Endometriosis and The Pain of Medical Gaslighting with Endometriosis Surgeon, Dr. Madhu Bagaria, MD, FACOG

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:00:03 Hi and welcome to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m your host, Doctor Jessica Drummond, and I am so thrilled to have you here as we dive into today’s episode. As always, innovating and integrating in the world of women’s health. And just as a reminder, the content in this podcast episode is no substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment from your medical or licensed health care team. While myself and many of my guests are licensed healthcare professionals, we are not your licensed healthcare professionals, so you want to get advice on your unique circumstances. Diagnostic recommendations treatment recommendations from your home medical team. Enjoy the episode. Let’s innovate and integrate together. Oh. Hello. This episode is for you. If you are struggling with a complex chronic illness or complex chronic pain, and you feel like you haven’t found the one practitioner who can solve your problem. The reason is, is because it’s almost never that simple. I’m going to introduce you today to one of my colleagues, Doctor Madhu Bulgaria. She’s an endometriosis surgeon in the New York and New Jersey area.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:01:36 Yet she struggled for six years with her own severe chronic pain, fibromyalgia and trigger warning. She even experienced some suicide ideation. She and I have both walked the path of complex chronic illness, and it’s a difficult one and we can be so motivated and so understanding about what’s going on from a technical perspective. And there’s still not a quick fix. There’s not a drug, there’s not a surgeon. She’s a surgeon. And we talk about how she helps her clients navigating, preparing for and recovering from surgery and how much time that really takes. We talk about the physical body, the emotional body, the spiritual body, and she brings her eastern traditions. She was originally trained in India. She grew up in India. And then she came to the United States, trained at the Mayo Clinic, highly, highly skilled surgeon. And we talk about beyond the clinical knowledge. There’s so much important for us as clinicians and just as humans. All of us are humans and patients to to navigate things holistically because surgery is an amazing tool, but even skilled well done endometriosis excision surgery is not a complete answer.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:03:08 So we’re going to share some of our own stories. This is the first place she’s ever shared her story. We’re going to talk about how women, even women physicians, are not well served in our current model. This is why we created the Menopause Solution at the Integrative Women’s Health Institute. The menopause solution is our perspective on midlife health and healing for women in their 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond who have navigated complex chronic illness and know in our bones that there is not one specialist. We’ve been to many specialists. We might have had surgeries, tried the medications. This does not get to the root, but there are things that help you get to the root. And we’re going to talk about those today. Listen in and let’s talk about on the other side how you can utilize this conversation tomorrow in your practice. And if you are living with chronic symptoms, there’s so much hope for you to heal so fully, but it’s in ways that you probably don’t expect yet. I’ll see you on the other side.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:04:26 I am thrilled to be here with Doctor Bulgaria. She is going to share with us more from the perspective of an endometriosis surgeon who has been trained with such an integrative perspective, and most importantly, she has a special interest in really centering the client and her experience and her family’s experience keeping herself valued as a part of the whole experience, which, if you’ve ever interacted with or had surgery, that’s not generally what surgeons are known for in terms of, you know, really thinking about the experience of the person navigating surgery. But I do see a very significant shift even among surgeons, especially in the world of endometriosis, as we understand how this is a whole system disease. So welcome, Doctor Bergara, and tell us a bit more how you got into this and how your perspective was framed.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:05:38 Thank you. First of all, Jessica, for having me. It’s my pleasure to be here a little bit about my journey. So I have lived in both worlds in the eastern and the western side. So I grew up in India, has done my training there, but I wanted to do something more.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:05:53 There’s always an inner side of you which wants to do more. So here I am, applied, and everybody told me it’s so difficult to apply a surgical branch, but I was like, if I don’t try ten years down the lane, I will regret about it. So here I am. I did my training here, and then I worked as a journalist at the Mayo Clinic Health System in Austin, Minnesota. I worked as a journalist for six years, and in this in my role, I have taken care of women from pregnancies to the 80s with pastries and everything. But I also saw a good amount of people who are suffering with pain and that to me like the prolapse issues and these things as well. And they were ashamed to talk about it. I was very lucky that in my first year I was preparing for my oral botes, so I took a course where I learned how to check for pelvic floor muscles and tenderness, and I was amazed to see that some people have it and some people don’t.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:06:47 And then when I send them to public property, which was very fortunate to have done in Mayo Clinic Health System, that Mayo is very blessed to work with RT and I saw there was improvement, so I started collaborating more with them and during my six years of tenure, I will agree that I did not have much knowledge about endometriosis as a resident. I had not done much endometriosis cases. I’ve not seen many endometriosis cases, but some of the patients come to your door and you take them for surgery because you want to help them in your best interest. You are like, okay, I need to help. This lady and I have done some incomplete surgeries myself. I did not do ablation, but I’ve done like just training the cells, leaving the ovaries behind, or just giving them little symptomatic relief. But again, in my core, I knew that I was not doing the right thing. I needed to step up my game of my surgical field. During my tenure as a physician at the Mayo system, I also went to a chronic pain myself.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:07:41 Not with the endometriosis per se, but with some back pain issues and chronic pain issues and things like that. And also to the point that I felt I was getting disabled. I was on a visa, which means that if I don’t have a job, I might have to go back to my country. My job was at stake, you know, I could not do most of the stuff, but I went. The process of multiple MRIs and the little things which pops in the MRI, like you tried to click on it and you try to find Google it. So being in that field and being a medical person and being too physician and a very good health system in a very good in one of the Pioneer Institute of America, you know. So I’ve been through a lot and, and I’ve been given the diagnosis of fibromyalgia. And take the oxycodone. You will be fine. I was like, are you a depressed? I’m like, I’m not depressed. But of course the pain is making me depressed.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:08:29 It’s bringing my morale down. But I will say that going through this journey, I felt very deeply for the pain people who are suffering from pain. And I could see a subset of patient with chronic pain. And I could relate, like, yes, living looking at me, people will think that I’m a doctor. I have such a good body, I look so good. But internally they don’t know what the turmoil I’m facing. So I’ve gone to that the path. So became very humble. And then all these things helped me shape the person I am. And this was a perfect world for me to serve as a woman, because I knew what women goes through when they’re taking care of women and the society, you know, like a woman, does this take care of the work or the society? They’re taking care of the household. Now, I have a three year old father. Like I understand that what the world of women is that helped me shape my I think a great role has to be for my husband, which I met about three years ago, four years ago now.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:09:21 And he was like, you can do it. Yes, you can do it. You can apply for the surgical fellowship and like, okay, I’ll do it. And I did it. And I think a lot of work is needed. And your thing like, you know, a lot of mind body. And that’s when I delved into the mind body connection and so much into like meditation, yoga and all those things. This is kind of an integral part of me, and that really helped me.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:09:41 I love your story because I think many practitioners end up coming to the work that they do because of their own experience. So as a clinician, as a physician, you were clear you understood what was going on with you biologically, and yet you was very easy as a woman to dismiss you like, oh, this is just fibromyalgia, you need antidepressants. And this is such a normal experience of women navigating the health system for any chronic pain condition. Yeah, I.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:10:17 Went to a neurologist and she was chatting in front of a computer without looking at my face as like, I am never going to do this with my patient because I could not connect with her as a person.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:10:28 When you go into this, you just wonder, like, oh, this is the thing, I can find it and I can fix it, but it doesn’t work that way. It does not.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:10:36 And I think that’s the hard reality. Right? So as a physician, you also can emphasize empathize with that neurologist is in a position of a lot of pressure. How many patients does she have to see that day? Correct. And the answer is, is that there’s almost never a really simple like, complex neurological pain issue that can be solved with oxycodone, right?

