Meet Dr. Pooja

Meet Dr. Pooja Pandey Tripathi, the founder of Arogya Physiotherapy in Bangalore.

She is a physiotherapist with over twenty years of experience across neurological rehabilitation, women's health, paediatric physiotherapy, musculoskeletal rehabilitation and fitness. She holds an MPT in Rehabilitation, and she is also a certified yoga teacher, a Zumba and fitness instructor, a choreographer, a Marma therapist, a theatre artist and an entrepreneur.

Arogya began as one idea and has grown into a group of physiotherapists running four clinics in Bangalore, along with home physiotherapy and online rehabilitation for people who cannot come in.

Her mission is simple to state and harder to do: make quality physiotherapy accessible, and help people understand their own bodies, address the root cause of their problems, and lead healthier, more independent lives.

"Healthcare should be professional but never intimidating," she says. The Arogya motto is "Witness Your Fitness With Us." Her own is shorter. Keep smiling.

Varanasi, and everywhere else

She was born in Varanasi, which is also her husband's home town. Her childhood, though, happened in several places at once.

Leh. Chandigarh. Rewa. Pithoragarh. Her father's work moved the family, and she grew up across all of them. Her schooling ran from Kendriya Vidyalaya to Mount Carmel, where she completed her eleventh and twelfth.

Her parents taught her discipline and hard work. They also did something that shaped the whole of her later life: they taught her the importance of being financially independent, and they kept saying it until she believed it.

The interests she had as a child are the ones she still has. She loves dancing, singing and doing plays, and she loves learning something creative. None of that was set aside when the degrees and the clinics arrived.

The values she grew up with were independence, discipline and compassion. Her husband later brought her into the world of spirituality.

The people at home

Her father, Dr. Bhawani Shankar Pandey, retired as IG Medical for seven forces, and he is still working. Her mother, Poonam Pandey, she describes simply as a very strong lady, and she is still very active.

Her sister Aarti Pandey works at Wipro and is a mother of two. The two of them are very close, and Pooja calls her a constant emotional support and, in many ways, her real-life partner.

Her husband Anurag Tripathi works at Google, teaches Art of Living, and runs the south chapter of the Malviya Mission NGO. What she values most about him is the respect for individuality. He has always encouraged her and never once stopped her from doing anything.

Their daughter Satviki is seventeen — sweet and wise, as her mother puts it. Their son Reyansh is eleven, and naughty and innocent at the same time. Between them they have taught her patience, responsibility, and how to balance the different roles a life asks for.

Her in-laws are no longer alive. Of her father-in-law, Surendra Prasad Tripathi, she says only this: he was my hero. And Geeta Shenoy, her neighbour and an investor in Arogya, is not described as either. She is family.

"My family gives me unconditional love," she says.

Becoming a physiotherapist

Her academic journey began with a Bachelor of Physiotherapy in Bangalore, followed by a Master of Physiotherapy in Rehabilitation from Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences. She completed her MPT in 2007.

Her clinical internship at R&R Hospital gave her early exposure to patient care and rehabilitation. Before that, in 2004, she had already pursued manual therapy training through FIMT.

Her professional experience started as Head of Physiotherapy at St. Joseph Niwas, working with special children. It is worth pausing on where a career begins, because it often decides where it goes. Hers began in paediatric and neurological rehabilitation, with children who needed careful, patient, long-term work.

That is also where she first saw the gap she would later build a company to fill. There was a real need for quality rehabilitation services, particularly for children with special needs, and providing it safely and accessibly inside existing setups was difficult.

Never stop learning

"I have always believed that learning should never stop," she says. "Physiotherapy is a constantly evolving profession, and I have made it a point to keep learning, experimenting and improving my clinical skills."

The list of what she has trained in since her MPT is long, and each item on it is a separate course with separate hours behind it. Mulligan Manual Therapy. Maitland Manual Therapy. KIASTM, which is instrument-assisted soft tissue mobilisation. Dry needling. Pelvic floor rehabilitation.

Outside clinical physiotherapy, she has been a certified yoga teacher since 2006, and she has trained in Zumba and fitness instruction, and in Marma therapy through Sri Sri Wellness.

Twenty years of practice and that list belong together. One is the experience, the other is the refusal to let the experience become a habit.

Why Arogya was built

Arogya Physiotherapy was born out of her determination to continue working while being a mother to a young daughter.

That sentence is the whole origin of the company, and she does not soften it. She never wanted motherhood to mean putting her professional ambitions on hold. So rather than choose between the two, she built something that would let her keep both.

She founded Arogya in 2009 with her MPT classmate and friend, Seema Ravindran. They started with a clear vision: quality musculoskeletal and neurological physiotherapy, done properly.

