Good Neighbor Podcast: Cooper City
Bringing Together Local Businesses & Neighbors of Cooper City
Good Neighbor Podcast: Cooper City
EP #292: Gayan Poovendran with the PRO Institute
Gayan Poovendran from the PRO Institute is here to change how you think about healing orthopedic injuries. Say goodbye to the idea that surgery is your only option. Gayan introduces us to regenerative medicine, exploring groundbreaking treatments like stem cells and platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections that tap into your body's own healing powers. These innovative methods promise not just to treat the symptoms but to truly heal issues such as meniscus tears and rotator cuff injuries. Get ready to discover a world where your body’s natural abilities are the star, shaking up the traditional medical scene with less invasive, more effective alternatives.
But that's not all—Gayan takes us through his personal journey of breaking free from the confines of working for others to building a private practice in sports medicine. With the unwavering support of his wife, Gayan faced the unique challenges of running a business with a spouse, sharing insights on the blend of professional and personal life. Experience the highs and lows, from the grueling demands of medical school to the exhilarating yet daunting task of establishing his practice. This episode is packed with stories of resilience and personal growth, offering listeners a peek into the power of overcoming adversity both in medicine and life.
Call: (305) 209-1951
Visit: https://www.pro-institute.com/
Follow: https://www.instagram.com/PRO_InstituteMD/
Like: https://www.facebook.com/PROInstituteMD/?_rdr
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Jeremy Wolf.
Speaker 2:Oh, hello everyone and welcome back. I was recently at the Chamber of Commerce luncheon and I met our next guest. Actually, I didn't meet him, but I met his lovely wife. He had to step out a little bit early, but, as you guys know, anytime I encounter a new business through the chamber, I always like to extend an olive branch and invite them on the show to learn a little bit more about what they do and how they help our wonderful community. So today our guest is Gayan Puventron, and Gayan joins us from Pro Institute. Gayan, welcome to the show, brother.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much. I really am honored to be here. This is really cool and exciting for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, happy to have you, man, and thanks, as always, to our listeners for tuning in to learn more about our great community and the businesses that serve us. So, without further ado, why don't you tell everyone a little bit about what you guys do at PRO Institute?
Speaker 3:So we are a regenerative orthopedic and sports medicine practice. So PRO stands for Puventrin Regenerative Orthopedic Institute, and so I brought my experience from the general medicine or allopathic normal MD school to a more alternative, natural healing approach to healing orthopedic injuries. So we utilize a lot of things like peptides, prp, which is called platelet-rich plasma. We use stem cells, not the ones you get from the bottle but the ones from your own body. We do different nutrient IVs, we do ozone therapy, we do some like nutrient testing. There's a whole bunch of different things that we do to try to optimize the body from the inside to help it heal better. And then sometimes I have to do injections as well.
Speaker 2:I've been doing a lot of podcasts lately with. I just did one with my podiatrist the other day and we were talking about this whole idea of regenerative medicine, and I've done a lot with various businesses that are in like the holistic healing space and there's been this common theme and I think it's happening because as I get older I'm more attuned to this, I'm more aware of the body's ability to heal itself. So I'm really fascinated by the approach to this holistic regenerative medicine. Can you speak a little bit? You just mentioned some of the various services that you offer. Can you speak a little bit more about this distinction between traditional medicine, sports medicine specifically, and this idea of regenerative medicine and kind of healing from within? Like for somebody that hasn't heard about that or has heard regenerative medicine but doesn't really know what it is? Go down that rabbit hole a little bit.
Speaker 3:Sure Be happy to. So you know the um, my, my residency and my, my fellowship were in sports medicine as a non-operative doctor, and so typically, or traditionally, if you were to come and see me in that type of office I was working in an orthopedic office I would evaluate you. I would say oh, you have a knee injury, maybe a meniscus tear, let's do some physical therapy. Maybe let's do a cortisone injection, do some medications, try to manage the symptoms. If it doesn't get better, go to surgery. Right, that's what ends up happening with a lot of patients.
