National Health Service Corps

I was really fortunate.

A couple weeks ago, I was on Capitol Hill talking about preserving the National Health Service Corps.

And for those who may not know what that program is, we all know if you want to be a doctor, you're going to be about half a million dollars in debt.

And if you couple that with, as of today, in our U.S. population, we don't have enough primary care physicians.

There's a shortage today.

The shortage will be there tomorrow, and it'll be there decades from now.

So what the National Health Service Corps program does is it allows primary care physicians to be placed in rural areas to practice that not only increases access in those areas but by serving for four years they got their loans forgiven what a win-win situation it's always been so cruel to me that in order to be a doctor i have to now swallow half a million dollars of loan debt um or pray that I am, you know, the inheritance of a wealthy family to be able to afford such an expensive education.

And so these programs exist, but if we don't talk about them, we don't talk about the impact, we don't talk about how it's beneficial to both clinicians, the hospitals for being able to access care, the patients who are receiving care, then programs like that truly are at risk of being defunded.

And in regards to Dr. Thompson, she is currently a PGY-3 in family medicine at UPMC Altoona in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

She was awarded the National Health Service Corps Scholarship while completing medical school at Lincoln Memorial University, Dubuque College of Osteopathic Medicine.

And she lived in a rural town in Appalachia and has a passion for rural health care disparities and plans to offer a broad spectrum of care to her patients while balancing life with her husband and three young children.

So can we get another round of applause for Dr. Thompson, please? Beautiful.

And.

One other point I just wanted to add to that was, it's completely unrelated, well, a little bit, is just knowing that there are resources and financial assistance for this type of work if you're truly interested in it.

So we both kind of have money that we're getting from the National Health Service Corps.

to work with this underserved population.

And as I started to get more and more into understanding, 'cause I was solo in practice in southeast Georgia.

I was a National Health Service Corps scholar, so really mission driven, and, you know, had to be economical, and always tried to understand what's the root cause, and what's going on here? Why are they having these symptoms? You know, why isn't like...

You know.

W- So as I did, and I started to get into functional medicine, nutrition, and understanding nutritional detox and bioidentical hormone balancing, you know, my patients got better.