Dr. Pattani, owner of Allen Pharmacy & Wellness, equips frustrated, stressed professionals with tools to stop feeling fatigued, anxious, and hopeless, and instead feel sustained energy, in control, and healthy so they can live their best life yet.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and why you do what you do.
I was born and brought up in Mumbai, India and came to the US at the age of 13 and started high school. To say I experienced culture shock is an understatement, but I have always been someone who figures things out. After graduating from high school and getting a doctorate in pharmacy, I practiced in the retail setting. Being in retail made me miss the important transitions in my patients’ lives due to the sheer volume of prescriptions that needed to be filled. It hardly left any time to actually counsel patients. Western medicine is heavily focused on symptomatic treatment and does not look at the root cause of any problems. Therefore, patients’ triggers went unnoticed and untreated. We give people the correct advice: lose weight, reduce stress, eat well—but we are not showing them the path to get there. This is when I realized that Western medicine doesn’t focus on prevention, so none of us are trained to help prevent diseases. In 2016, I started my own consulting company. I wanted to help people live a healthier life, reduce the number of medications they were taking, and help them be healthy naturally. In 2019, I started my own pharmacy and continued helping my patients in the best way I knew. We are the kind of pharmacy that prides ourselves on not just adding everyone on autofill year after year. We are constantly working with our patients and their medical teams to help them understand their bodies so that they can take positive steps towards long term health, potentially helping them eliminate the medications entirely.
What has been the most inspirational client’s story you have encountered?
I love this question. One inspirational story that stands out is from during my hospital work. I was given the opportunity to precept some pharmacy students, and we needed to counsel a patient that was started on a blood thinner. Our patient was a 42-year-old female who was admitted because she had multiple clots all over her body. While we were treating her with infusions that would dissolve these clots, her body kept forming new ones—even while she was hospitalized. No one knew the reason for these new clots developing so unexpectedly, and therefore this patient was likely going to be on warfarin therapy for the rest of her life. As I was counseling this patient on proper use of warfarin, its side effects, drug interactions, etc., she happened to pour herself some liquid from a jar. I questioned her on the contents of her cup as it did not appear to be water. This is when the patient revealed that she was drinking green tea and had completely stopped drinking plain water. She only drank green tea. She further revealed she drank about three to four full jars of green tea every day. Apparently, her family was also bringing it for her from home while she was hospitalized. Aha moment! Our jaws dropped as the root cause of her clots was finally revealed. We immediately paged all of her doctors to get her the appropriate treatment, and it turned out she would not need to be on warfarin for the rest of her life. Through further conversations, she revealed that no one had asked her about any dietary changes and that she felt since green tea was natural, she did not think it was important to tell anyone. This patient was lucky—very lucky. Imagine she left the hospital on green tea and warfarin, but someday decided to stop drinking green tea. She would have likely suffered an internal bleed and possibly died from massive internal hemorrhage. I definitely learned an important lesson that day—there is always a reason for everything. It is up to us to figure out what that is.
What is the best piece of advice you have received in your career?
There is no such thing as failure in life. Every situation either brings us closer to success or gives us important lessons. My functional medicine business coach and mentor said this, and it really hit home. I do everything with heart, so when something didn't work out, it was very difficult for me to face those failures. Once I understood this advice, I no longer saw these situations as failures. I now look for the lesson and focus my energy on understanding the concerns and moving forward.
Allen Pharmacy & Wellness
945 W. Stacy Rd, Ste 110 Allen, TX 75013. DrDeepaPattani.com
Read Dr. Pattani's FULL INTERVIEW on our Facebook Page, Allen City Lifestyle.