AMEN 2020 Virtual Conference – Touch of Faith

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network (AMEN)

Seminars

Brock Arms

Dental Practice Efficiency

So I thought I would just share some of the things I've learned over the years.

And if you can benefit, you know, something from that, that would be great.

So my, my broad spectrum topic for today is dental practice efficiency.

And I know dentistry and, you know, the healthcare field in general has taken a hit this year in its efficiency.

We've had to implement different protocol, PPE, all those things that can slow us down.

But this world is all about change and we've seen a lot of that this year.

My first objective is how to incorporate spiritual care in the dental practice.

And this is an area that I definitely have some growth to do in.

I've implemented some things that have been a blessing to me, but you know right now the focus I guess of spiritual care in my office is prayer.

And, you know, with the way that a dental practice runs, and I could be wrong on this, because I don't have experience in other healthcare fields, but it just seems like it's more challenging in a dental setting than other venues as far as sharing.

Because we run so efficiently, we have high overhead, We measure things in millimeters and seconds.

And so the spiritual part has been somewhat of a challenge, a hurdle that I've had to put a lot of thought into and have gained some insight from you guys as well.

But prayer is really an area that I focused on with my office.

I love studying about it, listening to presentations on it.

And it's something that is, in my experience, not easy to do.

So I need to be reminded of its power, effectiveness, the need for it in my life.

So I like to immerse myself in different areas of prayer.

And it's an amazing thing that we can talk to our Creator, and He's there waiting and willing to answer our prayer.

It's unbelievable, really, and I personally need a reminder of that constantly.

Some of the ways that I've incorporated prayer into the practice is of course praying with patience and this is an area that I have some growth on as well.

Again, the practice runs so efficiently, I don't always take the time for it.

My assistants often remind me, if they're doing a screening and they're talking with the patient before I come in and they, you know, share something sensitive that they would like prayer for.

My assistant will often ask me to pray with the patient, which is great.

Something that I started doing that's been a blessing is taking a picture of the schedule for the following day with all the patients on, listed there, and I pray for each patient by name, either the night before or during the morning devotions.

And that way I know everyone is prayed for.

And I pray for the team that I work with by name as well.

Another thing I do is I, you know, before a procedure, particularly a, you know, a surgery or something like that, I pause to myself and pray silently.

And that's been helpful too, to, if I don't have a lot of time, at least I'm, I've done the prayer box in the waiting room like many of you have.

That's been good too, patients put in prayer requests there.

I remember the first week that I put the prayer box out, I had 2 requests in the box and 1 was for healing cancer and the other was a patient that I made a partial for and I actually made 2 because I couldn't get it to work as well as they had their partial for 30 years and loved it and those wore out and you have to remake it and you're like oh this is they're not gonna like it as much as their new 1 but so it was a struggle to get get that right for him and his prayer request is that his partial fit right.

The other area that I look to incorporate prayer is in the morning huddles And I'm sure many of you are doing that as well.

And that's been a big blessing to involve the team in prayer to protect us throughout the day, and that all the patients would have a good experience with their treatment and that all the team members would be unified and have a great day as well.

There was a event in July, it was July 22nd this year that every dentist nightmare happened to me.

My assistant was screening a new patient in op 4.

I was in the middle of a composite bonding procedure where I was etched and the matrix was on and I was ready to go.

I got the emergency notification in the office.

So I jumped out of my chair, ran down to out 4, and my assistant had this patient laid back in the chair, and he wasn't breathing.

By that time, 1 of my team members had the AED out and the breathing device, trying to get that unwrapped.

Just a side note on that, it was interesting.

When you take CPR class with the dummies, you give the breath and you see the chest rise and there's some resistance as you're breathing.

I gave 2 breaths and I wondered if I was even doing anything, but I could see his chest rise.

And when I was done with that, there was some movement, kind of some gasping for breath.

And my assistant and I were, you know, alternating CPR on him with compressions.

And as the other team member was hooking up the pads, the AED pads, and it was analyzing the heart rate, it told us to stand back, asked us to activate the AED, activated it, the patient jumped out of his chest, you know, popped out of the chair, and we continued CPR until the EMS arrived.