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:11:03 So glad I didn’t take the route. Glad I did not have to take any anti-depressant. I mean, I think your mental agility, which comes with your meditation practice, with your support system, and that’s why I advocate in my Instagram about support system, because that plays a huge, huge role in keeping you away from that downhill, the spiral which goes down, you know.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:11:25 Yes. So since there are rarely very simple solutions to the complex chronic pain problems that women have to navigate, and especially if you’re a woman, you’re going to be at best given kind of a pain medication to mask the symptoms.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:11:43 Or more commonly, just an antidepressant or something like that. Or birth control pills if you know it’s pelvic related pain. So now let’s say this woman and you’ve had this experience sort of on both sides of the charting computer, right where now this woman is like, okay, I know that’s at best gonna mask my symptoms, but what do I do next? So before she even goes down the surgical route, one of the things you would suggest she supports herself with is taking an inventory of what’s her support network, and how emotionally and mentally resilient she is. Does she have a meditation practice or a breathwork practice or yoga or something like that? Right.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:12:29 Yeah. I mean, those are not easy things to do when you are in that mental frame. But I think the thing which keeps you going is that one day I will be okay. My dad used to tell me that when you lose hope, it’s the end of the world. So each moment at a time is very, very, very important.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:12:50 And you cannot live in anxiety thinking about future and cannot live in regret thinking about the past. It’s easy to say, I’ll say that, but it’s just like remembering when in that phase.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:13:02 It’s essentially a practice. So it’s very easy to get pulled into anxiety about will I ever get better? So in your journey, how long did it take for you to feel significantly less pain?

