See a Physician Every Time: Why Our Pain Management Specialists Don’t Use Mid-Level Extenders

You have a health problem and call a doctor’s office to make an appointment, an appointment you assume will include sitting down with a licensed physician.

Unfortunately, many practices tend to stack up patients and use mid-level healthcare professionals, such as nurse practitioners (NPs) and physicians assistants (PAs), to cover the overlap. As a result, many patients may only see a doctor for the minority of their visits, leaving them feeling unseen and not well managed.

At Apex Pain Specialists, we take a different approach. Both Dr. Maziar Massrour and Dr. Naveen Reddy firmly believe that each patient who walks through our doors deserves our complete and undivided attention.

Here’s a look at why we never use mid-level healthcare workers as a substitute for our care.

Setting the scene in healthcare

Let’s look at this issue on a broader scale so you can see why so many healthcare clinics use mid-level healthcare workers like RNs and PAs to handle a lot of the patient care.

In the United States, the population is more than 340 million and there are slightly more than 1 million licensed physicians. If you do some quick math, you’ll see that it comes down to about 1 doctor for every 340 people in the United States.

To handle this workload, many practices will double and even triple book time slots in order to service as many patients as possible. To help them cover this workload, they rely on PAs and NPs. While this is a perfectly acceptable practice, what is less acceptable is having patients spend most of their time with the mid-level provider and only a few minutes with the actual doctor.

Of course, we rely on our excellent NPs and PAs to improve our service and they play an invaluable role in your pain management care, but they shouldn’t be used as substitutes for a physician’s care.

Spending time with our patients

There are many reasons why we emphasize one-on-one care with a physician at our practice, such as:

Advanced training

Both of the physicians at Apex have undergone extensive education and training to become experts in their field.  We expect that patients should be able to tap this expertise. In fact, our physicians go a step further, and both Dr. Reddy and Dr. Massrour are double board-certified in pain management and anesthesiology.

Experience

A person can have all the training in the world, but it needs to come with experience to be truly effective, and our physicians have been practicing pain medicine for over 20 years.  

Over the years, we’ve seen almost every type of pain imaginable, which isn’t all that surprising given that nearly one-quarter of adults in the United States report pain.

What we’ve found is that no two people experience pain in the same way. As physicians, we understand this nature of pain, and we are able to recognize issues that mid-level extenders may not thanks to our extensive training and experience.

Getting you to relief more quickly

We also feel that the use of mid-level medical providers can delay what you truly need: pain relief. We don’t want you sitting in pain for any longer than you have to, so you can be sure that a physician will handle your diagnosis and care, from start to finish. Of course, our RNs and PAs may play a role, but the central role will focus on patient and physician.

So, if you’re tired of being shuffled through doctors’ offices and passed among mid-level workers, we recommend that you come see us for proper physician-directed care.

To get that ball rolling, we invite you to call our office in Chandler, Arizona, at 480-820-7246 today to schedule an appointment. You can also book an appointment online.