And they took him away and flew, took him to the local hospital, just a smaller 1, and flew him by helicopter to a larger hospital where they had to do an emergency quadruple bypass.

And he was that was the picture I showed you of that guy with my 2 employees.

He's only 59 years old, which I don't think is old anymore and He was Very thankful to us for saving his life.

It was a team effort and He came back to thank us his wife called us to thank us over and over again.

The interesting thing about that was he was scheduled to come in the following day, And we had an opening in the schedule and we brought him in the previous day.

And if we hadn't brought him in earlier, he would have died, his wife said, because she works and would have been gone out of the house that day.

So it was just, it was a very emotional time.

It has highs and lows for sure, But I just praise the Lord that his life was spared.

And it was a reminder to me to really pay attention to CPR, because you know how it goes.

You have to take it every few years or so, and you go through the motions and, yeah, I got this, but I'm paying attention more now than I was before.

But I really strongly feel and know in my heart that the morning prayer at the huddles was significant that God was looking up over the practice, over him and the team that we were able to provide that life-saving service for him.

Another area of spiritual care is music that's played in the office.

And that's always an area of contention with team members.

So there's been a lot of back and forth and what we should listen to and this and that.

And I finally just made the decision as the owner, as the person running the handpiece, that I need to listen to what makes me feel at peace and at calm for the benefit of patient care.

It's not about disrespect to your likes or tastes of music, but this is what I need when I'm practicing to provide the best care.

We usually play Christian music or some classical, some good for the brain type music.

Ellen White counseled in messages to the young people that music was made to serve a holy purpose, to lift the thoughts to that which is pure, noble, and elevating, and to awaken in the soul devotion and gratitude to God.

I just think that's such a powerful quote, to awaken in the soul, devotion and gratitude to God, because that, you know, that's really the type of environment we want to foster in our practices.

She also said in BOE, which is the book, beginning of the end, singing is as much an act of worship as is prayer.

So, you know, the type of music environment we set in the practice is a really, really is a big deal, and it's, you know, part of our, you know, spiritual care in part of our spiritual care in our offices.

The other objective I wanna talk about today is reducing provider stress while increasing production.

And there's a lot of different ways to do this, but I'll share some of the main ones that I see that's been helpful to me.

And, you know, I didn't do this until about 9 years ago.

And I don't know how I ever practiced without 1.

But the amount of stress it reduces to free up space in your head and time for production more than pays for having an office manager.

And the office manager I have is a hygienist.

And she can administer anesthesia, all of the hygienists I have do, 4.

And she can, you know, provide anesthesia for me for a patient, which helps the office flow and just do a lot of the things that took up a lot of headspace for me to get done throughout the day.

Something to seriously think about is getting an office manager if you don't already have 1.

You know, I don't know what the laws are in your state regarding hygienists giving anesthesia, but I incorporate all of my hygienists to do that for me with my patients, and that really helps me go from room to room and be productive.

I know probably all or most of you may have 1 by now, but that is invaluable when you're doing surgeries, even endo.

You can look at the root curvature, the number of canals.

You can measure the length of the canal prior to even going in to start the procedure.

Placing implants, looking at bone volume, availability, extracting teeth.

Do I want to do this or do I want to refer?

I mean, you can make quick judgment calls that are very productive and not get yourself into a situation you shouldn't be in or by looking at it, yeah, this is doable and you can do it and it's a productive procedure.

Wes Youngberg

Clinical Application of Lifestyle Medicine Strategies to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline Associated with Alzheimer’s disease

I graduated from Loma Linda University in 1988 with a doctorate of public health and a master's of nutrition and have been on the clinical faculty for a while on the full-time faculty at the School of Public Health for the last 30 years, as well as a clinical assistant professor for the School of Medicine at Loma Linda University.

I've had the privilege to be a medical missionary for 14 years on the Island of Guam, where I first became exposed to the challenges of severe dementias, where on the Island of Guam, there is a illness, a neurologic illness called lytical BODIG, which is a combination of Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and ALS.