Speaker 3:So I got really frustrated with you. Know, I feel like I have really good skills with my hands and I wasn't getting to use them very much. So with regenerative medicine, what we do is we harness your body's own ability to heal itself because, just like when you cut yourself on the arm, you know your body is going to heal it. So what we do is we'll take either stem cells or PRP, inject it into whatever is injured and then that stimulates it to heal and make it feel better. That works. On meniscus tears, rotator cuff tears, labral tears, arthritis of the knee, arthritis of the hip, anything that really can cause a lot of aches and pains we're able to help heal those, not just by masking it. You know, like a cortisone injection we talk about to decrease pain it just masks the symptoms and in the end we know that it makes things a lot worse, whereas these injections or these treatments actually help roll the clock back so that we're not having the cause of the pain anymore.
Speaker 2:It seems like a no brainer to me to at least attempt to heal the body through this idea of regenerative medicine, as opposed to just going straight to the more invasive types types of procedures. Now, do you also I'd imagine that you also do the surgery aspects of it Like, do you do? Do you run the full gamut, or you just specifically focus on the regenerative side and if it can't be, the issue can't be addressed through that you refer them out to like a surgeon if they ultimately need surgery.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what I my. My treatments stop when the injections or the needle based therapies don't work anymore. So if somebody needs to have a surgery to fix whatever, then I'll refer out. Surgery is sometimes the answer. Sometimes patients do come to see me and they're too far gone I can't help it. But there are so many patients that I see that you know they have a partial rotator cuff tear that their surgeon says oh, you did six weeks of physical therapy, let's operate on it. They don't want to. I fix them. And then they have to go back to the surgeon and say, hey, I guess I don't need the surgery anymore.
Speaker 2:Are you finding that through these non-invasive regenerative approaches you're getting a very, very high level of success with patients, or is this something that works for some period of time and then often needs to go? I guess it just depends on the case.
Speaker 3:right Depends on the individual, but it depends on the case, it depends on the individual and it also just depends on what's going on Right. So the again, the main focus of these treatments is to heal the injury. So people always ask me is this permanent? Well, it's as permanent as a surgery is going to be. It's as permanent as your body, your body or the biology is going to allow it to be. So, like again a rotator cuff tear in the shoulder, we can heal that and it's not going to tear again until 10, 15, 20 years down the road when it's going to naturally wear down and degrade.
Speaker 3:Arthritis, which is a degenerative condition, tends to be a little bit different. That one requires a lot more maintenance tends to be a little bit different. That one requires a lot more maintenance. You know we do those injections maybe once a year, once every 18 months, just to keep things as healthy as possible on the inside. But it's not like a again, it's not a temporary fix where you know we're just masking it for a couple months and moving forward.
Speaker 3:I mean, I do agree it's kind of a no-brainer for a lot of these conditions that I see and treat that people try this. I've had pretty good results. I've been doing this for 12 years now. I believe. I think that part of my success ends up really being because of patient selection. I am very selective on who I think this stuff will work on and I use a lot of the evidence from the conferences I go to and I teach at. But you know, when we get 70 to 80 to 90 percent success rates, I mean I get to be pretty bullish on how well these things work earlier that you were frustrated by kind of like the old school way of going about this.
Speaker 2:What ultimately seeded that frustration, and does this go back to before medical school that you've always had this kind of like holistic approach to medicine? Talk a little bit about how you kind of evolved into this specific field of regenerative medicine.
Speaker 3:So I think with most things that people are passionate about, there's a personal story involved, and for me it is the same thing. When I was a junior in college, I hurt my shoulder lifting weights. I partially dislocated it, point where it's bad. He had me see two of our family friends who are orthopedic surgeons and their solution to me was well, we can operate on this, but you're better off not and just dealing with it and great advice right it was like they're like oh, if it the same doctor device, like, if it hurts, don't do it.
Speaker 3:I'm like you know what? I'm 20 years old. I want to lift weights, I want to play basketball, I want to play golf, I want to play. There's all these things I want to do. I can't not do them at 20 years old because my shoulder hurts. So my dad and I, you know, got on this regimen of he had me do physical therapy and then he was giving me cortisone injections and after, you know, the first cortisone injection probably lasted me nine months a year, give or take, and then probably lasted me nine months a year, give or take, and then the next only lasted like three or four or five months. And then we did another one and it only lasted like three weeks.
Speaker 1:And I'm just like, and my and I go and ask him again hey, can I get another one?