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:13:18 Six years.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:13:20 Yeah. And so that can feel like a really long time having lived with complex chronic illness myself. When you’re in the middle of it and the reality is you don’t quite know what your status is going to be when you’re going to get better. I think there’s some real value in people like you and I talking about the fact that as health professionals, it’s actually a little bit easier to maintain hope because we know about such a wide range of tools that a lot of people aren’t aware of.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:13:54 I honestly know whatever tool I found it, I googled it. It is just one after the other, not my physician.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:14:03 so you had to do really your own homework?

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:14:06 I know that’s when I started reading some good books. I was always into tedtalks. I always listen into how mind can heal the body. Most of the things that I did was not given to me by my practitioners, because they had no clue what was going on, you know?

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:14:22 Yes. So so true. I think most people with chronic illness, the difference, I think, is that you and I may be new to keep looking, whereas people who are just showing up at the health system or showing up at their surgeon’s office and the surgeon is like, well, I could help a little bit or let’s go to surgery. And if you’re not better in six weeks, like, I don’t know what happened, you know, or take this medication, it’s going to solve the problem. We knew to keep looking. And so I think the fact that there’s an opportunity to keep looking, that eventually they will find someone like yourself who holds the space for them in a sense, what you’re doing, even as a surgeon, is you’re coaching, you’re holding the space of there’s possibility for you to feel better than you feel now.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:15:10 Correct. Yeah. It’s very, very important to maintain that hope up and think about this. Shall to pass. Each day at a time. People are going to judge you. Not everybody will respond to you. You don’t need a whole group of people. You just need two people to support you. I can’t tell you how many times my dad had to fly from India just to support me, because I could not cook. So just having two people in your life is more important. Having that faith is important and it’s not a quick fix. Meditation. Your journaling, these are not quick fixes. It takes years of practice, but eventually it does happen. Or it changes your perspective, how you look at life.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:15:50 And it also changes your brain. Right. So that actually physiologically changes the pain too. So I think what’s really important is that there’s this challenge in how we speak about this. Because the reality is it’s not like all in your head like this isn’t true or you’re making it up or whatever, but it is kind of to some extent in your brain.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:16:14 And the driver of the nervous system and the interaction between the nervous system and the immune system and the digestive system, and how that triggers inflammation is a real physiologic change that can be over time improved with things like meditation and journaling and mindfulness practices. So I love that idea. Okay, so if someone’s listening to this right now and either they’re a clinician, we have a lot of clinicians who listen or they’re a person living in pain, or both. You can be both, right. We’re both. Yeah. Examples can be. You can be both. And they’re like, okay, I’ve been dealing with this for two years. Where do I start? Step one inventory. Do you have two people on your side? Everybody else. Don’t explain to them. Don’t talk to them about it. Doesn’t matter. You got your two person support network if you have 3 or 4, even better. But that’s all you need. And then next, what would you suggest?

