Courtenay Chatman: Inside the Life of an OB-GYN Who Built Her Own Practice

If you’ve come across the name Courtenay Chatman online, chances are you found it while looking into actor Michael Jai White. For years, Courtenay Chatman’s name has circulated alongside his in entertainment archives, red-carpet photo galleries, and celebrity biography roundups. But reducing Courtenay Chatman to a footnote in someone else’s Hollywood story misses most of what actually defines her life: more than two decades in medicine, a specialized surgical practice she built from the ground up, a business partnership with her husband, and a career trajectory that has very little to do with red carpets at all.

This post brings together what’s known about Courtenay Chatman, her education, her medical career, her personal life, and the practice she runs today.

Courtenay Chatman’s Early Life and Education

Courtenay Chatman was born in Los Angeles, California, in the late 1970s. She attended San Juan High School before moving on to undergraduate study, where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in biological sciences in the mid-1990s. From there, Courtenay Chatman pursued a medical degree through Drexel University College of Medicine (previously affiliated with MCP Hahnemann University School of Medicine in Philadelphia), completing her M.D. in the early 2000s.

What stands out about this stretch of Courtenay Chatman’s life is how conventional and demanding it was. Medical school is a long, narrow road, years of coursework, exams, and clinical rotations before a graduate even qualifies to apply for residency. That she went on to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology, one of the more physically and emotionally intensive fields in medicine, says something about the kind of career Courtenay Chatman was aiming for well before anyone outside her own circle knew her name.

Courtenay Chatman’s Medical Training and Early Career

After finishing medical school, Courtenay Chatman’s career followed the standard path for a newly minted OB-GYN: internship, residency, and then years of practice.

Courtenay Chatman worked as an OB-GYN intern with the UCLA Health System starting around 2001, then moved into a multi-year residency at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, one of the major teaching hospitals in the Los Angeles area and a well-regarded training ground for physicians in high-acuity specialties. Residency in OB-GYN is notoriously demanding, with long shifts, unpredictable hours, and the responsibility of managing both routine prenatal care and genuine emergencies.

From there, Courtenay Chatman spent roughly six years, beginning in 2005, as a practicing OB-GYN with the Southern California Physician Medical Group. This is the kind of role that doesn’t generate headlines but forms the backbone of most physicians’ careers: years of patient visits, deliveries, and the accumulated clinical judgment that only comes from repetition. Over that stretch, Courtenay Chatman is credited with having personally delivered well over a thousand babies, a figure consistent with what a full-time OB-GYN would accumulate over six years of active obstetric practice.

Courtenay Chatman also spent time at Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest integrated healthcare systems in the United States, working as a physician surgeon. Kaiser’s scale means physicians there typically see an especially high volume of patients, which added further depth to her surgical and obstetric experience.

Courtenay Chatman’s Shift Toward Cosmetic and Functional Gynecology

At some point in her career, Courtenay Chatman moved from general obstetric practice into a more specialized niche: cosmetic and functional gynecologic surgery. This is a subfield that has grown substantially over the past fifteen years, as more OB-GYNs have begun offering procedures aimed at addressing both aesthetic concerns and functional issues, things like discomfort, asymmetry, or changes related to childbirth and aging, that traditional general gynecology doesn’t always address.

Today, Courtenay Chatman practices as a cosmetic gynecologist based in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, with her clinical home at the Aesthetic Center of Santa Clarita, located in Valencia, California. The practice focuses heavily on labiaplasty and vaginoplasty procedures, alongside other aesthetic and reconstructive gynecologic services.

Courtenay Chatman is also connected to the Labiaplasty Center of Los Angeles, a practice built specifically around this specialty. The center takes a women-centered approach: an all-female staff, an emphasis on discretion and privacy, and a goal of making an often-taboo category of women’s healthcare feel less clinical and more approachable. Its services include labiaplasty, vaginoplasty, clitoral hood reduction, hymenoplasty, perineoplasty, and revision surgery for patients who’ve had prior procedures elsewhere.

This kind of specialization reflects a broader shift in how some OB-GYNs choose to practice. Rather than staying in general obstetrics, which, for many physicians, means an unpredictable on-call schedule stretching over decades, a growing number are moving into focused surgical niches that allow for more scheduled, elective work while still drawing on the same underlying surgical training. For Courtenay Chatman, that shift coincided with building something that was entirely her own, rather than working within a larger medical group’s structure.

by Dr. Poucher: The Business Courtenay Chatman Built With Her Husband

Beyond her clinical practice, Courtenay Chatman, who now also goes by Courtenay Poucher professionally, co-founded a wellness and cosmetic brand she runs alongside her husband, Dr. Garrett Poucher. The venture is an extension of Courtenay Chatman’s clinical work: a brand oriented around women’s health, wellness, and confidence, built on the same philosophy that runs through her medical practice more broadly.

