About Us - Sydenham Clinic

Founder’s Story

The Structural Failure in Modern Healthcare

Sydenham was founded in 2020 to address a fundamental flaw in modern healthcare: the system rewards transactions, not outcomes. Hospitals optimize for capacity. Insurance optimizes for cost. Care begins after illness appears. Patients are managed by systems-but no one truly centers the patient.

Purpose, Not Permission

Aanchal Bhatia is an entrepreneur by choice and a psychologist by education. She believes modern healthcare has lost the patient at its center. Her purpose is to challenge that reality by confronting broken incentives, fragmented care, and institutional complacency.

This is not a profession-it is a mission. Aanchal is an activist, relentless and unafraid, committed to reshaping healthcare around the patient, not the system.

Founding Team

Raised in the family-owned Uttam Group, Karan Bhatia grew up believing institutions should endure beyond individuals. During his time at Harvard, he became drawn to places built on ideas, rigor, and legacy. As Aanchal’s husband, he shared a vision for Sydenham as an institute-principled, lasting, and intellectually serious

Karan Bhatia

After decades at MD Anderson, Dr. Terry Rice walked away from the certainty of emergency medicine to pursue something harder and more meaningful. She left crisis care behind to help build the Sydenham Method-rooted in prevention, foresight, and clinical integrity-long before longevity medicine had a name.

Dr. Terry Rice

A healthcare entrepreneur who built and operated over 50 imaging centers, Despo witnessed insurance delays and fragmented care firsthand. During her mother’s final illness, those failures became personal. That experience led her to co-found Sydenham;driven by the belief that care must start earlier, move faster, and answer to outcomes, not approvals

Despo Caldwell

Our Mission

To build a new standard for real healthcare—one that patients can finally trust. A global network of physician-led clinics and longevity spaces where care is guided by advocacy, not sales, and health is managed proactively, not reactively.

Build a global network of luxury, physician-led clinics in prime locations across major cities

Create a real community through longevity events, education, and member-led culture

Eliminate upsells and incentives, so medical decisions serve patients, not products

Set the benchmark for what healthcare should be—early, accountable, and human-first

Our Vision

The Future We Are Building

Sydenham is becoming a global health institution where families are cared for across generations, not visits.

How Care Feels

Warm, personal, and deeply accountable-like the trusted family doctor, enhanced by AI and precision medicine.

Healthcare, Not Sickcare

Proactive and preventive care that supports you throughout life, not just when something goes wrong.

Our Inspiration

A Forgotten Foundation

Thomas Sydenham’s Observations shaped medical practice for nearly two centuries. He rejected abstraction in favor of listening, longitudinal observation, and the lived reality of the patient. He believed health could not be understood without the patient’s active role-an idea foundational to medicine, yet largely lost today.

A Modern Rediscovery

Aanchal encountered Sydenham’s work when her son studied it at DeBakey High School for Health Professions. Despite Sydenham’s influence, his philosophy had faded from modern healthcare-replaced by fragmentation, specialization, and distance from the patient.