“More Than Just Medicine”

The health professional I interviewed was Dr. Makini Ainsworth. Dr. Ainsworth is a physician certified in internal medicine and owns her own practice in Spotsylvania, Virginia. She graduated from medical school and received her MD, and in addition to being certified in internal medicine, she is also certified in auricular therapy and functional medicine. In my interview with Dr. Ainsworth, I asked her questions about what her job is, if she could say her career is considered sustainable, and her advice for wanting to go into the health field. She talked about how her job can see a variety of different patients, all with different conditions. She takes those and their overall lifestyle into consideration to help them get treated, whether it is with prescription medicine or not. She also believed that she could say with confidence that her career is sustainable, yet that does not mean that there is never room for growth. She went on to explain that she hopes that the field will continue to develop to help serve patients with the best type of care to offer. Her advice to future health professionals would be to look outside the box, and that not everything is cookie cutter and that sometimes you need to work around situations to reach the end result. Everyone in the health professions field should have a passion for helping the well-being of everyone, not for superficial factors such as money. I learned from Dr. Ainsworth that there is more to being a health professional than just a diagnosis and treatment. There will be times when medicine might not be the best answer, and the knowledge of a variety of treatments can come into use. Dr. Ainsworth has a very admirable job that I did not know about when it comes to different doctors. She is able to use her knowledge to help more people than ever before, getting down to the root of their issues without the risk of polypharmacy. Thinking outside the box in the healthcare field might be able to help the condition of the patient in the long term and simultaneously give more ideas to help advance the quality of healthcare for the future.