My story

About Me

MY STORY
I was born and trained in Saint Petersburg — then part of the Soviet Union — in a medical education system built on scientific rigour and clinical depth that shaped how I think to this day. My undergraduate years began in one country and ended, without relocation, in another. That experience — of continuity through change, of holding your footing when the ground shifts — has been useful in medicine more times than I can count.
After graduation I worked across the Far East, South and South Central Asia. I lived and practised in places where the gap between a woman and the care she needed was enormous — not because medicine did not exist, but because everything around her made it hard to reach. I learned to work without systems to defer to, without equipment to rely on, and without the kind of clinical certainty that comfortable settings provide. What those years gave me was something no postgraduate training can: the ability to read a patient rather than a protocol.
I returned to the UK and spent 25 years training under leading specialists in reproductive medicine, IVF, minimally invasive surgery, and gynaecological endocrinology. I pursued further surgical training across Europe, working with specialists at the forefront of endometriosis and laparoscopic technique. I have been part of endometriosis multidisciplinary teams at two major hospitals and have spent my career learning, refining, and questioning what I think I know.
I am now in my late fifties. I have practised medicine across four continents. And I am still more interested in the patient in front of me than in any framework designed to make her easier to categorise.
JOURNEY
The path was not linear and was never meant to be.
Soviet medical school. Remote clinics in Asia. The British training system — with all its strengths and its tendency to favour process over thinking. European surgical centres where I encountered clinicians doing things I had not seen before. A period of intensive training that connected my practice to a wider international network and deepened my approach to complex cases.
Each stage added something the previous one could not have given me. The Asian years gave me clinical instinct and an understanding of women's lives in contexts very different from consulting rooms in Manchester. The British years gave me structure and evidence. The European training gave me surgical depth and exposure to minds that had solved problems I was still learning to name.
The STRATA Clinical Framework came out of all of it — not as a product, but as the natural result of asking the same question for thirty years: what is actually driving this, and what should happen next?
VALUES
I do not believe in managing women. I believe in informing them.
There is a difference between a consultation that ends with a patient feeling reassured and one that ends with a patient understanding what is happening in her body and what her options actually are. I have always preferred the second.
I work with women who are intelligent, self-regulating, and ready to follow a structured plan once the reasoning is clear. Not because I cannot work with anyone else — but because that is where I do my best work, and where the outcomes are worth the effort on both sides.
I have seen women in contexts where their health was entirely shaped by forces outside their control — cultural, economic, systemic. I have seen women in private consulting rooms in England who were suffering just as much, for entirely different reasons. What connects them is that they were not being fully seen. That is what I try to change, one consultation at a time.
I do not offer hope as a clinical strategy. I offer clarity, reasoning, and a plan. If that resonates — this is the right practice.
PURPOSE
I developed the STRATA Clinical Framework because I kept seeing the same pattern: women who had tried multiple treatments, received multiple opinions, and still did not have a coherent explanation for what was driving their condition.
The framework is not a product. It is a way of thinking — structured, layered, and built on the understanding that adenomyosis and complex gynaecological conditions do not behave the same way in every woman, and cannot be treated as though they do.
My purpose is not to be the last doctor a woman sees. It is to be the one who finally gave her a picture complete enough to make the right decisions — about treatment, about timing, about fertility, about what comes next.
That is what I have always been trying to do. The framework just made it more explicit