Dr.Uzma Chaudhry

So welcome. Thank you, Dr. Chaudhary for making time to quickly stop by here and talk to audience about all this. I’m going to just read about your bio to introduce you and then we can go into this interview.

So Dr. Chaudhary is a fellowship trained gynecologist. She completed her residency in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in New Jersey Cooper Hospital, where she served as chief resident. Following residency, she continued her education at Cooper Hospital, where she completed her three year fellowship in female pelvic medicine and reconstructive surgery.

During her fellowship, she was active in research, receiving grants and presenting at national conferences. Dr. Chaudhary is also active as a clinical assistant professor at Jefferson University Hospital, working with medical students and residents. So thank you so much.
We are very happy to have you here to answer some questions and questions of gynecology and pelvic floor and pelvic health. So welcome. Thank you.

Thank you for having me. Yeah, we are honored. So let me start off by asking, tell us how you got into this field and how all this came about.
In all honesty, my I’m very my mom had prolapse or she had urogynecological issues. And that’s where the passion started at the time, because she was she had prolapse and she had some urinary incontinence issues. And the kind of care that she received and the kind of I’d like to say that that not the judgment, but not being as empathetic towards some of the issues that she was experiencing within her own community and within the health care field prompted me to look into this and see what I can do in order to provide.

So she has guided me significantly in how I approach my patients today, knowing that a lot of women don’t talk about this. And a lot of women are they all have different presentations. So you may not have you may have a similar number or a similar stage, but have completely different symptoms.

Yeah. And because of that, we can sometimes within the world that we’re in be like, oh, so and so is worse than you are, but their symptoms aren’t as bad. And I took that and I understood to be that that’s not for anyone for us to say, who am I to say if your stage is less or more and then tell you that, oh, you know, it’s not as bad, so to speak.

So that’s what guided me into it. And I was a second year resident at the time when I was brought into urogynecology and kind of pushed into it by my mentor, Dr. Carolyn Eccles. And I fell in love with it.
And, you know, going from there, I’ve continued to do whatever I can to make a change in my patients lives for the better. That’s very nice to know.

Yeah.

When there is a personal reason like that, we work differently and look at it differently. Yes, 100 percent. I get that.
So tell us, how is your practice different from others, meaning there are lots of other urogynecologists or other doctors? How would you be different, set apart? I don’t know how. So generally speaking, for me, I find that education is very important. And any time a patient walks in, I tell them that first, it’s a no judgment zone.

And second is that knowledge is power, that my job is to make sure that you leave my office with more information than you did when you came in. And I like to spend time with my patients going over all their questions and their concerns and then coming up with, you know, management treatment options that range from expected management to conservative management to surgical management. As far as how is it different from any other practice? To me, I put my heart and soul in any patient that walks in, and I always want to make sure that I have a positive impact on them.

And I have a very personal relationship with my patients. And to me, that’s very important. It’s not something that is to be able to make them feel comfortable, right? Intimate problems.

And a lot of the times they have a difficult time approaching people or health care providers or people within their community to talk about them and to make them feel comfortable, to make them feel relaxed about it, to make them feel that, you know, there are treatment options they can open up. And that’s kind of how I present it to them. And I don’t know if that makes me different from a different practice or not, but generally speaking, it’s something that I do want to make sure that they have given every opportunity that they need in order to feel comfortable with what their body is going through.

Right. And I saw that as patients who have been departmental patients, their feedback is that you’re a real client. And that heart and soul part of what you just mentioned definitely reflects in the way you treat them.
So, yeah. Thank you. That’s a good one there.

So tell us a nugget you would like to share that most people you think should know but don’t know. When it comes to pelvic health and like everything about female medicine, the area that you kind of specialize in. So when I talk to patients, definitely that my specialization carries, you know, I do prolapse, I do incontinence, I do sexual dysfunction.

And along with all of that, I think I also do a lot of what I would consider just overall mental health. People don’t realize how much of this impacts their mental health. And I bring that into everything that I do.

The main thing is people feel like, oh, there is not a treatment or people are not aware that you have treatment options that are not surgical that can still impact your quality of life tremendously. Sometimes it’s just being aware, right? So my emphasis has always been on education. I have had patients come in, example, urinary incontinence is very common in patients.

Frequency and urgency may be a common symptom that they have. And they may not be aware that having something like coffee or an energy drink that they need that can impact their quality of life. And it doesn’t, they don’t have to do anything.

They have to take a medication, they have to do surgery for it, but they don’t even have to stop the coffee. But now that they’re aware that it’s causing them the urgency and the frequency, they can modify some of their lifestyle choices. So empowering them through education is something that I feel is very important.

Just to give them that information can change their life completely. And I’ve had patients come back and tell me, I’ve had patients who said that, oh my God, I didn’t realize what I was doing was causing me to have these bladder symptoms. And once I stopped, or once I changed a certain thing around, they’ve either completely resolved, or they have a significant improvement.