Speaker 3:he goes no, you can't do it that many because it's going to do damage. So then we go and talk to my friends, the surgeons, and they tell me well, we can operate on it now that you've failed the normal conservative treatment. Um, but you're going to have to be in a sling for six weeks or eight weeks and it's going to be another three to four, five months of rehab before the shoulder feels good. And here I am, a 21 year old at this point, getting ready to go to medical school. I'm like when am I going to figure this out? And so from medical school I just kept dealing with it.
Speaker 3:And then, once I got into residency, I was really into sports medicine. I've always been into sports medicine, but I started like looking at different ways of healing things naturally. So I started by I don't know, it was like an in flight magazine where they talked about growth hormone injections. Like, oh, maybe if I injected growth hormone into my shoulder that would help. Never ended up going down that route because luckily, when I was in residency there was a sports medicine fellowship with a doctor that was doing some of these regenerative things and he's talked to me about PRP, and so I kind of switched focuses from again traditional regenerative medicine or traditional sports medicine stuff to more the regenerative side, or that was my passion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's pretty cool how you landed into that. We're having that specific issue. And then you were in a situation where you could kind of test the waters on yourself to see how things went and kind of validate what you were looking for. Reminds me of a story for myself. I herniated my L1 S5 lumbar way back when and I couldn't. Whatever I did, I got the epidurals. It worked just like you said. The first one worked really well, the second one not so much. The third.
Speaker 2:By the time I did it, the third third one didn't have much of an effect. I was getting acupuncture, I was doing all sorts of things to avoid getting a micro discectomy and I was one step from getting the surgery. And somebody finally recommended to see a chiropractor to try disc decompression, spinal disc decompression and I went into that machine and it took a while but after going two times a week for several months finally got the pressure off the nerve and I was able to get back to normal and I haven't had an issue really since and that was all done through. I guess you could call that like regenerative, right, it's through the body, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's your body healing itself. I mean that's. I think people forget about how important the chiropractor or the physical therapist can be. You know they're going to because a condition like yours that you're talking about part of it is, you know the alignment is off right. So you correct the alignment on the top, like I can put a new tire on, but if your alignment is still bad, the tire is going to go bad again, whereas the chiropractor, the physical therapist, they're going to adjust all of those motions and the way that your muscles fire, so that way it doesn't keep bothering it and the decompression obviously helps but getting those muscles. I'm sure that did some other work to get the muscles stronger along your spine, which ultimately is what gave you the long lasting relief.
Speaker 2:Yeah, your spine, which ultimately, is what gave you the long lasting relief. Yeah, your, so I met at the chamber again. I alluded to at the front of the show. I didn't meet you personally. I met. I met your wife.
Speaker 3:She also works with you at the practice. She is the practice, she's the boss, she's the practice manager, she's the one that tells me what to do, when to do it, how high to jump.
Speaker 2:So how did you meet her through the field? Tell us a little bit about how you guys linked up and how you ended up working together and starting this practice together.
Speaker 3:So we actually met a long time ago when we were in college. So I met her when she was a freshman in college and I was a junior or senior, so right around the time where I hurt myself Interesting story my girlfriend at the time and her boyfriend at the time were brother and sister, so the four of us used to spend a lot of time hanging out. Nothing ever happened, nothing crazy like that. But after I graduated college, you know, we kind of went our own ways. I went to medical school. We would talk once in a while, you know, just friendly medical school, we would talk once in a while, you know, just friendly. And then one day, um, a couple years ago, she like sent me one of those messages on instagram. I was like, hey, how's it going? And then we like literally did stop talking. After that. I mean, it was like one of those like weird, like it was the right time, now we're gonna reconnect. So we reconnected.
Speaker 3:Uh, she was living in ohio at the time this was right before the pandemic so she flew down for two weeks because it was just a two week lockdown and she ended up never going back. And then during that time she saw me go through two different sports medicine practices where I was employed by other people. She saw the frustration in me on a daily basis of not necessarily being able to do things the way I wanted to, or implementing new therapies when I think that they're good, because the business people behind it don't understand it. She was a little bird in my ear that said you could do this on your own. You've been making people a lot of money for the last couple of years. Why don't you do it for yourself? Why don't you do it for yourself? And finally I said okay, you know what, let's do it.
