My Mission
My goal is offer comprehensive, affordable, and quality care that you can depend on time and time again, to create a solid doctor-patient relationship that lasts for years, and to always do what’s best for the people I serve.
What I Do and Why
How I treat patients and run a practice are based on some fundamental beliefs of mine.
- Health-care should be affordable and of good quality.
- When a doctor recommends something, the patient should never wonder if that recommendation is in their own best interest or that of the doctor’s bottom line.
- Making someone feel better is good. Teaching them how they can keep themselves that way is better
These tenets of how I operate can be summed up like this: I want to be the kind of doctor you’d send your grandmother to. Being in the industry has given me some keen insights into how healthcare is managed. And those insights usually make me pretty angry. It spans across all the healthcare fields. Accountants running hospitals, rehab clinics getting paid on the amount of people they push through, doctors getting kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies, surgeons getting paid more for this “preferred procedure” over that, dentists filling cavities that don’t need to be filled, and chiropractors wanting to pre-pay for long-term expensive treatment plans. It isn’t right. That’s not how I would want myself or my family to be treated. And that’s not how I’ll treat you and yours.
My Story
Entering the healthcare industry was never something I had to decide on. There were never any hours of shadowing different people at different jobs in middle school, no aptitude tests or talks with high school career counselors. Healthcare was the only option. The earliest childhood toy I can remember what a play-doctor kit. I suppose it was just ingrained. The only thing I had to choose was which character did I want to play? I grew up in southern Louisiana. An economy majorly supported by the offshore oil industry. Men like my dad would spend half the month on a rig working hard to support their families. The pay was good but the risks were high. Bad weather and the hard manual labor made the risk of injury pretty good. Men got hurt on the rigs all the time. Sometimes they’d bounce back. Sometimes they’d spend their lives on pain killers and disability. These fates were nothing more than an obscure statistic – until my dad was injured on a boat hundreds of miles off shore. It was your typical lift and twist injury that herniated several lumbar discs. The industrial health complex quickly swept him into a back surgery. No thought of any alternatives or conservative care like chiropractic. The back surgery didn’t work. Neither did the next one or the one after that. He developed failed back syndrome and a man who loved to hunt, fish, run, weight train, and travel had to come to terms with his new life filled with pain and disability. His family had to come to terms with that too. It could have been worse still. Many of my friend’s fathers became hooked on painkillers and ruining their lives. Some even decided that a life like that wasn’t worth living. I knew there had to be a better way. A better way to handle injury without surgery. A better way to handle pain without drugs. The problem was there. And that’s when I chose the answer. That’s when I chose to become a Chiropractor. Now in practice, I get the opportunity every day to fix people up and get them back to the lives they and their families want to live.
About Chiropractic
Chiropractic Medicine focuses on offering conservative approaches to common conditions and ailments before the application of drugs and surgery. Doctors of Chiropractic are health industry’s best choice for treating conditions of the bone, joints, muscles, and nerves (especially as they relate to back pain, neck pain, and whiplash) and for the promotion of health and wellness. Chiropractors are the logical choice before trying more invasive treatments such as prescription drugs or surgery – especially for conditions that respond very well to a single trial of conservative care. The field of chiropractic medicine is diverse. Just like with other healthcare professionals, you have general practitioners, practitioners who only treat certain conditions, and specialists. Those who become specialists often receive a diplomate after several hundred hours of a post-doctoral program in fields such as radiology, nutrition, pediatrics, internal diagnosis and management, rehab, and ergonomics – just to name a few. The profession and its members have grown considerably from the days of just treating the spine. No two chiropractors practice exactly alike. Though most chiropractors base their care on evidence based guidelines and protocols, there is a large range of how they manage patients and how they approach various conditions. Many healthcare practitioners of different disciplines will practice the same “cook-book” or “cookie cutter” approach to healthcare (and there aren’t too many cookbooks that they are allowed to choose from) which is often why a person can see many different clinicians and still get the same result (or lack of). This isn’t the case with chiropractic physicians. No two bodies are exactly the same and no two approaches to healing those bodies should be the same either. Doctors of Chiropractic are primary care physicians, meaning that they are portal of entry providers and you can see them without a referral. The Doctor of Chiropractic degree (D.C.) is a first professional degree just like the Doctor of Medicine (MD), Osteopathy (DO), Dentistry (D.M.D.), and Optometry (O.D.) degrees. The D.C. degree is attained after graduating a four year 4,820 hour program and four national board exams. Most students enter a chiropractic program already having a B.S. and though a B.S. is not required to enter the program, it is required to practice in most states. Chiropractic Physicians are licensed in all states though the scope of practice varies from state to state. For example, in Washington, Chiropractors can only perform adjustments on the spine and extremities and use a few physiotherapies such as ultrasound. In Oregon, the scope is broad and includes minor surgery, proctology, obstetrics/gynecology, and the management diagnosis/management of internal diseases. In New Mexico, chiropractors can write prescriptions for various pain killers and muscle relaxants. When choosing a chiropractor, it is important to find one that you can get along with. A good doctor-patient relationship is, in my opinion, fundamental to the healing process and must be based on trust. It’s also important to find a practitioner that takes time to answer all of your questions and explains things in a clear and understandable manner.