And at the time, I wasn't emphasizing what I currently emphasize in my practice, which is this topic of helping individuals who already have been diagnosed with some level of cognitive decline and finding natural and simple remedies to address that, which we will be covering in detail today.

But without realizing it, I was actually helping people with those conditions because my emphasis was in reversing insulin resistance, was in early detection of prediabetes and diabetes, and basically reversing the underlying risk factors, the primary risk factor for dementia, especially of the Alzheimer's type, is insulin resistance.

So over the last 12 years, I've been practicing in Temecula, California.

For a few years, I practiced with a large family medical group called the Rancho Family Medical Group.

And then for the last 10 years, I've been in my own private practice basically working virtually with many patients around the country.

Here on this slide, you see that out of the 318 million individuals that lived in the United States in 2012, it was fully expected that about 45 million individuals would eventually go on to develop Alzheimer's disease.

We know that by 2050, the worldwide burden of Alzheimer's will be over 160 million individuals.

And then the top 3 causes of premature death in the United States is actually known to be cardiovascular, cancer, And number 3, if you look at the statistics properly, the Alzheimer's is actually the number 3 leading cause of premature death in the United States.

Now, other countries around the world, like in the UK, for instance, and elderly women, the number 1 cause of premature death is Alzheimer's.

And so I believe this is becoming a worse and worse phenomenon based on the literature over the last decade.

And we basically don't have a medical system developed to properly address these underlying issues.

But I've had the privilege to present through the American College of Lifestyle Medicine several years back, both in a plenary session and in a three-hour workshop for physicians, these concepts.

And so in 2018, this paper that was published, that was written by Pauline Nachete and myself on the really a write-up on the presentations that I'd previously given with the American College of Lifestyle Medicine and published in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine.

In addition, I had the privilege of collaborating with Dr.

Dale Bredesen, who's an eminent neurologist who basically published a book, The End of Alzheimer's, and has trained thousands of physicians in a comprehensive strategy on how we evaluate the underlying triggers and risk factors for Alzheimer's and not only prevent cognitive decline, but help people who already have cognitive decline, either in the subject cognitive impairment category or in the mild cognitive impairment category, or who already have different levels of Alzheimer's.

And so I had the privilege to share about 10 case studies in this paper of a hundred patients that had documented reversal of cognitive decline.

So these were all individuals that either had mild cognitive impairment or various levels of Alzheimer's disease.

So this is not just an idea, This is something that is, there's more and more evidence that is being published and documented in case study reviews, and in this case, in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinson's.

Also, I've had the privilege, and all those, by the way, are available on the Vimeo On Demand, the American College of Lifestyle Medicine meetings of the past are available on Vimeo On Demand.

So you can just search for those lectures and access those.

Also, I've had the privilege of doing a 15-hour comprehensive series for health professionals and patients alike on this topic.

And it is entitled, Reignite Recognition, Restoring Optimal Memory.

So that's also available on Vimeo on demand.

Then I wrote this book, Memory Makeover, specifically to give hope.

And in that book, I started out with my very first chapter, quoting these famous literary lines by Charles Dickens in the book, A Tale of 2 cities, which to me best describes the current, the state of healthcare in medicine as it relates to this whole topic of dealing with Alzheimer's there's a lot of differing opinions out there about what is possible.

You just heard 2 wonderful presentations by Dr.

Charles-Leno Marcel earlier today and Dr.

Roger Schwelt, who gave excellent presentations on the applications of lifestyle medicine and how they can powerfully impact health and cognitive function directly.

Roger Swelt, I realized that 1 of the number 1 things that we can do for individuals who have cognitive decline, the number 1 lifestyle intervention group of strategies that we can encourage people to follow if they have cognitive decline are things that improve the immune system.

Roger Schwell talked about in terms of enhancing the native immune system and enhancing the immune system early in infections and doing these natural remedies.

That is a critical, an essential element of optimizing the ability to address the underlying triggers of cognitive decline.

