Meet Anita Ravi, MD, L’Oréal honoree, family physician and philanthropist
David Mitchell — Anita Ravi, MD, MPH, MSHP, FAAFP, has made trauma-informed care of survivors of gender-based violence, including domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking, her mission for the past decade.
Not only has she treated survivors and trained other clinicians to do so, Ravi started a non-profit organization dedicated to the cause and advocated for women in AMA and AAFP policy-making events. She has written, spoken and, yes, even drawn about trauma-informed care for a wide variety of audiences.
Ravi’s platform recently got even bigger with help from a seemingly unlikely source. The New York family physician recently was named one of 10 Women of Worth by L'Oréal Paris. For 20 years, the global beauty company has supported women-led nonprofits with financial support, mentoring and access to the brand’s substantial platforms, including access to millions of its followers across multiple social media channels.
Ravi spoke with AAFP News recently to share details about her practice and ways that the L'Oréal Paris honor is helping advance her work.
Family physicians ‘learn from every experience’
Ravi said her training in family medicine helped her understand her patients’ unique needs and how to collaborate with various subspecialists. She has attended subspecialty visits and even court dates with patients so she could see their lives up close through a family medicine lens.
“I think the beauty of being a family doctor (is) as you get thrown into different spaces there’s an opportunity to learn from every experience,” she said, “and there's an expectation to do that as well.”
Anita Ravi, MD, MPH, MSHP, FAAFP, was named one of the 2025 Women of Worth by L'Oréal Paris.
Building executive and fundraising skills
In 2015, Ravi piloted a grant-funded clinic for survivors of human trafficking and other forms of abuse, within a community health center. Four years later, when she transitioned the program into a stand-alone charitable organization and medical practice focused on gender-based violence, she had to learn executive and fundraising skills in order to continue her work in a nonprofit setting. Again, her training in family medicine helped.
“In family medicine, you learn to quickly get skills that you don’t have and become agile with it,” said Ravi, who is president and CEO of the PurpLE (Purpose: Listen and Engage) Health Foundation. “There’s a whole other language that I’m having to learn. And then you need to understand how to feel comfortable asking for help. And I think that’s been a big part of my medical journey and my philanthropy-building journey for this nonprofit work.”
Gender-based violence as a new medical field
Ravi, who is a James C. Puffer, MD/American Board of Family Medicine Fellow at the National Academy of Medicine, said primary care of survivors of gender-based violence is a new field of medicine that needs support, training and research.
“I think that there’s a huge opportunity,” she said. “When I think about the secret sauce of PurpLE, I’m like, ‘Well, we’ve figured out a way to be able to help build trust and community with patients who may not otherwise engage in the health care system.’ … There’s a big opportunity to really formalize the information and the data from what we’re learning from patients so that more people can believe it and do it and learn from it.”
Trauma-informed primary care
Ten years in, Ravi said she’s still learning how to treat survivors differently. She said she envisions a health care system that focuses more on patient experience and less on having to “check boxes in order to get reimbursed.” She hopes lessons learned from PurpLE Health can benefit patients beyond her clinic.
“We have an opportunity to really improve health care for all, including you and me, our family members,” she said. “It’s exciting. It’s what keeps me going, because I have a belief that there’s something better waiting for us.”
Networking with Dame Helen Mirren
Ravi said she already has benefitted from networking with L’Oréal’s other Women of Worth honorees. She also was thrilled to get to meet the company’s spokespeople, including Dame Helen Mirren. Coincidentally, Ravi already had been using a Mirren quote about “being a good servant” from “Gosford Park,” the 2001 movie for which Mirren won a Screen Actors Guild Award, during trainings about trauma-informed care.
Mirren autographed Ravi’s copy of the movie when they met.
“I took the ‘Gosford Park’ VHS, and I told her about it and asked if she would sign it, and she did,” Ravi said. “And that means so much to me, again, because it’s authentic to how all these dots connect, and it really meant something to how I approached this work. And so, it’s cool to just let that person know the impact they had.”
AAFP membership opens doors
Ravi was a longtime AAFP blogger and has been a mainstage speaker at multiple Academy events. She was elected the AAFP’s delegate to the AMA Young Physicians Section in 2018, and she later served as chair of the AMA’s Women Physicians Section. In 2022, she served as co-convener of the AAFP’s minority constituency and also served as an alternate delegate and delegate to the Academy’s Congress of Delegates. Her long list of awards and honors include being named the New York AFP’s Family Physician of the Year in 2025.
“The AAFP has gotten me, throughout the last decade, to where I get to be now through mentorship, through advocacy opportunities, through so much,” she said. “To be able to be seen in this way by a specialty that you truly believe in means a lot.”
Helen Mirren signed Ravi's copy of "Gosford Park" and People magazine.