What are the benefits of coordinated care?
If you’ve noticed that you are experiencing both emotional and physical challenges, you might find that getting treatment for both will help you feel much better overall than if you only treat one. This is why I provide coordinated care with your doctors and other health care providers. For example, I can coordinate your care with psychiatrists and psychiatric nurse practitioners who may prescribe medications, as well as surgeons, primary care physicians, family practice doctors and other mental health professionals.
Symptoms can be clues
A collaborative and integrated approach helps us develop a treatment plan that can address all the symptoms you are feeling. Our aim is for both short-term and long-term relief, giving you the knowledge, tools and skills that last a lifetime.
Symptoms and feelings can be important clues that drive where to begin our work. Learning about your physical health issues helps me to help you.
Health psychology specialty
Health psychology practitioners, like myself, use training and experience to help clients understand how the mind-body connection affects their overall health and functioning. I developed my interest in this specialty during graduate school when researching stress, coping, and cardiac health. Since then, I’ve worked with individuals on many other issues including chronic pain and fatigue, weight loss, insomnia, specific health diagnoses and more.
How we talk about our feelings
A health psychology approach can help you get to the bottom of physical symptoms that so often go hand in hand with unresolved emotional pain. As a society, we have been talking about these connections for a long time. Consider how we talk about our emotions and their relationship to our physical bodies:
- I’m broken-hearted.
- My blood is boiling over what happened.
- I’m so nervous I have butterflies in my stomach.
- I’m feeling down in the dumps.
- I nearly jumped out of my skin from fear.
- I’m feeling disconnected and out of it.
- I don’t know what to do – I’m at my wit’s end.
Treating emotional and physical symptoms
Even if physical symptoms cannot be completely resolved, addressing emotions can help and vice versa. For example, when a client has sleep difficulties, they often feel stressed, anxious, or depressed. Conversely, a client with anxiety or depression will often also have at least some difficulties with sleep. When I help someone with their anxiety and depression and give them tips for how to improve sleep, they often feel much better more quickly than if I only treated one or the other. Often, it’s hard to treat the sleep difficulties at all without also dealing with the emotional issues.
Let’s talk
Navigating health care can be complicated, but I aim to make it easier for the adults who seek my help. When we begin working together at our initial visit, I’ll ask a lot of questions about what’s going on in your life and take a complete medical history. Together we can decide how to include your care team. If coordinated care sounds like an approach you want to explore, contact me at 512-627-3583 to set an appointment today.