"An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure" - Benjamin Franklin

With a wide variety of medical care and information available to you, we wanted to share with you our approach to medical care and how it relates to your health.

With most serious illnesses, whether it is heart disease, cancer, or diabetes, two things are most critical. The first is prevention, and the second is early detection. These and many other conditions are influenced by your family history, your personal history, and your lifestyle.

The first step toward prevention involves recognizing and accessing your risk factors. For instance, is your risk of developing diabetes increased because your mother had diabetes? Once the risk factors have been assessed, then we can begin a program of prevention, designed to reduce those risks.

Early detection is the other critical factor. Heart disease is a great example. If we can recognize the early stages of heart disease, then we now have a wide range of treatments and medications which can significantly reduce or eliminate the risk of a heart attack. But if heart disease goes undetected for year after year, then by the time it's discovered, it may simply be too late.

A thorough annual physical examination and consultation is a vital part of both prevention and early detection. But your choice of doctor is equally as important. Having a primary care physician, one doctor who is most familiar with you, your history, and your health, gives you and your doctor a better opportunity to recognize problems early on. Your primary care doctor can then recommend and coordinate with specialists as needed.

As a family physician, we often see several members of the same family, perhaps spanning two or three generations. This allows us the added benefit of being able to take into account a more thorough knowledge of your family and social history.

As we see patients over the span of several years, we are able to develop trends, whether in physical characteristics or laboratory results, which then help us recognize when things are abnormal for you. So when we see patients for seemingly minor problems, like a cold, the flu, or an infection which just doesn't want to go away, it helps us to assess your overall health picture and to recognize when what appears at first to be a minor problem is perhaps an early warning sign of something more serious.

In medical terms, we call this "continuity of care". We think it's better if you have a great relationship with one primary care doctor, than having ten different relationships with a variety of doctors and clinics, none of whom are looking at the overall picture of your health.

We think it makes sense. That's why we do what we do.