Hello, and welcome to my informational page for those of you who are healthcare practitioners, or in the process of entering the healthcare field, and would like to observe my clinical work with patients.
Observation shifts tend to look like one day, once a week for 3 months. This is just a rough guideline, and can certainly be adjusted for those who are traveling to observe with me (so perhaps may want to spend a week or so in my office).
There are two forms that all preceptors will fill out their first day in my office. You can find those documents at the bottom of this page.
And before we get any further, I would like to take a few minutes to introduce myself.
You can read all about my bio on this page, medical conditions I focus on on this page, and my strongly held beliefs about how I try to provide great quality healthcare on this page.
But because you are a colleague, or future-colleague, I want to share more than that with you. I believe that understanding my values and beliefs that I bring to my practice are vital aspects in you determining whether you think I would be a good fit for you to observe and learn from.
I won't be the best fit for everyone. I am not trying to be the best fit for everyone (colleagues and prospective patients alike). I have a unique style and approach that works for me, my patients, and the colleagues who value and refer to me.
First up, I'm pretty anti-dogmatic. As much as I'm able.
I don't present treatment options to patients with some (herbs, supplements, or those attributed as being "more natural") being labeled inherently more valuable, somehow morally superior to others (medications, conventional standards of care, etc). I don't think that that is my position as a healthcare provider.
I feel like I say, "I'm not against any particular type of treatment (usually mentioning the pharmaceutical, steroid injection, orthopedic procedure relevant to the patient here), they are all tools and have their place. It is my job to learn from and understand what you need at this point, so that I can help you find the best fit for you" about 20 times a day.
The same goes for diets. I am anti- Diet Culture. Naturopathic Medicine is so much more broad, comprehensive, and powerful than just putting everyone on the same long-term restrictive diet. That's just not personalized medicine. Furthermore, the last thing I ever want to do for my patients is cause them harm, and we know that long-term restrictive diets are a major trigger for disordered eating patterns.
As a child I learned from Girl Scouts to always leave each environment better than I found it. The same holds true of my medical relationships.
When it comes to assessing and providing therapeutic injections, I was trained, and primarily practice, as an, "old-fashioned prolotherapist." That to me means that I focus on in-office exams, their history combined with a thorough physical exam provides the foundation for the rest of their workup and my future recommendations.
I avail myself to ordering labs, imaging, or in-house assessment (such as using a musculoskeletal ultrasound) whenever that will help shed a light on my patient's concerns. But I am not tech-forward. I am hands-on-forward, if that makes sense.
This means that sometimes I find myself in a tenuous position when relating to other colleagues in the regenerative injection therapy realm. If you can't tell from my approach by now, my view is that more is not always better. More interventions, more injections, more higher-tech types of injections. I find that oftentimes it is just not necessary and I still get terrific patient outcomes.
You can read all about my bio on this page, medical conditions I focus on on this page, and my strongly held beliefs about how I try to provide great quality healthcare on this page.
But because you are a colleague, or future-colleague, I want to share more than that with you. I believe that understanding my values and beliefs that I bring to my practice are vital aspects in you determining whether you think I would be a good fit for you to observe and learn from.
I won't be the best fit for everyone. I am not trying to be the best fit for everyone (colleagues and prospective patients alike). I have a unique style and approach that works for me, my patients, and the colleagues who value and refer to me.
First up, I'm pretty anti-dogmatic. As much as I'm able.
I don't present treatment options to patients with some (herbs, supplements, or those attributed as being "more natural") being labeled inherently more valuable, somehow morally superior to others (medications, conventional standards of care, etc). I don't think that that is my position as a healthcare provider.
I feel like I say, "I'm not against any particular type of treatment (usually mentioning the pharmaceutical, steroid injection, orthopedic procedure relevant to the patient here), they are all tools and have their place. It is my job to learn from and understand what you need at this point, so that I can help you find the best fit for you" about 20 times a day.
The same goes for diets. I am anti- Diet Culture. Naturopathic Medicine is so much more broad, comprehensive, and powerful than just putting everyone on the same long-term restrictive diet. That's just not personalized medicine. Furthermore, the last thing I ever want to do for my patients is cause them harm, and we know that long-term restrictive diets are a major trigger for disordered eating patterns.
As a child I learned from Girl Scouts to always leave each environment better than I found it. The same holds true of my medical relationships.
When it comes to assessing and providing therapeutic injections, I was trained, and primarily practice, as an, "old-fashioned prolotherapist." That to me means that I focus on in-office exams, their history combined with a thorough physical exam provides the foundation for the rest of their workup and my future recommendations.
I avail myself to ordering labs, imaging, or in-house assessment (such as using a musculoskeletal ultrasound) whenever that will help shed a light on my patient's concerns. But I am not tech-forward. I am hands-on-forward, if that makes sense.
This means that sometimes I find myself in a tenuous position when relating to other colleagues in the regenerative injection therapy realm. If you can't tell from my approach by now, my view is that more is not always better. More interventions, more injections, more higher-tech types of injections. I find that oftentimes it is just not necessary and I still get terrific patient outcomes.
how about a little rant time
Please do not chose to observe with me if you cannot communicate honestly and with integrity with your patients.
Yes, this sounds pretty controversial, so let me explain.
Many colleagues inject, or want to learn to inject, birth product tissue. Injectible biologic matter that comes from placentas, umbilical cords, etc. That's fine. I don't have a problem with that.
But if you call it stem cell injections*, tell your patients (or infer) that you are injecting neonate stem cells, that's when I have a bone to pick with you.
And if you didn't even know that that is dishonest communication (you didn't even know that you weren't injecting stem cells and that the FDA specifically tells you not to call them that), then I suggest you read up on what the products are, what they contain, what research there is out there on your preferred product before charging your patients thousands of dollars to inject is into them.
Ignorance is not an excuse.
"I'm just doing what my employer tells me to do" is not an excuse.
You are a licensed medical professional (or you will be soon). You are the one with all the medical responsibility.
If you are providing an injection service, it is because you have determined it to be medically necessary, and have obtained informed consent from your patient.
If you work in an employment scenario and your schedule effectively gets filled up by your employer recommending injection services to those patients, you must also agree that those injections are medically necessary. Otherwise, why would you be doing it?
And by informed consent, that also means that your patient understands what is in (and what is not in) the injection they are receiving. Do they understand what it is? Do they understand what it will do?
The FDA prohibits the manufacture and sales of viable birth tissues for injection. So if you (or your employer, who then puts the patient on your schedule) tells the patient that they are getting stem cells, which will then go off to make tons more stem cells in that patient's body... well... that's just straight-up lying.
I commonly burst those bubbles for patients who have gotten "fake stem cell" injections elsewhere, then come to me later on. You better believe that I let them know all this. More than one patient has felt enraged and swindled, as they should. That's not the type of care we want to provide our patients, right?!
Please, feel free to treat your patients as you see fit. Just also communicate honestly about the care you are providing.
So if my rant hasn't completely turned you off to observing with me, please fill out the form below, and I will respond to you when I am able to provide information about an observation schedule.
https://forms.gle/J6dr3e7eWRJXVxXm8
* I am specifically talking about birth cell products here, not autologous injectibles.