Seema is no longer with us. She will always remain an important part of Arogya's story, and the organisation she helped begin is still standing on the foundation the two of them laid.

Today Arogya is a team of physiotherapists running four clinics in Bangalore, along with home physiotherapy and online rehabilitation. Dr. Munesh is now her co-founder, and the team includes doctors and healthcare professionals who bring the Arogya vision to life.

The thing she had herself

Before any of the women's health work existed, she had the condition herself.

She had been a PCOD patient since she was a teenager. It was not something her lifestyle had produced — it was genetic, and she describes it with the dry humour of somebody who has lived with it a long time: she was blessed with it.

Her periods were never regular. But she had always been active, so her weight never rose the way the condition usually announces itself, and that is exactly the kind of case that goes unexamined for years.

She finished her graduation and married in 2004. In the middle of 2006, she and her husband began thinking about starting a family — and that is when what had been a background fact became the thing in the way.

She went to the best professionals she could find in the field.

What she learned there she now teaches, and the part she is most insistent about is the first sentence of it:

PCOD is not a curse. You can win over your war with PCOD.

What women are not told

As her professional and personal journey progressed, she became increasingly interested in women's health and pelvic floor rehabilitation. What she found there changed the direction of her work.

Women often suffer silently from urinary incontinence, pelvic floor dysfunction, diastasis recti, pelvic organ prolapse, pregnancy-related pain and postpartum complications. Many of them do not know that physiotherapy can help at all.

That last part is the real problem. These are treatable conditions, and a great many women are simply never told so. They are left to assume that what they are living with is a normal part of being a woman, or the price of having had a child.

She does not accept that. One of her stated beliefs is direct about it: women should not have to accept pain, incontinence, postpartum dysfunction or pelvic floor problems as normal parts of life.

So she built the specialisation. Arogya's work now covers pelvic floor rehabilitation, diastasis recti management, hernia reduction, pregnancy and postpartum rehabilitation, PCOD-related wellness and menopause care.

Between the clinics, the programmes and the awareness work, thousands of women have now been through some part of it.

Proving it on paper

Clinical conviction is one thing. Evidence is another, and she went after it.

In September 2023 she published "Effect of Combined Treatment of Massage, Exercise and KIASTM with That of Only Exercise in Patients with Diastasis Recti" in the SSR Institute International Journal of Life Sciences, under the Department of Physiotherapy at RGUHS University, Bangalore. She is its only author.

That was not the only one that year. In the International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Clinical Research she published "A Systematic Review on the Effect of Physiotherapy in Mild Cases of Umbilical Hernia" — ten studies read and weighed to answer a question that gets skipped: whether a hernia being watched rather than operated on can be helped in the meantime. Her conclusion was that it can, with exercise that is scheduled, regular and professionally guided. Sole author on that one too.

Research takes time a working physiotherapist running four clinics does not have, and it puts your methods in front of reviewers whose job is to find the holes in them. Doing it alone means there is nobody else's name to share the weight.

She has also trained others in what she knows. Around fifty physiotherapists and fitness trainers have come through her workshops, which is a quieter kind of reach than a clinic and a longer-lasting one — each of them now carries the method into rooms she will never be in.

And she built a third kind of reach. Arogya PhysioTips, her educational channel on YouTube, has passed 76,000 subscribers, and her Instagram has over 40,000. Alongside those she runs online and offline rehabilitation programmes, workshops and professional training.

Clinical practice, research, entrepreneurship and public education — being able to combine all four is the thing she says she is most proud of.

Wolly

Wolly is hers. The name is made from two words — women and belly — and the thing itself is a mix of cardio, strengthening and stretching.

It did not come out of nowhere. She built a workout for the part of a woman's body that most exercise programmes either ignore or punish, and she built it having lived with PCOD herself since she was a teenager.

Then she did the thing that separates a method from an idea: she put it to the test. There is a study on the effect of the Wolly workout on the management of PCOS and PCOD patients — her own workout, measured against the condition she knows from the inside.

She teaches it to others now, and she still teaches it online herself as part of the 30 Days Fitness Plan, which she co-founded with Dr. Atrayee Niharchandra and Dr. Vinita Tripathi.

None of this sits outside her clinical work. Her view of fitness is not about appearance at all — it is about strength, mobility, mental well-being and longevity. A healthy body, as she describes it, is one that is strong, functional, pain-free and capable of letting you enjoy your life.

Yoga she has practised for over twenty years, and she is clear that the postures are only a small part of it. Breathing, self-awareness and connecting with yourself matter just as much.

What she had to push against

Her journey has not been without challenges, and she lists them plainly.

Balancing motherhood and entrepreneurship has required discipline, flexibility and determination. Building a professional career while raising children is not a thing that resolves itself once.