And that’s all they did. Somebody just needed to tell them. So how can patients get to you? And what’s the process of working with you look like? So generally speaking, we are very, like we said, patient-friendly, patient-oriented.

We have a website that they can go to. We have a telephone number. I like to be very personable in the sense where they can call the telephone number.

We try to get them in as soon as possible. We generally, they’ll be able to give whatever information that they need to the office and they’ll fit them in if they fall under whatever services that we provide. And we have the ability to, like I said, be in communication with them via text message, via email, via phone once they become our patient.

We’re very available to them at any time of the day. Usually we get back to them before the end of the day, the following morning, and even needed on the weekends. So like I said, we’re very patient-oriented to make sure that they have access to us as much as they possibly can through any of the venues that we stayed in.

Okay. Okay. We will also try to link your website and contact info if you want to be able to activate it down here.
So what else can we ask you? We have like anything specific you would like to promote to the audience around health and wellness or other services that you offer as a practice? So generally speaking, like I said, my main focus is pelvic organ prolapse. For patients that don’t know what that is, basically it’s a weakening of the pelvic floor that causes a bulge to come either to the opening or past the opening of the vagina. So we deal with that along with different types of urinary incontinence.

It could be incontinence that happens with an activity or an incontinence that you can’t make it to the bathroom or just the frequency and urgency. Pelvic pain, we do a lot of pelvic pain. Urinary pain, there is a subset of patients who deal with something called interstitial cystitis.
Generally speaking, studies have shown it takes about two years and eight doctors before somebody is able to diagnose a patient with interstitial cystitis. So I’d like to make sure that that is talked about and patients are aware so that it doesn’t take them two years to get that diagnosis and they’re able to get the treatment that they need in a more timely fashion. So I try to educate not just patients, but other providers through lectures and education like today.

Outside of pelvic pain, vaginal atrophy, bladder pain, also sexual dysfunction, different types of sexual dysfunction, decreased libido or dysfunction due to pain or other various issues that we have. So we do that. Those are the main things from a urogynecological standpoint that we offer.

Okay. Is there a lot of diagnoses you mentioned? Anything specific you’d like to treat? Any specific category that you feel is more receptive, responsive? So I have not always gone out to be the IC doctor, but I have become one. Okay.
So I feel like, again, it comes down to the education and spending time with the patients. So people kind of now seek me out for that. And other providers who don’t have the time to put in have sent a lot of patients.

And so I feel like even though it’s not that I have expert, I mean, through the expertise and all the things that I can offer, this is the one thing that I feel like patients who really need someone to kind of just listen to them, that I find that these patients have benefited the most in the patient population. But outside of that, I find, and it’s very rewarding when you have a patient who comes in with chronic pain and you’re able to tell them what that pain is caused by, and then you’re able to decrease that pain. It’s very, very rewarding.

Outside of that, all the other things that I do is extremely rewarding. You have patients with vaginal bulge who no longer have it, either expected management or surgical management. I think I joked with you before, I’ve been called a magician.

It’s being a magician for the vagina. And I joke with patients all the time. I said, I want to change the world.
And if I can’t do it on a level that’s going to reach out to an expansive population at one time, I’m okay with that because I’m still going to do that, but one vagina at a time. So that’s the goal is to make a difference in a positive impact in women’s health, to be able to give them an improved quality of life. Absolutely.

Yes. Wonderful. So the process of working with you to get to you is going to be to just call, make an appointment, and you mainly see patients out of your Ben Salem office? Mainly, yes.

So, yes. Thank you very much. This was a good time spending with you and sharing your awareness.

You’re very welcome. I have a significant, what’s it called? When it comes to, like I said, all the things that I do falls into different categories. And I can’t do what I can’t, I can’t provide for my patients without the support of other people within my community, which includes things that you do.
Right. Like pelvic floor physical therapy, it plays a significant role in the quality of life improvement within our patients. Absolutely.

And not a lot of patients don’t even realize that how much of an impact that can have on patients because it’s not something that not everybody can do, right? So everybody can prescribe a medication to say, hey, listen, this can help. And you can see if it helps or not. But not everybody has the skill or the technique or the approach to be able to do pelvic floor physical therapy that can have a positive impact on a patient’s life.
And I am a firm believer that when they say it takes a village and it takes what we call a multidisciplinary approach in order to impact a patient’s quality of life to the best of the ability, that it’s not just what I offer. It’s what we as a community in the pelvic health can offer our patients and doing that as a joint approach, like what you offer as in different approaches from pelvic floor physical therapy. So, again, I do thank you for what you do for my patients as well.

You’re welcome. Again, it makes a significant impact and overall their improvement and their happiness and their quality of life. So anything that we do, it’s not one person.

It’s a combination of people together with the same mission in mind. And that’s what helps your patients get to the improvement that they’re looking for. So thank you for taking time out of your busy day as well.

I appreciate everything that you do for my patients as well. Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

Talk to you. Bye bye. Bye.