If the adage ‘Best doctor gives the least medicine’, is to be believed; Dr Prathima Reddy, Director & Senior Consultant-Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Fortis La Femme, reassesses the importance of health in an age of smartphone, gadgets and ambitious career plans. A Fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), London, her contribution to her medical practice speaks of an annual delivery rate of 10,000 to12,000 per year, in the UK for 10 years before she migrated back to India in 2000. Currently practising in Bengaluru, she is a sportsperson and continues to be an active swimmer and cyclist
“In the long run, it is not where you have reached in life but, how healthy you are when you stay at the top, when you can manage to continue to be at the top with good health”, said Dr Prathima Reddy, Director of Fortis La Femme Hospital, Bengaluru.
With close to 20 years of experience in women’s health, her alarming observation is that, “Health is no longer a priority for a lot of people because they are young and today, there are so many opportunities in India that they all want a slice of it and consequently health gets put on a backburner!” She believes that mental fitness is equally valuable for everybody, especially for those in high-pressurised jobs such as doctors, corporate CEOs and executives. “Mental health is extremely important; the toughness is important to be able to not just make a decision, but the right decision!”
A typical morning for Dr Reddy is a time to reflect and contemplate. “It is a bit of a quiet time before going to work, especially before a surgery, when I don’t talk to anybody unless it’s absolutely work-related... It’s a time of calm that I maintain for my own self so that I can gather all my strength.”
“A simple thing that I tend to do is to always take the stairs. It’s a well-known fact that if you climb about 7-8 flights of stairs per day you can reduce your risk of heart attack/heart disease by about 20%. This is simple enough for anybody to follow in any building. I also tend to walk rather than take my car if I can help it...I do not eat out too frequently as I don’t believe in wasting my calories on food that is not good for me. Of course, I do indulge but restrict myself to eating healthy stuff... I am a teetotaller and that helps too...”
“Whenever possible, I take a short walk by the hospital and evenings too, I try to walk or gym and swim from time to time. On the weekends, I try and cycle. I am lucky to have some very good friends; having them to talk to and bash out a few things which also helps to bust stress. Unless it is a hospital call, I do not bring home anything back with me. I prefer either trekking or doing some activity in the mountains or the hills on holidays...”
“A simple thing that I tend to do is to always take the stairs. It’s a well-known fact that if you climb about 7-8 flights of stairs per day you can reduce your risk of heart attack/ heart disease by about 20%. This is simple enough for anybody to follow in any building”
While depression and certain feelings of ‘inadequacy’ might be the first triggers among women who do manage to scale the corporate glass ceiling, Dr Reddy pinpoints that there are other impacting factors underlying various ailments that strike corporate women.
In their quest to balance work and home, highly successful women CEOs and executives bear the ‘health brunt’. “Clinically, I see a lot of women quite depressed and this impacts them when they fall pregnant... especially in Bengaluru; as many come into the city from other states and also suffer from loneliness, having left their families behind”.
She strongly feels that increasingly women higher on the corporate rung “have really lost out ‘in some sense’ as they have to balance on the personal, home and professional front. While some are lucky to have partners who will help them out, there are equal numbers that do not have enough support. So, they work outside the house and inside too. This obviously puts a strain on both their physical and mental health and from a gynaecological point we find that a lot of women these days suffer from Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), a hormone imbalance leading to irregular or no monthly cycles, obesity and infertility; other difficulties in conceiving too.” “PCOS impacts at least 20-25% of girls and women in urban centres in comparison to 5-10% in rural areas,” she said. “About 40-50% of working women are often fighting irregular menstrual cycles, about 30% fighting obesity; and about 10-20% of couples are infertile.”
“Corporate health workshops are conducted more as a ‘tick box’ as opposed to “...You know what? We really need to improve the health of the employees”, she said. “While some companies are more committed than others on employee fitness, ‘Time Out regimes’ and health workshops; there is room for more proactive steps. I have been giving regular talks on PCOS and breast and cervical cancer, on pregnancy. etc. But, but what these translates into, I am not sure off as to the actual impacts. There are often no feedback calls from companies.”
Rx: “Simple things to keep polycystic ovaries at bay would be losing weight and eating a healthy diet but, a lot of people can’t seem to do this. Men too seem to have problems with their semen counts. It’s a ‘Catch-22’ situation, especially for young boys or girls. Women in their 30s or 40s who are looking to get pregnant come to me with gynaecological complaints. I tell them all the right things as a doctor but, putting it into practice is the more difficult part...Unless you look after your health, there is absolutely no point in being in your professions if you are going to be unwell. They have to follow guidance and how they do it is entirely down to them.”
By Sangeeta Ghosh Dastidar
