Practicing Medicine Beyond Prescriptions

SCENE: Dr. Claudia Jensen, a pediatrician, stands to introduce herself at a luncheon meeting of marriage and family therapists.

“I’ve moved from practice to practice, searching for the right setting in which I don’t have to think twice about whether the kid needs referrals or more than just Amoxicillin.”

(Laughter)

“Now I’m here, in Camarillo, at a medical group for which I have high hopes. I look forward to working with you, and I’ll keep you posted on how things go.”

(Smiles all around, a few people applaud.)

*

SCENE: Jensen, weeks later, dawdles over lunch in an interview:

“You don’t just throw medicine at problems. I try to reach the kid, really reach the kid and the kid’s parents. Sometimes it works. Other times, the parents, say, aren’t happy unless there are prescriptions. ‘Just give us the medicine,’ you know.

“So I make judgments along the way about how far I can reach, about who gets what.”

(She orders her second cup of regular coffee.)

“You get a sense for this. I’ve come to know that I have got to be free to feel something for my patients--to care. And they’ve got to be able to receive that loving. We’re here to teach and learn, love and be loved.

“Now be careful how you write that, please. This kind of talk divides doctors.”

*

Claudia Jensen is not your usual doctor, not central casting’s whitecoat-with-a-clipboard. If most physicians live by Just Give Me the Facts, Jensen lives by Give Me the Whole Truth, Facts Included.

If a child shows up at Greater Valley Medical Group, where Jensen practices and the provisional diagnosis is sore throat, Jensen is as interested in the child’s home culture as throat culture.

Ditto on bruises. Ditto on Attention Deficit Disorder, something Jensen calls “the problem every child has if you give them a minute to show it.” (Here she sips coffee, sighs and raises a wry eyebrow: “Is there a parent out there whose child does not have ADD?” She contains her laughter only long enough to get the words out.)

The word alternative as applied to doctoring or medicine is loaded. It reliably conjures images of voodooists or spiritualists or fringe artists who walk crisply in starched whites but do so only to serve some larger, flapping cosmic agenda. Truth is, sore throats are sometimes only about sore throats--and a simple pill will do.

Jensen knows this. She will tell you that the science is important.

That’s why she’s board-certified in pediatrics, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics sitting on a resume that couldn’t be more button-down: BS and MD degrees from the University of Arkansas, with an internship of residency in pediatrics at UC-Irvine.

But she will also tell you that much more is necessary to get someone well. It’s this dimension of her personality and approach to doctoring that separates her from the crowd. It’s what makes her a bona fide holistic practitioner.

It’s also one of the reasons she has been on a job-to-job itinerancy in managed-care settings since graduation in 1984: staff positions with CIGNA Healthplans of Southern California in Glendale, Huntington Medical Group in South Pasadena, Briarwood IPA Medical Group in Thousand Oaks and now Greater Valley Medical Group in Camarillo. Finding the right fit when you want to dish out more than Amoxicillin can be a challenge.

Greater Valley is Jensen’s great hope, actually. She notes with enthusiasm the group’s plan to establish alternative medical approaches at its Mission Hills offices, with an emphasis on wellness and prevention and holistic medicine. And she reports with delight that she enjoys the freedom to practice as she wishes, case by case, within a supportive climate.

Still, this doesn’t mean Jensen isn’t hedging her bets. Though she doctors all day and raises two daughters and is a leader in Girl Scouts and YMCA Indian Maidens programs, she returned to school recently. She will pick up an MBA, with emphasis in health-care administration, at Cal Lutheran University.

Will she ultimately leave doctoring to manage the doctors who do see our children? Is this the inevitable fate of a doctor whose popularity with patients runs high but whose dealings with her own profession have at times made her the odd fit?

“Not any time soon” she says, “but anything’s possible.”

*

SCENE: Jensen declines dessert, orders a third coffee, responds to her beeper and runs to a pay phone. Upon returning, she returns, also, to the word possible :

“That’s what I sense here, possibility. That’s what inspires me, keeps me going. You’ve got to have that to get through. We’ve got to help one another.

“Just the other day, I saw a woman stuck in a shopping center parking lot. So I and some other stranger stopped, walked over to her, and pushed her car for her. It felt as it should. None of us knew each other. Yet we solved a problem together.”

(Suddenly, her beeper goes off again, and with it, she leaves.)