DirectMed DPC Is Expanding to New Braunfels with Dr. Travis Simmons!

Who is Dr. Travis Simmons?

I am one of the two new doctors joining DirectMed DPC and will be the first in the New Braunfels area. I am beyond excited! I love being a doctor. It is an honor, and a privilege to play such a personal role in the lives of fellow human beings. I am constantly mindful of this.

I am writing a series of blog posts over the next several weeks to months for a few reasons. My hope and primary purpose is that these blogs will serve as a way for future patients and members of the New Braunfels community and surrounding area to get to know me, this practice, and the idea of direct primary care a bit better. I’ll be writing about a variety of health and personal topics.

If you feel like I might be a good fit for you as a doctor, please Contact Us. I start working in New Braunfels on September 1st and we have already started taking pre-enrollments for patients interested in working with me!

With this first post, I thought I would talk a bit about why I chose primary care as opposed to a more specialized field of medicine.

A number of things drew me to primary care, and more specifically, family medicine:

1. Long term relationships. Personally, I am quite extroverted. When I have free time I almost always try to pack it full of family and friends. This is what fills my tank. In medicine, my favorite part of the job is the relationships I have with my patients. Family medicine provides the opportunity to know and care for people for many years (even an entire lifetime!), and often several members of the family all at once! Relationships are critical to the way we humans function and to our wellbeing.
   
2. Focus on the community. A healthy person exists in a community, not in isolation. I believe this with my whole heart. During my training in Family Medicine (often referred to as “Family and Community Medicine” in many medical schools and residencies), my teachers and I were constantly mindful of how the community surrounding each patient plays an integral part in health.
3. Family medicine is so broad! In one day I can see a newborn and a 90 year old. I can do a knee injection and counsel someone on their depression. It never gets old and always keeps me on my toes. I love to learn. I constantly have a list of books to read, podcasts to listen to, videos to watch, new hobbies to explore.
4. Focus on staying healthy rather than just being less sick. Much of medicine in America is focused on reacting to disease once it has developed. For example, we’ll monitor someone’s A1c (a measure of average blood sugar) but not really do anything about it until the person “meets criteria” for diabetes except maybe mention they should be “eating healthy and exercising.” Why not do something before that point? As a primary care doctor and first point of contact for many of my patients, I have the opportunity with every single patient to help them make a plan to improve health and wellness, and prevent disease.
5. Broad training and big-picture perspective. Primary care doctors have an advantage that many specialists lose during the very challenging, but single minded focus of their specialized training: perspective outside their field. We all likely have a family member that sees 10 different specialists for 10 different issues. And those 10 different specialists will inevitably have something that they disagree about. The broad training of a primary care doctor and the long term relationship that we seek to have with our patients enable us to help patients prioritize these conflicting specialists recommendations or even to serve as a “translator” of sorts between specialists. Perhaps most importantly, the long term relationship between patient and primary care doctor gives us the ability to more easily know and identify the patient’s priorities/wishes and to advocate for these.

Thank you all for reading! I hope this helps you to better understand why I do what I do, and why I love it so much. I and the team at DirectMed DPC would love the opportunity to educate you about becoming a patient so please reach out!

Next week, my post will be talking about what DPC is and why I chose to join a direct primary care practice rather than one of the many traditional primary care practices in the area.