Primary Care
There are many benefits to having a primary care doctor managing your overall health and wellness. We choose to focus on three key points when caring for our patients.
+ Holistic Care
This doesn’t mean we will only use natural remedies – it is exactly how it sounds. It means we will see you as a whole person and treat you as a whole person.
Urgent cares and specialists get very narrowly focused on the illness you’re facing right in that moment, but as your primary care doctor it is our job to figure out how that illness you’re dealing with right now fits into the great scope of your life as a whole person. We will always ask questions of you and ourselves, like:
- Do you have any other illnesses?
- What is your overall health status?
- Are there any other medications you’re taking?
- Will what you need to take to improve this symptom impact any of those medications?
- What is your home/family life is like?
- How is your mental health impacting your daily life?
- Where are your greatest risks for long term complications?
+ Preventive Care
Benjamin Franklin once said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” And he was right! It’s easier and more affordable to prevent an illness than it is to treat one. Your doctor will often take your annual well visit to make recommendations for lifestyle changes to reduce your risks for chronic illness down the road. We usually start by improving diet, increasing exercise, quitting smoking, reducing alcohol intake, improving sleep, and evaluating your emotional wellbeing. Just taking this step and seeing your doctor for a well-check can improve your quality of life and quantity of years lived.
During your well visit, you will probably be asked to take some actions for cancer screenings. It’s important to catch diseases like cancer early and treat it before it becomes an even bigger problem. We choose to focus on:
- Cervical Cancer – 1 in 125 women will be diagnosed with cervical cancer. We can detect it early and remove the pre-cancerous cells if they are detected during your routine pap smear.
- Breast Cancer – 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer. Annual breast exams by your primary care doctor coupled with regular mammograms as recommended will help to catch the signs and symptoms early on, significantly improving your prognosis.
- Colon cancer – 1 in 20 people will be diagnosed with colon cancer. The earlier it is caught, the better the outcome will be. Often, we can even skip the full colonoscopy and opt for an at-home Cologuard test. Ask your doctor for more info on what is best for you!
Cancer screenings are not perfect and not all types of cancers can be screened for, but it’s important to have a primary care provider that understands what risks you face and that makes individual decisions on YOUR health and where YOUR risks are.
+ Affordable & Accessible
We do everything we can to keep healthcare costs low for our patients. We do this by increasing accessibility and helping with decision making.
We know who the quality specialists are – we even team up with some of our own! We know the ones close to your home, easily accessible, and even accept your insurance. Specialists can sometimes recommend multiple options for treatment – some of them might even be complicated, high risk procedures. You won’t always know what your best options are, but we can help you choose based on everything going on in your current health state. Ask us! We’re here to help guide you.
We know how to decrease hospitalizations and we know how to save you money! We have a 24-hour triage line that is available by calling your primary care office at any given time of day. We have a doctor on call 24/7 that will advise if you need to be seen immediately in the emergency room, quickly at an urgent care, or if you can wait until the morning to come in for a regular office visit. This small step can save you thousands of dollars – so CALL ME FIRST! Our doctors are here to help you.