The most exciting part about joining CNSA is the strong sense of community.  It’s not just about the immediate camaraderie I felt at the clinic, but also the broader community of Colorado Springs that I look forward to serving and raising my family in.

Patient care looks different for each patient but I enter every encounter with the same question – “what can I do to improve this person’s life?”  This requires a tailored approach to meet each patient’s unique needs and help them live the life they want to live.

When I was first applying to medical school, I never thought I’d become a neurologist.  My father developed signs of early-onset Alzheimer’s when I was in high school and died when I was applying to medical school.  He was diagnosed correctly, but there was no treatment.  Based on that experience, I had fallen for the outdated notion that neurology was a specialty that could “diagnose everything, treat nothing.”

Over time, I started to realize the value of a diagnosis, even if it wasn’t curable.  Putting a name to the condition my father was suffering from helped me to better understand what he was experiencing, how to help him, and how to best plan for the future as a family.  Even when there isn’t a cure, there are always things that can be done to improve the quality of life for the patient or their caretaker.  That’s my primary goal with each encounter. 

In the end, people with neurologic conditions were the patient population I wanted to help the most, which is what kept drawing me back to the field.  Despite what I said above, I love being able to treat disorders, so I was encouraged to find out that most neurologic conditions have some form of treatment.  Fast forward to today, and we already have medications that have been shown to slow down Alzheimer’ disease progression, and I’m optimistic that will continue to improve throughout my career.

For the reasons I discussed in the previous question, people with neurologic conditions are the patient population that I have the strongest connection to and get the most fulfillment from serving.  Early on, the hardest part of neurology was making a diagnosis that I couldn’t effectively treat.  During one of my first neurology rotations in medical school at an underserved hospital, I was exposed to several autoimmune conditions including multiple sclerosis, neuromyelitis optica, and autoimmune encephalitis.  It was incredible to see how quickly many of these patients improved by the time they were being discharged from the hospital.  These were some of the most rewarding experiences of my medical training.  It’s impressive how far treatment of multiple sclerosis has come in the past decade, and I’m excited to learn about new advances in the field seemingly every day.  This is what led me to do a fellowship at Johns Hopkins in neuroimmunology.

In clinic, I love getting to holistically care for the whole person.  Choosing the optimal disease modifying therapy is crucial, but it’s also important to discuss healthy lifestyle and evaluate for mood, fatigue, memory, urinary function, and many other symptoms that can affect quality of life.  I get to utilize all my medical training in these encounters, some of which even goes beyond neurology.