1.
What is your essential
question? What is the best answer to your question and why?
My essential
question is how can an anesthesiologist best treat chronic pain? My best answer
is referring patients to physical therapy. Although this isn’t a direct treatment
from an anesthesiologist, it is a part of the anesthesiologists’ treatment
plan.
2.
What process did you take
to arrive at this answer?
After shadowing
my mentor and seeing how he deals with patients who come in with various
conditions whether it be arthritis, fibromyalgia, chronic back pain, etc. I
concluded that although medication and minor invasive procedures are effective
in treating and reducing patient pain, physical therapy yields the most benefit
for the patients’ health long-term.
3.
What problems did you
face? How did you resolve them?
The biggest
problem I faced was finding mentorship. I knew that mentorship would be the
most important factor in helping me answer my essential question so it was
imperative that I find it. I overcame the challenge of not having mentorship by
searching fervently and diligently for one. I ended up changing my essential
question a bit to help me find a suitable mentor that could help me answer it.
4.
What are the two most
significant sources you used to answer your essential question and why?
My mentor Dr.
John Dimowo and an article called Physical Therapy for Chronic Pain by spine
universe. My mentor really took me under his wing and told/showed me everything
I needed to know in order to help me answer my essential question. For example,
he taught me about different medications that he prescribed to patients and
even showed me how he performed certain procedures in order to treat their
pain. One time he was telling me about a common local anesthetic called lidocaine,
it’s other name is xylocaine (pronounced like zy-loh-cane), which happens to
sound very similar to my name and so he remembers my name because of that. The
article “Physical Therapy for Chronic Pain” helped my with my best answer because it taught me all of the
common physical therapy treatments patients may go through to treat their pain.
For example, it told me about massage therapy, electrotherapy, etc.
5. What is your product
and why?
My product is a
character building trait that I have picked up through this whole experience which
is improving in patient care. What I mean by this is, through volunteering in
the ER at San Dimas community hospital and being mentored by Dr. Dimowo I have
learned what it means to serve patients. Serving patients goes beyond providing
them healthcare. It means being genuinely compassionate and concerned for their
well being. For example, any doctor can check up on a patient for their health
conditions and prescribe treatment, but it takes an excellent doctor to check
up on everything about the patient including how they are doing besides their
health condition. I learned this from Dr. Dimowo. I noticed that whenever he
has a patient that he sees frequently, he will ask them how their family is
doing or how their job is or what they’ve been up to. He really follows up with
them on not only their condition, but on the patients themselves.
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