A Journey to Holistic Women's Health with Dr Peta Wright
By Dr Peta Wright
As part of QENDO’s Endometriosis Awareness Month and our “Explaining Endo” campaign, we’re brining you the many voices of endometriosis to raise awareness, educate and be the change we all want to see for those afflicted by endometriosis. It’s easy to feel disenfranchised and alone when the general public and many medical professionals still have poor or misinformed knowledge of endo, but through this blog series we want to shine a light on those doctors and health professionals who have built their practice around providing high quality care for women with endo, and who are just as passionate about creating change as us. In this blog Brisbane gynaecologist Dr Peta Wright shares her journey to becoming a clinician passionate about providing holistic care and empowering women to live their best lives by helping them understand their bodies.
Today I am a gynaecologist and holistic women’s health provider. I work with women in helping to uncover root causes of what’s troubling them, provide them with education about how their amazing bodies work at their best and how things can go wrong. I also recognise that not every woman wants the same solution and there are many different approaches to the same problem. Part of my job is to honour the power each woman has over her body, outline the options for treatment and respect her right to choose what fits for her. This is one of the most important parts of my job as a doctor. I also work in a very holistic way, understanding the incredible power that food, connection, movement and lifestyle factors have medicine, and it is this sort of medicine that often becomes the foundation of a treatment plan – before medication, supplements, or surgeries.
So how did I get here? This approach was not what I was taught in medical school!
My journey into this field of women’s health care started when I was 5 years old and knew I wanted to be a doctor. I spent countless hours running clinics for my dolls and teddy bears who were stitched and bandaged up, given spoonsful of imaginary medicine and set on the mend. I feel like early aspirations may have been thanks to TV shows like A Country Practice which I watched religiously and loved.
At high school in the tiny country town where I grew up, there was only one other girl I knew who went away to uni to study medicine and she was 6 years older than me. There was a female GP who came to fill in for the regular local doctor occasionally, but role models were few and far between. Luckily a few things were in my favour to get me to medical school. I was a nerd (surprise surprise) who loved science and was always looking to understand the nuance of things, and I was blessed to have a group of other beautiful nerdy girl friends who pushed one another to strive for the best. This might not seem remarkable except when you understand that there were only 12 kids in my year 12 class.
One of those beautiful girlfriends got very sick with a rare kind of cancer in year 11. She recovered and is fine but seeing how medicine and doctors could change lives was another real push from the universe.
Great teachers obviously also helped but the biggest factor was probably that I had a mother who always told me I could do and be anything I wanted. She pushed me academically when I was in my younger years of high school, but I never grew up with limitations about what was possible because of her. She also taught me compassion. Fun fact. – my second choice for uni after medicine was social work – probably not surprising to any of my patients!
I don’t think I would have got here if it wasn’t for my mum.
Fast forward to medical school and beyond – obstetrics (looking after mums and delivering babies) was my first love. No one can witness the birth of a new soul into the world and not be changed – all that joy and oxytocin (and sometimes adrenaline) is a bit addictive to be honest! That is why I went into obstetrics and gynaecology at first.
I spent 6 years training all over the country – starting in my home state of Victoria, spending some time in the Northern Territory working with Indigenous women before landing in Brisbane where I am based today. I fell in love with the sunshine state (and my incredible husband) so had no choice but to stay.
My final year of training was in adolescent gynaecology and after I finished I became a specialist working in both the public and private systems. I still work in the Adolescent and young women’s gynae clinic at the Mater but am mostly working privately in gynaecology and fertility. As much as I loved obstetrics, I gave it up when I become a mum almost 3 years ago. My husband is an obstetrician too and having two parents on call 24/7 would have been a nightmare. I felt like I was giving up a lot of what I trained to be at first, but then I realised that focusing solely on women, their bodies, their hormones, their fertility, their pain and most importantly their STORIES was where I felt the most passion, curiosity and the most at home.
I came to realise that many ‘chronic ‘conditions such as endometriosis, PCOS, PMS and pain were not well managed and that women themselves were in the dark about what was happening to their bodies and why. When medication and surgery didn’t work or just masked symptoms (which it does often) women were not given any other choices and often left to think that the problem was them or that they are crazy. They became the ‘difficult’ patients because the doctors have nothing left in their toolbox to fix them – and this is frustrating if you are a doctor and have been trained to ‘fix’ symptoms. I realised that conventionally that for many of these conditions the effects of diet, lifestyle, connection had been minimized and in some cases not taught. After sitting with countless women now, the other thing I started to understand was that in many cases there was underlying trauma from the past, deeply embedded and strongly held negative beliefs about the self that were massively contributing to the conditions these women were suffering with. Just seeing a dietician to help with weight loss is not going to be effective if the reason you eat is because of self-loathing or to numb painful feelings; and pelvic pain arising from sexual trauma will not improve simply by taking pain medications or seeing a physiotherapist if the underlying feelings of being unsafe and needing to protect are not addressed.
When I started really listening to women’s stories and feeling their pain, I knew that the way I was taught medicine was not enough. Women who come to see me for a gynaecological problem and I ask them about their social supports or what they eat for breakfast or what they do that makes their soul sing, are often surprised and probably think – ‘why is this relevant?’
It is relevant because each woman is a whole person not just a set of symptoms making up a condition and every aspect of her life contributes to her hormones, neurotransmitters, the biochemistry and the mechanics of her body. So many women have sat across from me coming in with a simple problem and end up crying as their underlying pain sneaks out.
When I realised this, I became hungry to learn more about this inter-connectedness of life and integrative medicine with a heart centred approach. I studied integrative medicine with Dr Aviva Room. I also completed my Masters in reproductive medicine to gain extra understanding in women’s hormones and in fertility.
My practice is always evolving, and I am always adding things to my toolbox to help uncover the root cause of conditions and guide women to live their best lives. Working with a whole range of other health providers who practice different healing modalities has also taught me that that it sometimes takes a team and there is much we can learn from each other to help women.
I realised too, that I can’t fix women. That is not my job. But I can work in partnership with them bringing all the knowledge I have to empower them to make the right choices for them to heal themselves.
Whilst still working one on one with women, I am more and more passionate about teaching and educating women on a larger scale to know and understand how their bodies work and the things that are in their power to make them as healthy as can be. Womankind has some deep scars that run through so many of us relating to poor body image, self-acceptance and not loving ourselves and I truly believe that these ravines of un-worthiness are a big contributor to keeping many of us sick. I want to change that. I want to help women become empowered with knowledge, feel safe to feel (because much of our unhealthy habits are just a way of numbing our feelings), and to become fully embodied women. To be and feel and love the bodies we are in.
That is my mission now. A long way from where I started. And yes, I have done lots of training but my biggest teachers through all of my education was and is the women who sit down in front of me so vulnerably every day. May you continue to teach me.
You can catch Peta at QENDO’s Long Lunch Event this March, as well as at QENDO’s “An Hour of Endo: Self Care” event in April, alongside hypnotherapist Belinda Chapman. You can purchase tickets here
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