Speaker 2:Good stuff. I always ask this when there's a husband and wife team what is one of the most rewarding things about working with your wife? And, on the other end of that spectrum, what's one of the biggest challenges about working with your wife and?
Speaker 3:on the other end of that spectrum. What's one of the biggest challenges about working with your wife? I think most rewarding is I know that we're both equally invested in the success right, Because she wants to see me succeed financially and emotionally and professionally and she wants to see me keep going and climbing and she's just as invested in that as I am, which you don't get with just anybody right. One of the challenges on the other side of that is-.
Speaker 2:Careful Think before you talk, because she's going to listen to this.
Speaker 3:She's going to listen to this and she'll agree with me. The biggest challenge is the brain never shuts off, right, because we'll do stuff here at work and then we're thinking about stuff at home, and then at 10 30 at night in bed I'll be like hey, wait a minute, what about this idea? And she'll be like really, it's 10 30 o'clock at night or the vice versa. She'd be like, hey, did you think about this? I'm like I really don't want to think about this right now. I need to decompress. That's the hardest part.
Speaker 2:But you know, it's all for the greater good yeah, yeah right, Separating work from personal, just sometimes knowing when it's right to maybe put that thought down on a notepad for the next day and not bring it up. But you get so excited when the thought comes up in your head You're like I want to share this with you right now. I can see how that could be interesting. So do you guys have kids?
Speaker 3:No kids. We've only been married for we're going on four years now but we're working on the kid part.
Speaker 2:Very, very cool. So what would be looking back? So what I found through my life experiences is that I'm often defined by my most challenging experiences, more so than the rewards or the triumphs that I've had. Right, the good stuff is great, don't get me wrong but the things that you go through, that you really struggle with in life, that at the time you're going through it feels like the end of the world and it feels like there's no hope. But then, retrospectively, looking back at it years later, you can say, wow, man, I'm really grateful for having gone through that experience because it really helped shape me into who I am today. Is there an experience like that that comes to mind throughout your journey, something that you struggled with, a hardship, a challenge that really helped to define you into who you are today?
Speaker 3:I mean I think right now I'm going through one right Starting this new business, that it's only been open for a year. So I've gone from a very, very stable life where patients were just showing up at my door and you know I was getting a nice paycheck and a nice salary and all that kind of stuff, and now it's. You know I. I know that in the future I'll look back at this and be like, of course it was worth it. And you know, you knew you were going to succeed.
Speaker 3:But when you're in the weeds it's sometimes challenging. I've had similar situations like that, I mean in education, right here in college I never thought I was gonna get into medical school. And then medical school they teach you how stupid you are the entire time. So you're like I'm never, never gonna get through this, I'm gonna just kill everybody. When I get into residency, and then residency, they're telling you don't kill anybody. And then you know you're, am I ever gonna make it through this whole treatment thing? And you know it, it's, it was.
Speaker 3:Uh, the the medical education system is very, very challenging and you never think that you're really gonna make make it through. And then when you do you like, look back and you kind of miss it, like there's a lot of stuff that I remember complaining about in the moment, like when I was in medical school in the Caribbean. I'm like man, I hate it here, I don't want to, like I'm in paradise and I'm studying. But then you look back and you're like man, all my friends were like two-minute walk away from me and now we're like all around the country. So like it's just interesting how your perspective can change when you're removed from the trauma, the direct removal of trauma.
Speaker 2:Indeed indeed, and appreciate you sharing that. Yeah, starting. I speak to tons of local business owners on the platform and if you haven't run a business or been an entrepreneur or started something from scratch, you don't know. It can be extremely frightening and a harrowing experience. Because your specialty lies in medicine. Right, you went to medical school. You're a doctor. Right, you deal with regenerative medicine, but as a business owner, now you got to deal with it. It's great that you have your wife to help you with all this, but now you've got to wear every single hat. Right, you also got to be a boss. You've got to be an administrator. You've got to do all these different things and it can be very, very difficult, but you nailed it. Right, you know that if you just put in the work now and do what's required, it'll all pay off in the end, as it always does.