Then there is the profession itself. Many people still associate physiotherapy only with massages, or with exercises after surgery. She has worked consistently to establish it as an essential healthcare profession rather than an add-on.

Women's health carries its own difficulty. Pelvic floor dysfunction, diastasis recti, urinary incontinence and postpartum rehabilitation are still subjects women hesitate to discuss openly, which means the first job is often simply getting the conversation started.

Running clinics, managing teams, maintaining quality standards and keeping healthcare accessible without compromising professional ethics have all been hard. And treating the root cause rather than managing symptoms sometimes means educating patients and challenging traditional approaches.

"Challenges are opportunities to learn, innovate and grow," she says. It is the kind of line that only carries weight when the person saying it has the list above behind them.

The turns that mattered

A career does not change direction evenly. It turns at a few particular moments, and she can name hers.

Motherhood was the first. It changed how she saw her own life, and it hardened rather than softened her determination to build something meaningful without giving up her professional identity.

Starting Arogya was the second, and it made her an entrepreneur, which is not a thing a physiotherapy degree prepares anybody for.

The third was pelvic floor rehabilitation. Her own experience and her professional curiosity took her deeper into women's health, and what she found was an area far more underserved than she had expected.

The fourth is the quietest and may be the largest. She stopped thinking of herself only as a physiotherapist and began working as an entrepreneur and an educator, because the reach she could have by teaching other professionals, and by helping women beyond the four walls of her clinic, was simply larger than the reach of her own two hands.

Being selected for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women entrepreneurship programme at IIM Lucknow pushed the same idea further. It encouraged her to think bigger, to build her leadership, and to picture what Arogya could become rather than what it already was.

What she believes

Her beliefs are short enough to state and specific enough to argue with, which is the mark of real ones.

Treat the person, not just the condition — every patient has a different story, and treatment should address the root cause. Never stop learning, because there is always something new in healthcare. Women's health deserves attention. Fitness is not about appearance. Yoga is much more than physical postures.

One of them is a business decision as much as a value. At Arogya they hold to professional integrity and do not follow doctor referral commission practices. That is an easy rule to write down and a harder one to keep when there are clinics to run and salaries to pay, and she has kept it.

The last belief is the one that explains the rest of her. Life should be professional but fun. She believes in working hard, laughing, dancing, moving and celebrating life.

Her personal philosophy fits in a single line: to keep growing without losing herself in the process.

The people who got her here

Ask her who built this with her and the answer is long, which is itself the point.

Her parents, for the values. Her sister Aarti, for constant emotional support. Her husband Anurag, for never standing in the way. Her children Satviki and Reyansh, for teaching her patience and balance. Her father-in-law Surendra Prasad Tripathi, her hero.

Seema Ravindran, who co-founded Arogya with her. Usha and Geetha, who are part of her Arogya family and have been her friends for two decades. Geeta Shenoy, her neighbour and investor. Dr. Munesh, her co-founder now. Ashok sir and Srihari sir and the doctors, physiotherapists and healthcare professionals on her team. Her digital team. Her gurus, her mentors, her teachers, her colleagues and her patients.

And the maids at home, whom she names directly, because they take the responsibility of the house off her and that is what makes the rest of it possible. Not many people in her position would put that on the list. She does.

Her recognitions include the Nirbhaya Award in 2018, Outstanding Physiotherapist from the Indian Association of Physiotherapists in 2019, and the Woman Achiever Award from Raaba in 2022 — among more than ten awards. She has been featured on entrepreneurial platforms including the Linvin Startup feature, and is invited to speak and sit on panels at professional and healthcare events.

What comes next

Her vision is to make Arogya Physiotherapy a recognised name in rehabilitation and women's health, and the plan behind it is specific.

She wants to expand Arogya to more locations across India, and to establish specialised women's health and pelvic floor rehabilitation units inside major hospitals. She wants to take affordable, quality physiotherapy to underserved communities, and to develop structured online rehabilitation programmes that can reach women across India and internationally, including opportunities outside the country such as Dubai.

She wants to train more physiotherapists in diastasis recti and pelvic floor rehabilitation, expand research and evidence-based practice, build CSR initiatives so that rehabilitation reaches women who cannot afford specialised care, and build a strong digital healthcare and education ecosystem around all of it.

The larger dream underneath the plan is simpler. Every woman should have access to the right information and to professional help for her own health.

And this is the message she wants her journey to carry:

I want my journey to represent the idea that a woman does not have to choose between family, passion, profession and personal growth. With determination, continuous learning and the right support, it is possible to build a meaningful life while contributing to the lives of others. Also, alone you can't grow — a woman needs an army of people to come up. Be that support to someone.