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:17:17 I will say keep up the resilience as resilience is important.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:17:20 You know, I will say as a physician I thought of suicide, because I could not do the things I wanted to do. Again, this is a very deep set of me. I’m explaining because I want women to feel empowered about it. But when you in that spiral, you think about that because as a young person, you want to do a lot of things, you see other people doing it and you feel your morale is going down, right. It’s very important. So it’s very, very important to have those two people in your life. To have your prefrontal cortex thinking about this is not right. I need to find a way. Listen to Ted talks. So there are lots of things on social media you can consume all the negativity from the social media, and you can consume all the positive things in the social media. And the good thing about YouTube and all these things is that when you start looking for things like mind, body, things like that, it starts feeding you those, you know, you don’t have to Google.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:18:19 So social media again, but in the right way. I’ll say being mindful, yes, it is there, but it is going to heal. Giving positive affirmations. It’s very, very important to keep your mind on sight. Like always in your mind, something is going on. I am a huge fan of chanting. Again. I can’t explain the scientific reason of it, but at least when I was in pain, I would just go and walk in the nature and I would just chant with me, and there’s nobody in Minnesota, there’s nobody. So you can just chant, you know, not like loud, loud, but you know, it does have an effect on your body and your chakras and things like that. I believe in all those signs. So chanting is a very good thing. Just speak a problem to God. You know, sometimes you just speak it, you know, that gives you the mental strength and agility to keep going on. It’s very, very important. And just keep telling yourself, I did not stop working.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:19:09 My work family was very good. They were very supportive. But I will say that nobody kind of knew or not. The patient knew what was going through. You know, doing the stuff, just being positive, always and just trying to find. So I’ve taken a lot of courses on chronic pain, things like that. So I kind of know about all those things a little bit. So those things are very, very helpful in the moment. It may look that nothing is working, but the day comes when it clicks. This is very important. In that moment you feel nothing is working, nothing. And I say also pain psychologists are good. Like if you find a good pain psychologist, they can help you rewire your brain. Those are good people. Not that I have done it, but I know that these are very good at taking courses. They are really good people and they can help you with somatic tracking and things like that.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:19:55 Absolutely. So if you find yourself really stuck in a chronic pain situation with endometriosis, and we’ll talk about this next, of course there are some surgical therapies that can be helpful, but that’s never the whole story, right? We have to prepare in advance.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:20:13 We have to recover after surgery. That’s what we’ve been doing for 25 years now. But when you’re stuck in a chronic symptom spiral or chronic pain spiral, there’s a checklist you can start to go through. Because you’re right. You can feel like there’s just no hope. You’re never going to get out of this. And it takes commitment to the practice over time. But I’ve seen this thousands of times at this point where, like you said, a few months of practice and then it begins to click, and then the pain declines a little and a little more, and then it goes back up, and then it’s a little more, it’s a little more, and it’s inconsistent, but it’s easier to maintain the hope because you’ve seen some movement. So you’ve gathered your support network of two people. Sometimes it can be valuable to keep doing the work at the level that you can, just to kind of tether yourself to something outside of your situation, if you can. And then the strategies that you brought from your traditions in India in terms of going outside and chanting, journaling, all the mindfulness practices, prayer, things that cross that East-West divide.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:21:26 Yeah. And you know what happens with meditation chanting. Is this basically changing your brainwaves on, centering you? You know, it’s like detaching yourself from all the negativity and again centering your mind to something which actually make some changes in your brain waves, mantras and all those things that help with the chakra balance and things like that. Like again, nothing like you have the chance and specific mantras, whatever you can, you know, whatever you feel. And again, these are not something you need to do. Find a time for it. You know, it’s nothing like that. You can just do on the move. Like when you’re traveling, you can do it. You can just close your eyes to to meditate. Meditation doesn’t have to be 20 minutes long. It doesn’t have to be these doesn’t have to be like, you have to carve out a time because that’s so difficult for nowadays, especially if they’re suffering from all these things. You just can do it here and there, you know?

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:22:15 Yeah.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:22:16 So you begin to implement these practices. After a little bit of time, you start to feel your symptoms shifting a bit. You’ve started to train your algorithms on your social media rather than letting them train you. So you keep always giving more attention to things that are encouraging and positive and most importantly, hopeful. Now you have a client who has been doing a fair amount of those things. She’s been working with a coach or a mental health professional in pain management, but she likely has endometriosis. Looking at her history. How would you start connecting with her about whether or not surgery is an appropriate next step for her?

