In short
Dr. Ashish Baweja is a Consultant Rheumatologist and Clinical Immunologist at Medanta – The Medicity, Sector 38, Gurugram. He treats inflammatory arthritis, spondyloarthritis, lupus and other connective tissue diseases, vasculitis, myositis, osteoporosis and osteoarthritis.
When people in Gurugram need a rheumatologist
Rheumatology is one of the smaller specialities in India, and a great deal of rheumatic disease is managed for years as "general body pain", a slipped disc or age before anyone looks for inflammation. The patterns that most often turn out to need a specialist are joint swelling that lasts beyond six weeks, morning stiffness longer than half an hour, back pain that eases with movement and worsens with rest, fingers that change colour in the cold, and unexplained fever or fatigue with raised inflammatory markers.
Where the clinic is
Consultations are held at the Institute of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology, Medanta – The Medicity, Sector 38, Gurugram, Haryana 122001 — on the Gurugram–Sohna road, close to Rajiv Chowk and reachable from the Delhi–Jaipur expressway.
Areas patients travel from
Patients come from across Gurugram — Sector 38 and the surrounding sectors, Golf Course Road, Sohna Road, DLF Phases 1 to 5, Palam Vihar, Sushant Lok and New Gurugram — and from South Delhi, Dwarka, Faridabad, Manesar and Noida. Because most rheumatic conditions need review every few months rather than every week, a slightly longer journey to a specialist centre is usually worth it.
Why a specialist rather than a general physician
Two things separate rheumatology from general medicine here. The first is interpretation: an ANA or RA factor result means very different things depending on the clinical picture, and treating a number rather than a patient is the commonest error in this field. The second is procedures — joint aspiration, nail fold capillaroscopy, salivary gland and muscle biopsy — which turn an uncertain diagnosis into a definite one, and are done in the same place as the consultation.