Flourish

We have big changes happening here at Baptist Health Corbin with a new building expansion that will include our new emergency department and will double our capacity. And with that, we're strengthening our ER team. Our emergency department has grown exponentially with the Merge with Envision. The new group is a team of board certified emergency medicine providers that are excited to care for our community.

Envision brings with them an idea of a new culture, which is something that we would love to instill in our hospital. We would like to invite new providers, new specialties to our hospital. It's bringing new perspectives and new ideas, which is really exciting. Our goal is to provide a seamless transition in our emergency department.

While you may see some new faces, the goal is to maintain a seamless transition.

From the moment you walk through the door at Baptist Health Corbin, our team is here to help guide you through your hospital visit. This time is often overwhelming and sometimes even frightening. And our team, the patient care techs to our nurses, the security, EVS staff, and providers are here to guide you through each step. Patients are at the core of our care in emergency medicine.

That's why I went into medicine is to help care for our patients. So strengthening our team means adding new providers, making our policies procedures the most latest up to date medicine. It's important that we care for our patients in the most up to date way while still maintaining a bit of a close knit community feeling. So it's important that our patients know that we are consistently striving to make our hospital better for our patients.

Low dose radiation therapy for osteoarthritis works very, very well. We all know what osteoarthritis is. We've lived with it our lives. Thirty two million Americans have osteoarthritis and have to deal with it.

I've had problems with my knees and pain in my knees for probably fifteen years. As time went on, naturally they got worse.

In the past, it's all been treated with non steroidal anti inflammatories like aspirin and Motrin and what have you. Invasively, they can do joint injections and surgically they can repair the joint.

It doesn't work for everybody. Low dose radiation therapy however is an alternative. It is a non invasive, toxic treatment that works quite well. The name low dose radiation therapy implies exactly that. We use low doses of radiation. High dose radiation therapy kills cancer cells. Low dose radiation therapy will break the inflammatory cycle which causes the inflammation and swelling and it stimulates the immune modulators which help repair cartilage damage.

I was excited because I've done everything to try to get some relief and as soon as I heard about it, I was ready to go.

Treatments are given with a linear accelerator using very tiny doses of radiation therapy. There's no pain or sensation of the treatment itself. When you're done with the treatment, you get off the table and go.

Probably the hardest part about this treatment was getting on and off of the table, and that got a lot easier the more treatments I had.

Mental Health IOP is an intensive outpatient program. It started at the beginning of December here at Baptist Richmond. It is a program that is a group model. It is for individuals that struggle with their mental health and they are able to come to a group setting here at the hospital.

We use multiple therapeutic modalities in this program that are designed for group therapy and are very beneficial for the patients. Some of those are dialectical behavior therapy, trauma informed therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy. Each of those therapies are designed for group settings and they have been shown to be very beneficial when it comes to mental health treatment. It is beneficial to patients because they are able to be around other individuals who are also struggling with their mental health.

It is a very safe environment and confidential, which oftentimes makes people feel very comfortable. They are also able to talk about their mental health disorders and maybe things that they have experienced in the community with their families. There is some stigma that is related to mental health and when they are in these groups they are able to relate to one another and to really share their stories in an environment that is very safe.

Our hope for outcomes with this program is that individuals will not have to go back into psychiatric hospitalization and are able to live with their families, friends, with their supports, and they will be able to live a healthy, happy life with the skills that they have learned from the program.

As a primary care physician, part of my role is to encourage a healthy lifestyle because we want to add quality to people's years of life in addition to the quantity.

Sometimes that can include helping people with their medications or just kind of walking alongside of them when they're making lifestyle changes, whether it's losing weight or working on their mental health. When we set goals, we want to be SMART. And SMART stands for setting a goal that's specific, and then we want to be attainable and realistic. So setting goals in increments instead of massive goals that are out of reach. And the last thing is that the goal is timely. Having a time frame so that we have a marker that we can go back and say I've reached my goal and you can feel good about that.

There's a lot of things you could consider when planning meals to make them healthier. Just a few things are including a lot of protein. Fiber is also important, keeping your digestive system regulated. And then planning ahead of time can be really helpful.

Exercise is also important for living a healthy lifestyle. Exercise needs for people are generally thirty minutes of moderate activity at least five days a week.

So one thing we want to emphasize is living a healthy lifestyle includes a lot of prevention and not just treatment of diseases. So we want to try to stop these things before they happen if we can.

My ultimate goal in patient care is establishing long term relationships with my patients. I want to meet them where they're at with their health, but I also want to walk along them.

The more we get to know people, the better we can take care of them holistically.

Here at Baptist Health Medical Group Orthopedics and Sports Medicine, we treat a variety of injuries. It can be from broken bones to overuse injuries, sprains, strains, wear and tear, arthritis, kind of a wide array of things on a daily basis. There's lots of injuries that we see that involve athletes that are actively competing at say the high school level and then there's the weekend warrior athlete like myself who still considers himself an athlete but they all still get hurt just the same. The goal is to get them back to that same standard they were at before they got injured.

Some of our more common procedures would be hip and knee replacement, shoulder and knee arthroscopy, carpal tunnel release, cubital tunnel release, and a Linder transposition, trigger finger surgery, basic fracture care, and management of broken bones.

As people age, a lot of times things will kind of wear out a little bit and some of those people are able to manage those things with modifying their activity, maybe taking a little bit of medicine, maybe slowing down a little bit, but some people don't want to slow down. They want to continue doing the stuff that they love to do and sometimes it does require surgery to get them back to that level of expectation and it ultimately comes down to quality of life.

People just aren't willing to give up on some things they want to do, and we want to help to get them back to those things so they can enjoy the rest of their lives.

So I'm from this area, it's really neat to be able to take care of people, sometimes even teachers you had in school, and be able to see the impact you can make on their lives, the ability to affect people's quality of life on a day to day basis and make that improvement to get them back to their activities or improve their quality of life so they can live a better life is truly amazing.

The cardiac MRI is the most accurate way of measuring the pumping function of the heart, both for the left and the right side of the heart, so it's the gold standard.

I had done some initial testing, but then Doctor Bose wanted to have a clearer picture of my heart to see what was really going on.

One of the biggest advantages of MRI is that it does not use any radiation. We can get very accurate imaging, look at the bowels. We are able to look for masses, tumors, blood clots, any complications from a heart attack.

The test is thorough and the information that it provides can be life changing. If your doctor recommends a cardiac MRI, it's because they want the best possible picture of your heart and the best outcome for you. I was incredibly thankful. Being able to receive such advanced care close to home made a huge difference. I didn't have to worry about driving out of state. Everything that I needed was right here in Paducah.

There are no MRI centers in this part of the state. The bigger centers are more than one hundred miles away. It's a tremendous benefit to them because we can provide very accurate diagnosis of the conditions we are testing with cardiac MRI and then our volumes have grown exponentially and continues to grow. So we want to expand this program further which would be quite unique for this region.