Running a business jointly with a spouse is its own kind of undertaking, separate from the demands of clinical medicine. It requires a different set of skills: branding, marketing, operations, layered on top of an already demanding surgical practice. Courtenay Chatman and her husband building this together speaks to a partnership that extends well past their household into shared professional territory, something not every couple attempts, let alone sustains.

Courtenay Chatman’s Life Before and After Michael Jai White

It’s worth addressing directly the reason many people search Courtenay Chatman’s name in the first place: her marriage to actor and martial artist Michael Jai White, known for roles including Al Simmons in Spawn and for his extensive background in martial arts and action filmmaking.

Courtenay Chatman and White were married for several years before finalizing their divorce around 2011. They share a daughter. Photos from that period, premieres for films like Never Back Down and Black Dynamite, and the Broadway opening of Fences, capture Courtenay Chatman and White attending events together as a couple, which is largely why her name entered searchable entertainment archives and stock-photo databases in the first place.

What’s notable, looking at her career timeline, is that Courtenay Chatman’s medical training and early practice years overlapped with this period of her life. She wasn’t starting her career after a marriage in the public eye; she was already deep into residency and early practice while that relationship was unfolding. The medical career came first and has continued well past the marriage’s end, which is really the more accurate framing of Courtenay Chatman’s adult life, even if entertainment databases will always index her primarily by association with her ex-husband.

Since the divorce, Courtenay Chatman has remarried. She’s now married to Dr. Garrett Poucher, with whom she shares the byDr. Poucher business. Courtenay Chatman is a mother of three, raising her children in Valencia, California, where her practice is also based.

What Courtenay Chatman’s Career Says About Reinvention

There’s a broader pattern worth pulling out of Courtenay Chatman’s career, one that applies to a lot of physicians even if it’s rarely discussed outside medical circles: the shift from general practice into a specialized, often self-directed niche.

General obstetrics is grueling in a specific way; physicians are essentially on call for nature’s schedule, not their own, for as long as they remain in that kind of role. Deliveries happen when they happen, regardless of the hour. Many OB-GYNs eventually move toward subspecialties, administrative roles, or elective surgical practices in part because that structure isn’t sustainable indefinitely, especially for physicians balancing their own families alongside their patients’ needs.

Courtenay Chatman’s path, from UCLA internship, to Harbor-UCLA residency, to years of general obstetric practice, to a large integrated system like Kaiser, and eventually to founding a specialized, elective surgical practice she controls directly, traces that same arc. It’s a version of career development that prioritizes both deepening clinical expertise and gradually gaining more control over how and when that expertise gets applied. Founding her own center, rather than continuing within a large medical group, also reflects a degree of entrepreneurial ambition that isn’t universal among physicians, many of whom remain within institutional systems for their entire careers.

Courtenay Chatman’s Personal Life Beyond Medicine

Away from the clinic, Courtenay Chatman keeps an active presence on social media under her practice’s branding, where she shares health information, patient education content, and updates related to her services. She also enjoys cooking and gardening, activities she’s described as ways of relaxing outside of a demanding surgical schedule.

Why Courtenay Chatman’s Name Keeps Coming Up 

There’s something a little ironic about how Courtenay Chatman’s public visibility works. The reason most people encounter her name is entertainment-adjacent: old red carpet photos, a past marriage, a shared child with a well-known actor. But the actual substance of Courtenay Chatman’s adult life is almost entirely built around medicine: years of training, a demanding specialty, and eventually a business she and her husband built together.

That gap between how someone becomes searchable and what actually defines their life isn’t unique to Courtenay Chatman, but it’s a useful reminder when reading any “who is this person” style biography. The most interesting parts of Courtenay Chatman’s story aren’t the photos from movie premieres in the late 2000s; they’re the fifteen-plus years of clinical training and practice that happened in parallel, and the specialized practice she’s built since, largely outside the public eye.

Conclusion 

Courtenay Chatman, now practicing as Dr. Courtenay Poucher, is a board-certified OB-GYN with training from UCLA-affiliated programs, roughly two decades of clinical experience, and a specialized cosmetic and functional gynecology practice she runs in the Los Angeles area alongside a wellness brand she co-founded with her husband. Her earlier marriage to actor Michael Jai White is what initially put Courtenay Chatman’s name in searchable entertainment records, but it represents a relatively small slice of a career and life that has, in the years since, been built around medicine, family, and entrepreneurship.

As with many people whose names first surface through a connection to someone more famous, the fuller picture of Courtenay Chatman, her education, training, professional specialization, and the practice she’s built, tends to say a lot more about who she actually is than the archived photos ever could.

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