patients the 360 degrees of treatment they deserve. I put the whole person at the center of my practice. This is the essence of what the three interconnected rings in my logo intend to convey: that pelvic health is only optimal when looked at from the entire bio-psycho-social lens, putting the patient at the center.
I also strongly believe in developing a strong and deep relationship with all of my patients, and feel that we, as practitioners, need to step away from a transactional model of healthcare. If you do decide to work with me, I assure you that I would try my best to never let you feel unsupported.