Our Mission

“At Hands On Medicine, we approach achieving health and wellness through nurturing the mind, body, and spirit within individual, family and social contexts.”

“Patients are encouraged, expected, and empowered to take an active role in their healthcare through integrated, multidisciplinary collaboration.”

Hands On Medicine’s Goals

Empower patients, prevent disease, collaborate on interventions, promote healthy lifestyles, and teach disease management; Contribute to and sustain healthy families and communities through long-term clinical practice, policy creation, and political advocacy; Provide living wage employment, help achieve professional aspirations, increase knowledge base, and create a healthy work environment.

Health Care Reform Brief

We at Hands On Medicine full-heartedly support health care reform. We believe health care should be a right. Health care access should be granted equally to everyone. We believe each of us should responsibly use the health care system and treat our bodies, families, and environment with care so that health is attainable. Unfortunately in the United States health care is not a right. Health care is provided and managed largely in a for-profit model. Hands On Medicine is doing the best we can to advocate for our patients, create a better health care system and improve the public health infrastructure. We are simultaneously attempting to provide a living for our staff, families and selves through our work as health care providers and clinic owners.

Primary care providers are among the hardest working and most dedicated medical professionals. Many, like us, could have chosen to enter a more lucrative field of medicine. Our love for our work far exceeds the financial benefits we may have received by taking another road. Owner Shelda Holmes is fond of saying “I do it for the quality of life, not the money. I want to contribute to my family and community in ways I cannot in other practices.” Regardless, we have faith that the state of health care management in our country will change for the better and thereby the health of communities will also improve.

Environmental Commitment

We use reusable cloth gowns (imagine no uncomfortable paper gowns). We do laundry and clean using the least hazardous materials possible. We sterilize the equipment we can for reuse via an autoclave. We cycle! We recycle! We use an electronic medical record system instead of paper charts. We are always thinking about how we can reduce our contribution to medical waste. Go here for more information regarding this unfortunate side-effect of medical advances.