Today we’d like to introduce you to Daniela Ezratty.
Hi Daniela, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’ve always loved the idea of service and taking care of people, and I’ve felt a real calling to help people in need. That calling led me to a career in nursing. I started as a young intensive care unit registered nurse taking care of patients after open heart surgery at Emory Saint Joseph’s Hospital and Piedmont Hospital. I really enjoyed that job because the patients were often extremely sick, but usually improved rather quickly and went on to rejoin their families and live very meaningful, productive lives. After about nine years of intensive care unit nursing, I wanted to elevate my education and degree to help people on an even higher level. I decided to attend Emory University’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and earn a master’s degree as an Acute Care Nurse Practitioner. For the past 15 years, I’ve worked in several roles as an acute care NP, most of the past ten years working in one of the highest acuity ICUs in the Emory University healthcare system and the southeast.
In 2017, my whole life changed abruptly. I became a patient myself overnight. After returning from a great vacation with my husband, I found a tumor on my upper back after getting out of the shower. My whole life flashed in front of my eyes. Within five days of finding that tumor, I was on the operating table as a patient. At the time, the odds were not so great and it was highly possible that I had a rare and highly lethal form of cancer, sarcoma. I had to wait two weeks for the final pathology, and in those two weeks, my life underwent a change. I told myself that if I survived this, I would appreciate every day and every thing in life, and I would follow my dreams and shoot for the stars. I was burned out of the ICU work, and I often felt like I wasn’t really able to help the patients and families as much anymore. I just had very little left to give them. It was a bit of a dark time for me.
After the two weeks, I got my diagnosis. It was a mixed blessing— cancer, and a rare and serious one at that, prone to spread locally and aggressively in many patients and causing great harm. But it wasn’t sarcoma, the death sentence that I was all but expecting. I was so lucky to be under the care of a talented and caring female surgical oncologist, Dr. Monica Rizzo of Emory University’s Department of Surgery. Dr. Rizzo began what became my gradual move to mostly female physicians and surgeons (ask me why when you talk to me!). She felt pretty confident that she was able to get all of it, but the “margins” (medical-speak for how close the pathologist calls the edge of the tumor from the healthy tissue removed) were very, very close on one side. So it required a second opinion at NYC Memorial Sloan Kettering and very close monitoring with an MRI and exams by my Atlanta surgeon and oncologist every six months, a cycle that became tiresome and worrying. That worry stayed in the back of my mind for a long, long time, but above all, I realized that I had been spared what so many people are not— chemo and radiation. I knew then that I needed to make good on the promise that I made to myself months earlier.
Determined to start working to keep people out of the ICU in the first place, I decided to fully commit to a pursuit of my life-long passions— health, nutrition, wellness, trying to feel and look my best, and really living. I enrolled in the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in NYC and got a degree in nutrition. I also got a post-masters certificate from Cornell University in plant-based nutrition and plant-based medicine under the renowned Dr. T. Colin Campbell. I then trained with Dr. Craig Koniver in Charleston, SC. He’s one of the world’s leading authorities on performance and longevity medicine and treats dozens of Fortin’s 100 CEOs, Hollywood A-listers, and world-class pro athletes. Having trained under Dr. Coniver, I’m able to offer all of his results-driven protocols to my own patients!
Lastly, I pursued advanced training in medical aesthetics and have trained with some of the most well-known names worldwide in facial aesthetics, becoming an expert in the use of Botox, other neuromodulators, and dermal fillers and their reversal agents. Most importantly, I learned to train my eye for full-face aesthetic balancing, something I think is often ignored the same way it’s easy to ignore the beautiful forest by over-focus on one tree. I’m passionate about my skin and always have been (ask my husband and kids, who I constantly remind to use and reapply the sunscreen!). I want others to become passionate about their skin health too, so I also offer skincare advice, as well as medical treatments like micro-needling with stem-cell derived growth factors and PRP using the industry-leading PRP machine that yields the highest concentration of platelets and growth factors. Like many women, I personally struggled with hair loss. It’s such an emotional experience for a woman and it took quite a while to discover the multiple causes of my hair loss. My personal experience with female hair loss motivated me to offer medical evaluation and treatment focusing primarily on female hair loss, as well as hair and scalp PRP and growth factor injections.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I found aesthetics and wellness to be especially shady industries in many places, often driven by money and not driven by what is best or right for the patient, my “true north”. That is why I opened my own business. I put the patient over everything, and certainly over profit!
We’ve been impressed with Ezratty Integrative Aesthetics LLC, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
It’s actually very simple— Medical aesthetics and wellness backed by science and delivered with integrity and safety. And personally delivered!
We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
It’s such a huge jump to go out on your own, and to try to do it differently, better than what everyone else does. And it’s risky to have a core value that puts the patient before profit. I encourage other ladies to do what I’m doing and I talk to and share my experiences all the time. One of my mottos is “Community over competition.”
We’ll see how my philosophy and approach resonate with my patients and with potential patients from Metro Atlanta and beyond. I have a feeling that they think a lot like me and place their values the same way!
Contact Info:
- Email: Daniela@EIAesthetics.com
- Website: EIAesthetics.com
- Insta: @danielaezrattyaesthetics
- Phone: (404) 695-0103