So Alzheimer's is very much in many respects, also it's an inflammatory disease and it is an infectious disease as well.

Not in every case, of course, but there's a very powerful element that promotes neuropathology in Alzheimer's that relates to a weakened immune system.

And In fact, the attempt of the brain to deal with infections, that's why beta amyloid is produced in large numbers as an attempt to actually fight the infection.

It's actually a good thing to produce beta amyloid under those scenarios.

And so our goal is not to get rid of beta amyloid.

Our goal is to decrease the need to produce excessive beta amyloid that becomes oxidized and then creates the beta amyloid plaques that destroy cognitive function.

So we're gonna be outlining that more in a little bit.

So let me share this quote with you from Charles Dickens in the Tale of 2 Cities.

As a, and think of it as I'm reading it, the current state of affairs within medicine in many of these topics that we're dealing with, much of chronic disease, there are few answers and the answers that conventional medicine has for chronic disease are really just treating the symptoms and not getting really to the core.

So lifestyle medicine, the natural remedies are really the only effective solution to these chronic diseases.

So, let me read the quote, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom.

You know, we have access to more research today and the knowledge about how the body works than ever before, and yet it's still right now the age of foolishness.

It's the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity.

There's all this research that's available that we can take advantage of in dealing with the underlying risk factors for Alzheimer's.

And yet most clinicians not taking the time to look at that research are basically don't believe, don't believe in this information because they think I would have learned it in medical school if it was that important.

It was a season of light, it was a season of darkness.

And then ultimately it was a spring of hope.

So the challenge for each of us as health professionals is what side of this are we gonna be on?

Are we going to be perpetuators of this age of foolishness, of incredulity, the season of darkness or the winter of despair.

I have a colleague of mine who's a physician who actually trains gerontologists at a university level in Northern California, he said to me, he said, Wes, he says, you know what the 3 most important words I use to train my residents who, as I trained them to diagnose Alzheimer's disease.

And he said to me that in our current system that I'm in, that's basically the answer to Alzheimer's.

I'm so sorry that the diagnosis is essentially a death sentence, not just in terms of there's nothing that we can do, but it's a sentence that leads to darkness and leads to despair.

It destroys hope in the individual patient.

And here, this was a physician that knows actually how to reverse that, but he was in a medical system that didn't really allow him to approach the condition from that perspective.

So I wanna be on the side of, no, this is the best of times.

We have this great wisdom, this great amount of knowledge available to us today.

We're in a season of light and it is the spring of hope.

And so that was the reason I wrote the book, Memory Makeover, to help patients and health professionals alike see what is actually possible.

Now, let me share with you a quote from the book, The Desire of Ages.

This book that I've had all my life, The Desire of Ages, basically a book written about the life of Christ, of Jesus Christ.

And I tell you, There's hardly a page in this book that doesn't have some underlining in it.

This is my, I call it my lifestyle medicine call to action.

How I practice and why I do what I do and how I approach my patients and how I talk to my patients who have various concerns.

And so as I read this quotation, think about it in terms of how we apply these principles, analogously to dealing with our patients on an everyday level.

And so this is actually a statement from the chapter, The Voice in the Wilderness, basically in the book, The Desire of Ages, which is talking about the life and activities of John the Baptist.

He was the 1 that was challenged and prepared by God in the Holy Spirit to prepare the way for the first coming of Jesus Christ.

Well, you and I are a type of John the Baptist.

We have been challenged to prepare the world for the second coming of Jesus.

And so think of this statement as how it applies to you directly.

White writes, "'He saw his people deceived, "'self-satisfied, in a sleep in their sins.'" So we're looking at our patients who, maybe they're coming to us because they just want medicine for their diabetes.

They just want a simple solution for their cognitive decline.

They want that drug, which we know in that case has basically really no ultimate impact on the progression of the disease.

We know that the diabetes medicines in many studies, the biggest studies done, actually increase risk for premature death.

They may very effectively lower blood sugars, but at what cost?

A Mayo Clinic did a major study on that, says we got to get past just treating blood sugar levels in diabetic because that's not getting the job done.