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:23:02 So when a person comes to me for endometriosis, I mean, you know, I listen to this story, I try to put it’s a pieces of puzzles because most of the symptoms of endometriosis, they’re very vague. Bloating is kind of a symptom of almost everybody feels that everybody’s having some constipation or diarrhea. So but you try to put the puzzle pieces together, you try to listen their story, know them about the whole, like how long this has been going on, what how it is affecting the life, how is the cycles being like, you know, how is the path of fertility being for them? All these things are important to know.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:23:33 And when you start putting these puzzle pieces together, if I think it is more in terms of endometriosis, I will definitely talk about surgery. And the reason is because, yes, you can do all these things, but they are like putting bandit. Sometime when you have a disease, you need to remove that disease. You know, because this is a surgical issue. If you remove the disease and then you continue to work on all these things, it will have a better effect. If there is an inflammation, a source that is still there and keep giving you inflammation, then you have to work on removing the source. Like if you now have a trashcan in a room and you just keep spraying air to it, yes, it will help, but unless you remove the trash can out of your room, the room is never going to smell fresh, right? So you have to remove the source is very, very important. And then some of them, if I feel that this is more muscular, if I get an intuition, this is more muscular, I will tell them this looks to me like muscular.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:24:26 Why don’t you start with PT therapy, do 6 to 12 sessions, see how you do if you’re not making a headway. Happy to take you to the operating room because again, unfortunately for superficial endometriosis, there’s not good enough detection tools. And the only way to know is through a surgery. So if it just comes to surgery and it’s okay to do it if it’s needed.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:24:47 Yeah, absolutely. So I generally tell our patients who are undergoing endometriosis excision surgery that the acute surgical recovery will be about six weeks and the full, complete recovery, because they’ve often had pain and other symptoms for more than a decade, will take 6 to 24 months before they’re really feeling like they’re like fully back in the gym, they’re fully at work. They’re starting to meet different goals or thinking about it less. What do you think of that time frame? What kind of outcomes are you seeing in your patients?

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:25:19 I was totally second to you on that, in the sense that surgery helps to take care of the disease.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:25:26 But your body, when we talk about a person, we are not just talking about a physical body, we are talking about the emotional mental body, the energy body, everything and and everybody is different to, you know, so yes, surgery when they go through the surgery, there’s a lot of things which is happening during the surgery, and there’s a lot of things which has happened before the surgery, like the body has gone through a lot of stress, a lot of like mental health fatigue and all those things happen, a lot of inflammation. So it takes time for body to reset surgery again is an injury to the body. So it again the body yes. Physically you can move around the very next day which is great. But internal healing takes some time. So I usually tell fatigue usually lasts for 2 to 3 months. But everybody is different. Getting back to the gut, health and everything. Bowel symptoms and everything. Improvement. Yes, once the endometriosis is gone, you start feeling better.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:26:17 But if you start building up your gut health by taking a proper diet, it takes about 6 to 12 months easily, right? It’s not. Again, a quick fix. And in that process, person has to learn how to get to this new person lifestyle, right? It’s not easy to swap all your food habits to a different food habit. It’s one baby step at a time, so it takes time. I’ll say around that time is a good time because you’re learning and your body is learning and learning new things, if that makes sense.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:26:46 Yeah, absolutely. You have to have a time for the habit transformation, which is why we like to ideally see people for a few months before surgery. But either way, after surgery, there’s a transformation of just lifestyle, of bedtime routine, of nutrition, strategies, of how they can exercise and move, and all of those changes. So if you’re working with a woman who you’re helping pre or post surgery or both, what are the kinds of things you recommend that their family do or their support network do to better support them?