Speaker 3:And I'm very lucky that my wife has a much better business mind because, you're right, like I spent my entire time and my entire education learning about science and healing and helping people. I never learned about the business aspect of it. I had a really interesting meeting with a kind of a mentor the other day and he was telling me you know what you don't need to like. You've gotten to the point where now the regenerative medicine is second nature. It's not something you have to think about, you just know what to do. But now you have to go to the next part of now. You have to be a business owner. Now you have to be, as you said, a manager. Now you have to think about marketing and all these other things that the entire time of your career you're like that's somebody else's job, now it's mine right. Now it's mine Right. But thankfully I have my wife that can do those things really, really well, because that was her trade.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they. They can often do them a lot better than us, can't they?
Speaker 3:no-transcript.
Speaker 2:Yep Guilty as charged. I'm not alone there. What would be one thing that you'd like to leave our listeners with? It can be about the business. It could be about life in general, piece of wisdom.
Speaker 3:One thing you'd like to drop, one, one nugget. I think my best nugget would be about the practice of medicine and how it's changing. I think, as a as a lay person, it can get very daunting seeing all the options and being frustrated by the options, but know that there are doctors and there's practitioners like me that are thinking outside of the box and actually looking for solutions to help people heal, as opposed to just covering it up or trying to, you know, run through the system or run through their clinic day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of that's one of the things, again, I always say on the North side of 40, I'm 40, be 45 soon.
Speaker 2:I've been on this journey and I just never ceases to amaze me how much of a capacity the human body has to heal itself and how we live in a society, this instant gratification, quick fix society, where everybody's looking for the magic pill, the one thing that you could do, and there really is no magic bullet for any of this. It all goes back to lifestyle, right, your diet, what you put in your body, how you take care of yourself, your exercise, all this stuff that seems so simple on its face but everybody has such a hard time implementing on a daily basis. And I see a lot of that in you, kind of this approach to medicine, in trying to treat the underlying issues and really, really truly heal yourself, as opposed to just slapping a bandaid on, which so many, unfortunately in the medical profession do nowadays. It's unfortunate that we live in a system that's like that. So it's a breath of fresh air to see somebody like you doing what you do, guyon.
Speaker 3:Thank you. I appreciate that. You know it is frustrating when you were in a, when I was in my first practice in the traditional, in a very, very traditional sense of orthopedics and sports medicine, you see 35, 40 patients a day. It's really hard in that little time to give the level of care that people deserve, right, yeah, even the other day I was having, I was working out with one of my colleagues in the area who's more in the university. He's at the university doing what I do and we were talking.
Speaker 3:He's like I can't even get my ultrasound out to look at the, to diagnose the patient, because my athletic trainer or my medical assistant is already like we have another patient that's waiting or we have three more patients that's waiting, whereas you know a setting like this where you are maybe outside of the insurance system but you get all the care. Like each one of my patient visits, a new patient visits in an hour. You get an hour with me to sit down to talk to me. I examine you, I do an ultrasound, I diagnose, I do whatever I can, the stuff that I can't do. If I need an MRI, then I order it Right and then we move forward. But I have found in my career that spending that little extra time usually helps me find an answer that most people aren't looking for or aren't seeing. I guess.
Speaker 2:So for anyone out there listening that is experiencing problems and they're frustrated, like you were, with their condition, they'd like to reach out and learn more. What's the best way to connect with you guys? Maybe share your website and your contact information.
Speaker 3:So our website is proinstitute P-R-O-I-N-S-T-I-T-U-T-Ecom, and our phone number is 305-209-1951. We're located in Davie. We're on State Road 84, right in between Knob Hill and Hiatus Road. Kate or Geetha will talk to you on the phone. You'll be in love with them and then you'll come and see me and hopefully still have a good experience.
Speaker 2:Perfect, and we will, of course, drop a link below in the description to all of your contact information so folks can reach out. Gayan, it's a pleasure having you on the show, brother. It was really nice learning about your story and what you're offering to our community, so thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much, Jeremy, for having me.
Speaker 2:I really had a good time. I'm glad to hear it and thanks to our listeners for tuning in and we will catch everyone next time on the next episode of the Good Neighbor Podcast. Everyone, take care and have a blessed day. Everyone take care and have a blessed day.
Speaker 1:Bye-bye. 954-231-3170.