We need to address the underlying risk factors.

Joe Reeves

John Torquato

Unity in Pastor Physician Teams: So the World May Know You Have Sent Me

Glad that we can be together here this morning.

My name is Joe Reeves and I have recently become close friends and partners with Dr.

John Terquato and we're excited to be able to share with you this morning.

We'll give a little bit more introduction, but I'd like to begin the morning with prayer.

Without the Lord's help, we're not gonna get the things done this morning we'd like to do.

So let's bow our head and ask for help from above.

Heavenly Father, thank you that we can be together here, online and from different places.

And we just pray that you would have your way with us and things that we say and learn, and that we will be on track with where you want to take us as your ministers.

So, yes, I recently moved to Spokane, Washington, to partner here with Dr.

So we're co-directors of Total Health Spokane.

I've been a pastor for 8 years, started in May of 2012, worked 8 years in Michigan, last 5 years in Berrien Springs, Michigan, first couple of years in the suburbs of Detroit, doing a lot of evangelism, church planting, youth ministry and otherwise.

But we this year took a call to come here to do city missions in Spokane.

I'm the pastor of 2 churches, 1 the Spokane Northview Church and also Spirit Lake, Idaho.

And I took the place of Pastor Wayne Cablano who was co-directing Total Health Spokane previous to me before his retirement.

And so we just started a new year of missions.

We have 5 volunteers that have joined us here in Spokane, and they are working with us full-time, without pay, volunteering a year, meeting people in the community.

They're using tools with health coaching and bridging the gap between health and spiritual And those are some of the things we're going to be talking about this morning.

Before I go to my next slide, there is an email there, amedicalministry at gmail.com.

And if you write down that email and if you send an email to that account, you'll receive an automatic reply.

And that automatic reply from amedicalministryatgmail.com will give you a long list of resources that we have compiled at Total Health Spokane, presentations and booklets and so forth.

And you can learn a lot about our program there.

Today's notes will be updated on that particular email by tomorrow.

Why don't you introduce yourself and anything what you're about and where you come from?

I've been in the North Idaho, Eastern Washington area for the past 15 years, working with pastors for actually the last 20 years in this area with my previous position.

The last 15 years working with pastors, starting small clinics inside a church, and working with teaching medical students and residents and interns and physicians interested in whole person care and using their offices and their opportunities in ministry of medical ministry.

So I have the opportunity to work with the likes of Joe Reeves now and every person I've talked to in this area as a pastor has always been a blessing to work side by side with and that's kind of what I encourage to happen in this particular presentation is for our physicians to work side by side shoulder to shoulder with pastors in medical evangelism.

So that is the title of our presentation this morning unity and pastor physician teams so we're gonna look at 2 2 verses here and objectives of what we're trying to look at over the next hour.

When we're looking at the ministry of Jesus, who was a pastor and a physician in a sense, because he did the ministry of teaching and healing, it says in Matthew 4 to 23, as you're well familiar, that Jesus went about all Galilee teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing all kinds of sickness and all kinds of disease among the people.

The reason that this is so important that Jesus did both preaching and healing is so that the love of God could not only be spoken to the world, but that the love of God could be demonstrated to the world.

The Preaching declared the love of God and the healing demonstrated the love of God.

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Seminars

COVID-19’s Impact on Healthcare Providers & Ministry

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Recorded

Parts

Dental Practice Efficiency

40m

Clinical Application of Lifestyle Medicine Strategies to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline Associated with Alzheimer’s disease

1h 24m

Unity in Pastor Physician Teams: So the World May Know You Have Sent Me

1h 4m

The Reach of Faith

1h

Broken Cisterns That Cannot Hold Water

55m

Nimble, Flexible, and Relevant

45m

A Fast Way to Live Longer

54m

COVID-19’s Impact on Healthcare Providers & Ministry

57m

Incorporating Families with Children into Local Health Evangelism

32m

Health Ministry is Where the Heart is

1h 8m

Praying with Patients

49m

Sound Doctrine