Evertide Pelvic Health founder Katrina Sudduth turns personal experience into a Poulsbo practice focused on specialized care for women at every stage of life.
For Katrina Sudduth, pelvic floor physical therapy was once something she needed herself. Now, it’s the focus of the new Poulsbo practice she built after seeing firsthand how specialized care could change a woman’s experience of pregnancy and recovery.
After the birth of her first child, Sudduth experienced postpartum issues and tearing. When she sought pelvic floor physical therapy, she saw a difference in her own recovery. By the time she was pregnant with her second child, she was working in pelvic health and decided to continue treatment throughout her pregnancy.
The results reinforced what she was learning professionally. Her first birth had involved tearing and a difficult recovery. With her second, she delivered a 9-pound, 3-ounce baby after 12 minutes of pushing — without tearing.
“I got to see firsthand the power of pelvic floor health,” she said. “My recovery was so much better the second time around, which is almost more important when you have another kiddo to take care of too.”
That experience helped shape Sudduth’s approach to women’s health — and eventually gave her the confidence to leave the traditional health care setting and open Evertide Pelvic Health, an independent practice focused on women’s pelvic health across the lifespan.
For Sudduth, the decision was about more than starting a business. She saw an opportunity to provide specialized care in a field where she believes there is a significant shortage of providers, while creating the kind of practice she wanted women in her community to have access to.
A New Direction
Sudduth didn’t begin her physical therapy career in women’s health. Her original interest was neuro rehabilitation, and she spent years working with patients recovering from brain and spinal cord injuries at a specialty hospital in Colorado.
“I actually wanted to work in neuro, and I ended up working in neuro for seven years,” she said. “I worked in brain injury and spinal cord injury at a specialty hospital in Colorado. I loved that work. It was really impactful, and the community was awesome.”
After moving to Western Washington, however, continuing that work would have meant a long commute. Her own experiences with pelvic health, combined with her growing interest in women’s health, gave her another option.
“Because of my experience in women’s health, I was already really interested in it,” she said. “So that was kind of a natural jump for me. I decided to just dive in, see if I liked it — and then I fell in love with it.”
Opening a business wasn’t originally part of the plan.
Once she and her family put down roots in the area, Sudduth began thinking about how she could build something of her own while contributing to her community. The idea became increasingly difficult to ignore.
“Once the idea is there, it’s hard to push it down,” she said. “The more ideas I got, the more it was like, ‘Okay, I have to just do it,’ because I love that creative control.”
That control is an important part of what she hopes to build at Evertide. She wants the practice to be more than a place where women receive treatment.
“I wanted to create my own community that’s not only women who want to stay active throughout all seasons of their life, but who also want to give back to the community and meet other women,” she said. “That’s my big goal with having my own practice and having control over all of that.”
Addressing a Gap in Care
Sudduth sees Evertide as addressing a significant shortage in women’s health care, particularly when it comes to pelvic health.
“Obviously the gap in women’s healthcare and pelvic health is huge,” she said. “There’s not enough of us.”
The problem, she said, isn’t simply the number of pelvic health providers. Pelvic floor problems can also be overlooked because symptoms don’t always appear to originate in the pelvic region.
“Maybe it’s not mentioned by another healthcare provider,” she said. “Someone’s not really thinking, ‘Oh, this might be a pelvic floor dysfunction,’ because maybe the symptoms aren’t in the pelvic floor. They’re in the back or there’s nerve pain down the legs, and no one’s tying it all together.”
Sudduth also sees a need for greater coordination among the providers treating women.
“There is a huge gap in collaboration over women’s health,” she said. “Maybe there’s a PCP, a rheumatologist, a gyn and a PT on board, but no one’s collaborating on a holistic plan of care for the client. They get kind of tossed around, and maybe it takes two years for them to finally see a pelvic floor PT and that’s what fixes the thing they could have just gone to in the first place.”
Running her own practice gives Sudduth more control over how she approaches treatment and how much time she can spend with patients.
“It’s another reason why I have my own practice,” she said. “I get to choose who I treat, how I treat, how long I treat people for. I’m not bound by all these other rules, and I can make sure they’re getting the best care they can get.”
More Than Kegels
One of Sudduth’s goals is to help women better understand what pelvic health actually encompasses.
For many people, pelvic floor therapy is synonymous with Kegels and strengthening exercises. Sudduth says that’s only part of the picture — and sometimes strengthening isn’t what a patient needs at all.