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:27:23 One of the things I sell to the family member is just be present.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:27:26 Don’t ask them how is your pain? Because then you’re feeding If the person is not able to keep up to certain plans, don’t judge them. Don’t ask them why they can’t drive or why can’t they do this. Why can’t they be present? Because they’re trying their best. And if you pose those questions to them, then it further brings the morale down. Very very important. Just support them without even them knowing that you are doing them for them. You know, it’s very important if you are able to take them out in nature, take them out. Nature has a very profound effect on healing. I used to listen to Sadhguru and he says they take a wind bath. I don’t know what you mean. Like, you know, just open it. When the wind is blowing, just open your hand to the wind and it’s good to see that wind blowing onto you. You know, it kind of brushes off. Or they just take a shower. That kind of cleanses your body of a lot of things, you know, and just be with them.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:28:22 Just be their support without letting them know that they’re there.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:28:26 I love that because I think sometimes when people feel like they can’t exercise, you know, they can’t like go out and take a hike on a mountain or something that they can’t get that nature exposure. But it really could be just sit outside on a backyard chair and feel the wind. Or I have one patient right now who’s pretty severely fatigued. And so we’re slowly building back up. And it was just like, you don’t have to take the dog for a walk. You can sit in a chair and just throw the ball, but they’re both. Then outside, I think there is something really profound, and I love that you think about for a person you’re taking to surgery. Surgeons are notoriously sort of focused on just the nuts and bolts as they should be of the physical body. But each person also has that energetic body, that emotional body. And I think how we take care of the body by giving it space to just rest in nature, feel very supported.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:29:25 Those layers of healing go so much deeper, even if you’ve taken the endometriosis lesions out, if you’ve kind of respected that, there are kind of layers of the mind body physicality, that the family can really support them at deeper levels.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:29:43 Yeah, or just walk barefoot on the ground, on the earth. So I mean, not on the floor of the house because they’re very I just house outside. Yeah. On the park, not the tradition, but it’s basically for five minutes. That’s grounding practice because then your brain waves is becoming one with the with the waves of the earth. And that has a calming effect on you. Again, not everything is very quick. It does take time, you know.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:30:10 Absolutely. And I think there’s that patient ness about even kind of relaxing and slowing down the mind and body because there’s a lot of productivity pressure, you know, working in a fast paced medical profession, there’s a lot of work pressure. There’s a lot of social media. Everything’s fast, fast, fast.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:30:30 It’s very rare for people to just take that time to really slow down and sit or stand barefoot in nature, or take a walk in the woods or in the neighborhood. There’s a very important neurologic healing to that that I think directly impacts chronic pain. So as you were healing, what were your favorite ways to experience those kinds of tools?

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:30:57 For me, you know, again, full of parks, Minnesota, I’ll just go and just sit in the park. I will spend two hours walking if I have time again, if my schedule permits. My favorite thing was waking up early in the morning, lighting a lamp before my God, hour before anything. And again, I’m not very religious, but I’m spiritual and just sitting and meditating. Or I just have a lot of good music playing in the background. Like with those, music is always some chanting or some Them instrumental music playing on those things were very easily accessible. You don’t have to walk out of the room. I used to go and exercise whenever I can.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:31:34 Again, depending on my situation, I will exercise. When I was pregnant, I did yoga almost every single day, waking up at 5 a.m. so I had a teacher from India. We used to connect virtually and I used to do it every day. It was great. I mean, I think those things are important, talking to your family every day, like, even though they were far, I would just call them every day and connect with them. If I’m having a rough day, I’ll call my brother or my sister and talk to them.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:31:58 Yeah, I think having that support network and I think us as practitioners can really facilitate the family being a stronger support network because it can be hard on them too, when especially someone who is really a productive member. So just kind of teaching not just the patients but their families how they can support this healing journey and that it might be slower than they expect. But there’s so much hope. I think gives the family some hope too, because they’re probably in a bit of fear as well.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:32:31 So if the family wants to be more supportive and you’ve experienced this in your life and with your patients, how would you support them?

