This month, Heather Pearson Chauhan is celebrating the first anniversary of the opening of Exceed Hormone Specialists, a two-physician practice in Germantown. She is one of the physicians; her father, Richard Pearson, is the other.
Exceed is not just unusual because it’s a daughter-father combination. It may be unique in another way.
“As far as we can tell from what we’ve researched nationally,” Chauhan said, “we can’t find any other practices that have a gynecologist and urologist in the same office.”
And then there is the fact that Chauhan, the gynecologist in the family, is married to a urologist, Ravi Chauhan.
“There are a number of married couples who are a urologist and a gynecologist both in Memphis and nationally,” Heather Chauhan said, “and so the big joke about that is you could put a urologist and gynecologist in the same office and open it and call it All Things Pelvic.”
But it was her father, not her husband, with whom she went into business when she was trying to find the best way to juggle family and career.
As a young girl, Heather would spend most Saturdays with her father when he made rounds at Baptist Memorial Hospital in Midtown. She’d wear a white coat that dragged along the ground, its sleeves rolled way up. Even then she knew she wanted to be a doctor someday, so why, she wondered, was she told to wait at the nurses’ station while her dad, a urologist, went into the examining rooms?
But her time would come, even though she took the somewhat unorthodox path of majoring in history at Princeton University rather than science. She was looking ahead, thinking a liberal arts education would make her a better doctor down the road.
She came home to Memphis for medical school and residency at the University of Tennessee, and then she enjoyed what she describes as “a terrific experience” as a gynecologist for 10 years at Ruch Clinic.
But she and her husband had two young children, and she felt they deserved more of her time, so she left Ruch.
And then came the idea that spawned Exceed.
“I knew I wanted to practice medicine, but I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do,” she said. “Looking at what my skills and expertise were and where I saw a need in the marketplace, I got interested in doing concierge medicine and looking at hormone management.”
She also was interested in having her father join her in the new practice. It was a fairly bold idea, inasmuch as Richard Pearson was approaching his 70th birthday and was winding down his own career. Pearson, a founder and past president of the Conrad Pearson Clinic, had recently been practicing in Amory, Mississippi, and reducing his workload in the kind of small-town environment he’d grown up in.
“I told him I kind of have this idea about how I’d like to structure a practice,” she said. “I have the gynecology-side experience, but obviously I don’t have the male side. I said, ‘Would you help me do this?’ He’s had a great deal of experience in opening offices and running businesses, which I had none of. I figured the two of us together could come up with a unique practice that might serve needs that weren’t being met.”
Pearson regarded the request not with skepticism but as something of a new lease on life for him.
"Approaching 70, I felt like Ulysses – about to be beached!” he said. “Heather's first phone call began a collaboration that has given me a new ship, a great new crew and a new direction. My contribution is knowing how to row.”
Not only did Pearson come along, but so did Heather’s mother, Freida Pearson, who is the practice administrator. The Chauhans’ children, ages 8 and 11, help on weekends.
“When we opened this business,” Chauhan said, “I told them this is the third baby in our family, and as you know, babies require a lot of care and attention.”
Chauhan believes hormone management is an under-served area of medicine that Exceed is trying to address. She says she thought she knew a lot about the subject until she began researching it, “and I realized there’s so much more to know than what I was taught in residency or what I learned in practice.”
“In residency I was essentially taught that if a woman wasn’t menopausal, then there wasn’t a lot of therapy you could offer her to alleviate symptoms or address complaints that might be occurring in her late 30s to mid-40s,” she said. “Over the last few years I’ve learned there is in fact a lot that can be done.
“When we think back 100 years, women didn’t live to be 85. So now that women live to be 85, they’re spending a third of their life after menopause. So we have to figure out what the key pieces are to help them live that third of their life as well as they can.”
Also key, Chauhan said, is the personal relationships that she and her father build with patients and the time they devote to them. Initial visits with patients last 45 minutes to an hour. She differentiates Exceed from, for instance, some of the men’s clinics that are popping up.
“The clinics out there where you come in and get your shot and you’re out the door in 15 minutes, that’s not us,” she said. “That is not what we want to be, and that is not what we are now.”
Working with her father, she said, has exceeded her expectations.
“In going through residency training, I never dreamed that I would practice with him,” she said. “When this unique opportunity developed a few years ago, it was kind of a dream to think, wow, that we could find a way to practice together.
“Plus, I’ve got the best COO that I could possibly have who’s got my back. You couldn’t ask for a better person than your mom to look out for you.”
RELATED LINK:
Exceed Hormone Specialists, www.exceedhs.com