“There’s pelvic health therapy, and then there’s pelvic health therapy,” she said. “It’s not just doing Kegels or exercises and strengthening your glutes and your core. We have to internally treat the tissues, just like we would anywhere else in the body.”
In a lot of cases, the problem is excessive tension rather than weakness.
“A lot of the time it’s a too-much-tension issue, and we need to work on relaxing,” she said. “It’s not actually a weakness issue, which blows people’s minds when they hear that.”
Sudduth recommends that women experiencing symptoms receive a thorough evaluation before deciding what treatment they need.
“I always tell people who are interested in pelvic health, just get an evaluation with someone who will do an internal assessment,” she said. “You don’t know which way you land until you get the assessment. You could be doing something that’s detrimental and making your issues worse.”
Her patients range from women in their early 20s to those in their 70s and 80s. They may be preparing for a first pregnancy, recovering from childbirth or dealing with changes associated with perimenopause and postmenopause.
She treats conditions including endometriosis and adenomyosis-related symptoms, back and SI joint pain, sciatica and other nerve pain, abdominal scar tissue, constipation, bladder problems, pain with intercourse and pregnancy- and postpartum-related concerns.
She also works with other specialists, including surgeons at Pacific Endometriosis Center in Gig Harbor.
Hormonal changes are another area where Sudduth sees an important role for pelvic health care.
“With hormone changes, the tissues change too,” she said. “We can’t just rely on hormone therapy; we also have to change the tissues back to how they should be.”
Preparing for Pregnancy and Beyond
Pregnancy care is a particular focus for Sudduth. She typically begins seeing pregnant patients around 12 weeks and continues through delivery when there are no high-risk complications.
Her work can include internal treatment, soft-tissue work and preparation for pushing in positions tailored to each patient’s birth plan and delivery setting.
“I tell them what their body’s doing and which position they’re pushing their best in,” she said. “I’ve been told by many first-time moms it’s the most valuable information they received in pelvic floor therapy, because they feel really empowered in the delivery room.”
The goal is preparation rather than a guarantee of a particular birth outcome.
“My big goal with pregnancy is to have a non-traumatic birth,” she said. “We can’t control everything, baby doesn’t always cooperate, but we prepare for all scenarios. The less a mom has to focus on her own recovery postpartum, the more she can focus on her baby and her family.”
Although Evertide has only recently opened, Sudduth said demand has already been “huge.”
“We do need more healthcare providers in all areas, but especially in pelvic health,” she said. “OB/GYNs are short in this area too. Everything feels short.”
Building a Different Kind of Practice
Sudduth also wants Evertide to provide something that can be difficult to find in a traditional medical setting: a place where women feel comfortable discussing subjects that can be embarrassing or difficult to talk about.
“I want it to be a place where women come to talk about uncomfortable things,” she said. “And then they go back out and spread the good word and tell other people about it.”
For now, Sudduth is running Evertide largely on her own. She is the clinician as well as the scheduler, marketer and office manager.
“I don’t have any admin support,” she said. “I like wearing all the hats, but finding the time to wear all the hats is really hard. The texts, the phone calls, the emails, the marketing — it’s a learning curve.”
Finding an affordable space was another challenge.
“Finding a space was actually really hard,” she said. “There’s just not a lot that’s affordable for small clinics and still a good space.”
Despite those challenges, Sudduth says building the practice has been more rewarding than she expected.
“It’s been even more fun than I thought it would be,” she said. “There’s something about coming to work every day knowing you’re building something for your clients and for yourself and your family, rather than just working for a paycheck.”
She expects there will be difficult periods as the business grows, but the early experience has reinforced her decision to take the leap into entrepreneurship.
“I think when you hear people talk about business, you assume it’s all hard and there are so many ups and downs,” she said. “I’m sure there are downs coming, but right now it feels like no one really warned me, ‘Oh, this is going to feel really fun and really good and bring you even more energy.’ It gets me up more in the morning to do my day.”
Sudduth hopes Evertide will grow enough to bring additional providers onto the team while remaining focused on the Kitsap community.
“I want it to grow — to fill this whole space, to have a few more team members so we can help more people and get them in quicker,” she said. “I want it to be a solid business that’s well known in the community.”
For Sudduth, success ultimately comes down to the difference Evertide makes for the women who walk through its doors — and the conversations they take with them when they leave.
“I want people to feel like, ‘Hey, I’m going to send someone to Evertide Pelvic Health. If anything, they’re going to get some education just talking to Katrina or whoever’s on the team,’” she said. “If I can make that kind of impact on my community, that’s what success looks like.”
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