Marshall Morris: Hello, hello. This is the super tall Marshall Morris and today I am joined by Dr. Patel. Dr. Patel, welcome back to the podcast. How are you doing?
Dr. Patel: Thank You Marshall. Good to be here.
Marshall: Good to hear and we we’re talking a lot about Oklahoma pain and wellness but to really understand the clinic here, we really want to make sure that you can understand maybe the faces behind the practice, okay? And the different providers within Oklahoma pain and wellness and so we’re going take the episode here today and we’re actually going to explain this for all of the listeners out there. Dr. Patel, maybe the best provider to start with is yourself. Why don’t you walk us through maybe your bio here and maybe give you an opportunity to shamelessly plug yourself, okay?
Dr. Patel: Thanks Marshall. Well, it’s always difficult to talk about yourself but when it helps patients I think it makes it a bit easier sure. I grew up in Kenya, in Nairobi which is in East Africa. It’s a big cosmopolitan city. I went to a school based on a medium of the Cambridge University program in England and I was there until I was 17. I basically went to one school most of my life in high school and it was a small classroom size. It had a strong emphasis on mathematics and science and that’s what initially tweak my interest in medicine.
My story is a little unique because I grew up with my childhood best friend and I saw him nearly every day of my life all through medical school as well and we moved from Kenya to undergrad together. Him and I became biology majors and we completed our undergrad at Boston University in biology. I was the class speaker at the end of that year and I graduated with honors and summa cum laude. At that time, both my friend and I went to Boston University together. We completed four years of MD Education at Boston Medical Center and the affiliated hospitals. I took an extra year to try and find what specialty fit my personality the best and in so doing, I spent a lot of international work particularly in Kenya doing tropical ophthalmology and working with different physicians doing infectious disease in Peru which helped me develop a little more of an expertise in Spanish and medical Spanish as well.
After that, I moved to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City to do my internship in general surgery. I decided to do general surgery because it was very procedural oriented. I knew that in my eventual life I would be doing a lot of surgery as well as interventions and so it would have served me better than doing something basically in medicine. After that, I completed a three-year program in anesthesiology at NYU Hospital and particularly in the last few months, I specifically specialized in Tulsa pain management.
After that I worked for about a year in the Bronx in New York City and subsequently moved to Tulsa where I’ve been ever since for the last approximately eight years. I started with a group practice and then started my own practice as an individual. I grew to two providers within a year and after that about three years ago in 2012, I moved into a larger facility where we opened our own Tulsa pain management practice and one of the only spa ambulatory surgery centers dedicated to Tulsa pain management in Oklahoma, which is on site. We also opened up our own toxicology lab to help curb the epidemic of prescription drug abuse in Oklahoma which really we stand out and as in as a state and I wasn’t proud of that and I certainly wanted to make sure we’re not part of the problem and having an in-house lab helped us get results very quickly and efficiently and we’ve been very proud of that. We’ve also been able to develop a stellar anesthesiology program on site and now we are approximately nine providers at the center.