HOW I GOT HERE

Hi, I’m Kelly. I’m a physician assistant in the Philadelphia area and I specialize in wellness. What does that mean? Basically, I can help you feel better, look better, and have better orgasms. How do I do that? Go check out my website and stay tuned to find out.

One of the most important parts of my job as a wellness PA is that I get to help people feel better on a daily basis by optimizing their hormones. Hormones are a topic made so complex by so many different people for so many different reasons. My mission is to keep it simple. To give my patients answers. To help them feel better and ultimately prevent long-term disease in the process. The bottom-line with hormones is if you think there is something going on, you’re probably right. If you have all of the symptoms of an underactive thyroid (hypothyroidism) or polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) or low testosterone you likely have that condition.

So many times I hear story after story of patients going to their primary doctor or gynecologist begging for help, for testing, for answers, for a solution and being told that they’re crazy. They’re just getting old. They’re depressed. It’s infuriating - not only to me, but especially to my patients. There’s a reason more and more people don’t go to the doctor, don’t trust doctors, and get their medical information online. I can’t even fault my patients when they tell me they don’t like their primary doctor and refuse to go back.

Yet, it’s not the practitioner’s fault. They’re doing what they are trained to do. They’re doing what they learned in medical school. We’re all taught to stay away from hormones, to only consider prescribing them if the lab values are well outside the “normal” range, and even then to refer to endocrinology because hormones are simply outside of our wheelhouse. I chose to go on to receive more extensive training in the area of hormones after finishing school so that I could actually help those who so many can’t help.

I am so frequently asked how I got into the field of work that I do. The answer is I really just kind of fell into it, without realizing in the beginning that this work is what I was always meant to do. Growing up I saw my dad, now my supervising physician, dedicate his life to medicine. I saw his career evolve over the years. I saw how hard he worked. I witnessed all he had to go through to get to where he is today. I wanted nothing to do with any of it.

It took me a long time to warm up to the idea of a career in medicine. When I was little I wanted to be a waitress. When I was older I wanted to be a marine biologist. When I learned that wasn’t for me I went into undergrad as a fashion merchandising major with a minor in business administration. By half way through sophomore year I figured out that wasn’t my passion either. I thought about dental school, medical school, and ended up deciding on physician assistant school.

Because of my late and epically drastic change in direction, I immediately started working at the local emergency room and gained thousands of hours of experience in urgent care, internal medicine, sports medicine, and regenerative medicine throughout my remaining years of undergraduate school. I went to PA school in Orlando, FL and quickly learned there is a great big world outside of my Philadelphia bubble. I never wanted to leave the sunshine state. But, after going through every rotation possible I finally realized no one was truly helping people like my dad’s practice.

The intention when I moved home was for me to join my dad in his regenerative medicine practice and train with him to learn the injection procedures he specializes in to include dextrose Prolotherapy, platelet rich plasma, adipose fat, and adult autologous stem cells from bone marrow. However, when I moved home I began to experience hormone issues of my own. I woke up one day and had gained 20 lbs overnight. We checked my labs and found that my thyroid was underactive, my adrenal glands were hyperactive resulting in significantly elevated cortisol (stress hormone), and I had a condition called polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). Luckily for me my dad had been trained in hormone optimization for years as a result of my sisters having PCOS and he had another PA running the wellness side of his practice at the time. I underwent treatment, woke up everyday feeling like absolute shit, and continued training with my dad. Eventually our PA left the practice and I found myself taking over the wellness side. Little did I know this was just the beginning of my journey into the world of hormones.