CRAVING MORE
During his time as a student at the VA hospital in Canandaigua, Charbel Medlej, D.C. learned how to be show up with an open mind and be willing to learn, even as a professional.
that I didn’t grow at least a little bit,” says Dr. Hibl. “At the end, you’re a much more competent clinician. You leave ready for private practice.” Or, like Dr. Hibl himself, you leave ready to deepen
your training with an extremely competitive postgraduate VA residency. For Charbel Medlej, D.C. (Main, ’20), two VA rotations — one in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the other in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — left him craving more. “My rotations taught me how to be a forever student,” Dr.
Medlej says from the VA hospital in Canandaigua, New York, where he’s wrapping up his residency and preparing for his new job at the Hunter Holmes McGuire VA medical center in Richmond, Virginia. “It’s about showing up with an open mind, willing to learn. Even as a clinician, you’re never going to have all the answers, so you have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable and continue to grow by searching for answers each day.” Ultimately, a fine balance of both clinical excellence and a
readiness to adapt is required to serve the patients who come to VA medical centers for care. Often considered “complex,” many of these patients have been dealing for years with pain, functional limitations and other health issues, including psycho-social factors that, in Dr. Medlej’s words, can “muddy the waters.” “Veterans have been through things most of us haven’t,”
says Dr. Medlej. “A lot of them have seen combat deployments, and what they’ve been exposed to — both physically and psychologically — contributes to their conditions today.
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Everyone’s pain experience is unique, and we have to emphasize a biopsychosocial approach to managing it. That challenge has made me a better clinician.” So has working as part of a team of multidisciplinary health care providers, a necessary approach for effectively managing these complicated presentations. For the chiropractic students on rotation, the chance to collaborate in an integrated setting and learn from a broad range of medical professionals is an invaluable aspect of the program. Mariah Hargrove, D.C. (Florida, ’21), spent much of her rotation at the VA in Little Rock, Arkansas, working on an interdisciplinary team in the Integrated Medicine Pain Alternative and Complementary Treatment — or IMPACT — clinic. There, she found herself
surrounded by an
array of knowledgeable providers: an acupuncturist, a nutritionist, a primary care physician, a physiatrist, yoga and tai chi instructors and, of course, her attending chiropractor. Every week, the team came together to discuss what each patient needed in order to get off pain medication.
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