Family Nurse Practitioner & Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner
Editor’s note: This month, instead of our regular Physician Spotlight, in honor of nurses we focus on an outstanding nurse who represents the quality of care provided by the profession.
Born in the crossroads of the Delta Blues, Clarksdale Mississippi, Brian Brown, MSN, grew up knowing he always wanted to be a physician. When the time came for him to make that decision a reality, nurse practitioners were on the rise as a profession and he found that direction a better fit with his philosophy of dealing with people. Today the family nurse practitioner who is also a psychiatric nurse practitioner is at the crossroads of Rock and Roll, Jackson, Tennessee and is bringing his holistic approach to his patients at Matrix Wellness Solutions.
Brown earned a Bachelor of Social Work from the University of Mississippi. He received his Bachelor of Science in Nursing in Memphis at the UT Health Sciences Center, where he also earned his Master of Science in Nursing in 1998. “The program I chose for the master’s degree was a two level certification track in psychiatry and family medicine,” said Brown. “It was such an intense track that they stopped the dual track after four years.”
After completing his education, Brown moved to Jackson to work with Pathways Behavioral Health Services. He also moonlighted for a Memphis psychiatrist doing inpatient work, which led to doing some psychiatric work in nursing homes. “Working in the nursing homes with patients really allowed me to take a holistic approach to caring for patients, which was in line with my overall philosophy,” said Brown.
Brown eventually took over the nursing home contracts on his own and started his own practice in 2002, Comprehensive Behavioral Health, which included an outpatient clinic and adolescent residential inpatient practice. Over the years, Brown says he has evolved into what he calls a hybrid practitioner, combining his psychiatric and family practice knowledge into one model.
Three years ago he opened Matrix Wellness Solutions, a unique approach to healthcare that utilizes a wellness approach. “If we have a patient who is dealing with sadness, fatigue, insomnia, and weight gain, rather than immediately diagnosing it as depression and prescribing medication, we look at underlying causes for it,” said Brown. “With this holistic approach, we take a thorough history and look for laboratory abnormalities related to hormone imbalances that could be going on. For overall wellness purposes, we also look at advanced laboratory markers that would indicate cardiovascular risk, diabetes risk, and genetic risk. This gives us a very individualized picture about the person’s health and allows us to address those specific factors. We have found in our practice that most people want to treat the underlying hormone imbalance or other causes when we can find them. We feel we have a pretty unique model that no one else has.”
In keeping with the wellness approach, Brown is always looking for innovative ways to address wellness concerns before they become big issues. Three years ago, he had an advanced lipid panel run. “My cholesterol had always been fine but because of my family history of heart disease, I had an advanced lipid panel run that Boston Heart Diagnostic and Cleveland Heart Diagnostic were utilizing,” said Brown. “What we discovered was that I had smaller lipid particles and bad genetics that put me at a higher risk for a heart attack and stroke. I immediately thought it was something we should be running at our outpatient wellness clinic. Boston Heart said we were one of the few clinics in West Tennessee and the only wellness clinic in the nation running their panels. Because of the wellness and prevention benefits we gleaned for our patients, that opened the door for them to go into other clinics like ours throughout the nation.”
For the past two years, Brown has been working on an intensive certification under his mentor, Neal Rouzier, MD, a leader and expert in the field of healthy aging who has been honored by The Academy for Preventive and Innovative Medicine for his contributions to evidence-based medicine in the specialty of hormone replacement therapy and preventive care. “I have completed 60 hours of classroom training and passed two of the four tests for this certification which I will complete in early 2015,” said Brown. “This places me in the top one-half percent of prescribers in the nation for hormone replacement therapy and preventive aging care.”
Taking a holistic approach to wellness allows Brown to incorporate his counseling experience into his practice. “To say I hang my shingle out and do therapy, is not correct,” said Brown. “But I do incorporate aspects of therapy into my practice everyday. For instance, if someone comes in with weight issues, we assess how that has evolved into a problem and deal with the life, work or home issues from as many angles we can.”
Brown balances his busy practices with family. “We are very family oriented. Any chance I have, we are spending time as a family. We enjoy traveling and doing mission work through our church and other organizations,” said Brown. “For my wife, who is the high school principal of Trinity Christian Academy, and I, our jobs are our ministry so church, family and work are our world.”
RELATED LINKS:
www.matrixwellnesssolutions.com/
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