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:32:42 I think one thing is that when these are going the spiral thing, giving them hope, giving them constant reminder, you know that you can do it and helping them do the things they want to do by doing the way they don’t realize that they are not doing it. Like, you know, when when you have like my, my toddler. So you do something and I kind of make her feel that she did it, but I actually did it kind of in that way, sneaky way. And then just helping, you know, everybody’s different trying to see how can you push them forward. Because when they are in that thing, they don’t want to do any damn thing, but once they do it, they feel better. So trying to see how they can push them out of their house or how they can push them to do things which they want to Because you do get fear.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:33:25 Like if they have certain dreams and they cannot pursue it because of XYZ reason. Because they always have a fear in their mind, helping them navigate that fear and making them feel that everything will be okay, and giving them that encouragement to go forward with their dreams. I think it’s very, very important.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:33:43 Absolutely. So I think for those of us who are practitioners working with people with chronic illness, one of the most important parts of our job could be really supporting the family to be more supportive, because people who have chronic illness and have kind of lost the support of their families, struggle so much more than someone who might just have 1 or 2 friends like, or family members just really helping and showing up and bringing meals and sitting outside with them. It just makes a such a dramatic difference to their recovery.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:34:18 Sometimes just pushing them forward out of that hole like, you know, pushing them in such a way that, yes, they can do it and let them do the things that they enjoy and they will not even know in that moment that they’re doing it right.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:34:31 Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much. I really think your perspective and both your personal experience and your merger of mind body tools, both Western and Eastern yoga, chanting, walking in the parks in Minnesota, even if it’s snowing. I would imagine you bring such a peaceful approach. And I really think that patients will be in good hands because you’re thinking not just about the surgical precision, but about the whole experience of recovering from a complex chronic illness.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:35:09 Yeah, that’s very important. You know, I think most of the practitioners, I think it’s very important for practitioners to acknowledge what the patient is going through.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:35:18 Absolutely. So where could someone find you if they wanted to do more work with you or see you as a patient?

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:35:27 So I have my Instagram account. I also have a YouTube channel, and then I work with pelvic rehabilitation medicine so they can easily message me on Instagram like DM me. Or they can go to a website and they can connect with me like, you know, find the doctor and they can connect with me there as well.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:35:46 Okay, wonderful. We’ll put all of that in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for being here. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Dr. Madhu Bagaria 00:35:54 Likewise. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:36:01 That was such an enlightening conversation. Even highly skilled Mayo trained women with experience life long experience of eastern healing practices can still struggle for years with complex chronic symptoms. I never read you Doctor Bulgaria’s bio. It is so impressive. Doctor Madhu Bergara is a highly skilled and compassionate gynecologic surgeon who’s committed to alleviating the pain and suffering of women affected by pelvic pain and endometriosis. She has extensive Eastern and Western training. We talked about how she trained at the Mayo Clinic. She works with a brilliant team at the Pelvic Rehabilitation Medicine Institute with Doctor Chandi and her team, and she lived this journey of struggling with complex chronic pain herself. So I think the most important thing as clinicians that we can take from this conversation is that we have to slow it way down and give our clients space to feel heard, give our clients space to be empowered that they have healing capacity literally within their own bodies, that being exposed to nature changes the experience of pain, changes the experience of other symptoms.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:37:33 And that can be hard to do when someone’s really stuck in it, when they don’t see the way out, when they’ve lost their hope. So give your clients a couple of simple things that get to the root of that. For right now, you might have to push them a little. You might have to hold their hand. You might have to really rally their team. Even if their team is two people around them, they get stuck. When you have complex chronic illness like this, you can feel really stuck. Am I ever going to get out of this? You’re doomscrolling. It’s not serving the healing. But there are concrete things that do serve the healing that help people get on that upward spiral. So that is a key part of your job. You can be perfect at giving supplement protocols, at putting your hands on patients and doing manual therapy, making pharmaceutical recommendations, giving meal plans. But first, you’ve got to help people connect to the power within them to heal. And just a glimmer of hope.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:38:35 So important. And if you yourself have struggled with chronic symptoms for, gosh, more than a few months, reach out to us, we can help you. That’s what our program, the Menopause Solution is for. If you’re struggling with endometriosis and you need to consider surgery, reach out to Doctor Bergara. And we also have had many other skilled, brilliant, compassionate surgeons on this podcast. There are people who can help you and they can help you from a very holistic mindset. Surgery is changing. It’s not just about technical skill and bro surgery. Maybe it is in some in some areas, but we’re learning that’s not what helps and heals people. Holistic approaches to surgery is happening. Seek it out. Find those practitioners. It’s time to give attention to those practitioners so that that kind of healing can expand. I’ll see you next week. Thank you so much for joining me today for this episode of the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. Please share this episode with a colleague and if you loved it, hit that subscribe or follow button on your favorite podcast streaming service so that we can do even more to make this podcast better for you and your clients.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:40:08 Let’s innovate and integrate in the world of women’s health.