Dr. Allyson Augusta Shrikhande, MD | Co-Founder & Chief Medical Officer
A conversation with Dr. Allyson Augusta Shrikhande, MD, Co-Founder & Chief Medical Officer at Pelvic Rehabilitation on reclaiming quiet strength, validating women’s emotional truths, and building systems where entrepreneurial dreams and emotional wellness are treated as essential—not optional.
Can you share a moment when you felt your experience wasn't being fully heard or validated? What helped transform that experience into a reason to speak up?
When I had my first daughter, I developed severe, debilitating postpartum pelvic pain. And even as a physician living in Manhattan and married to a leading vascular surgeon, I found myself completely gaslit and dismissed by the healthcare system. The options were basically: undergo invasive surgery, or just accept the suffering as "normal." Beneath the surface, I felt deeply isolated and frustrated by an industry I had dedicated my life to.
What made my silence shift was realizing the broader picture: if I was being told to suffer in silence—with an elite medical background, a strong professional network, and access to resources—then millions of women without those advantages were facing total isolation. That realization turned my personal pain into a clinical mission. I knew I had to speak up, challenge the status quo, and build a non-surgical standard of care where none existed.
How have the ways women's pain is understood or dismissed within healthcare shaped your perspective on psychological safety?
Healthcare carries a deep, systemic dynamic where women’s pain is routinely normalized. The average OB-GYN receives just 3 to 5 hours of dedicated endometriosis training throughout all of medical school. Culturally, women are conditioned to believe that debilitating period pain or postpartum dysfunction is "just part of being a woman."
When you navigate a system that defaults to "your scans are fine, it’s all in your head," it fundamentally strips away your psychological safety. But once I recognized that those responses were driven by structural flaws in medical training rather than personal failure, it empowered me to stop seeking validation within an outdated framework. Instead, it inspired us to build PRM as a space where women are believed and validated from day one
Who has helped you feel supported in sharing the weight of this work, and how has that changed what's been possible for you?
My husband and co-founder, Dr. Gautam Shrikhande, showed up for me in a way that truly changed everything. When I was navigating my own postpartum pain and formulating a functional, non-surgical treatment model, Gautam didn't just offer sympathy—he stepped up to share the immense emotional, intellectual, and operational load of solving this problem.
As a Harvard-trained vascular surgeon, he brought deep institutional and operational expertise to complement my PM&R background when we co-founded PRM. Having a partner who completely validated my experience and helped build the physical infrastructure allowed me to step out of survival mode and fully step into executive clinical leadership. And that collaborative spirit extends to our Clinical Advisory Board and partners like Project Endo and Endo Black working together so no one carries this burden alone.
What does emotional equity look like in healthcare, and how are you working to ensure women no longer have to carry the burden of navigating their care alone?
Emotional equity started in my marriage, but it became our core operational philosophy at PRM. For decades, chronic pelvic pain patients have carried 100% of the emotional load - enduring a 7-to-10-year diagnostic delay, coordinating fragmented specialist visits, and constantly fighting to prove their pain is real.
We built PRM to systematically lift that load off the patient. When you care for someone "as a whole," you take on the diagnostic heavy lifting—combining our proprietary ultrasound-guided protocol with surgical options, integrative nutrition, mindfulness, and behavioral health. When you relieve women of the exhausting burden of self-advocacy in healthcare, you give them the psychological security and space to actually heal.
Your own experience of being unheard ultimately became a catalyst for systemic change. What change are you working to create now for the next generation of women navigating their health?
My journey from a silenced patient to a physician-founder speaks to the power of turning lived experience into systemic change. That shift is the heart of our latest effort: the University Health Initiative (UHI), that we launched with non-profit Project Endo. Endometriosis affects 1 in 10 women, and symptoms almost always start in adolescence or young adulthood. On college campuses, these young women face severe academic disruption, mental health strain, and years of delayed care.
Through UHI, we’re ending the silence at the frontline by delivering free screening toolkits, clinical training, and clear care pathways directly to university health centers—including campuses like George Mason University, Georgetown, NYU, Columbia, Princeton, University of Florida, University of Miami, and Vanderbilt . By training campus providers to catch symptoms early, we're dismantling diagnostic delays and making sure the next generation never has to suffer in silence.
“I knew I had to speak up, challenge the status quo, and build a non-surgical standard of care where none existed.”
About Dr. Allyson
Dr. Allyson Augusta Shrikhande is a physician-founder, national women’s health expert, and co-founder of Pelvic Rehabilitation Medicine, where she is helping build a new model of care for women living with endometriosis, chronic pelvic pain, painful sex, pelvic floor dysfunction, and post-surgical pelvic pain. Her work focuses on closing one of the most overlooked gaps in women’s health: the years women spend being dismissed, misdiagnosed, or treated in fragments rather than receiving a comprehensive recovery plan.
Connect Further
Website: https://pelvicrehabilitation.com/ | LinkedIn: Dr. Allyson Augusta Shrikhande