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| James Bond, DC, prepares to adjust a patient as Carl Cleveland IV and the patient’s son observe. |
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For Students, an Opportunity
for Service and Learning
Devin Mobley, a senior student and intern at CCCKC who also serves as student council president, found her volunteer experience both challenging and rewarding. “From the very get-go,” she recalls, “the medical volunteers were asking us, ‘Where does chiropractic fit in? What patients should we be referring to you?’ We said, for starters, back pain, neck pain and headaches. They understood back pain and neck pain but were puzzled by our including headaches on the list. It was a reality check for me. We live in this little world where your fellow students and family and professors all understand what chiropractic is. They get it. But here we were out in the medical world and we needed to be able to explain why we were there and how we could help.”
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| Devin Mobley with a patient. |
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“It was frustrating to hear second and third-year medical students say that they had no idea what chiropractors do,” Devin adds. “It wasn’t that they were against chiropractic, but that they really knew nothing about it. So there was this window of opportunity for connection. They were open and honest. One of them said to me, ‘We don’t know anything about musculoskeletal pain.’ Once we explained what we do, they started sending people our way. That was truly refreshing.”
For Devin, the opportunity to see patients with serious problems, to perform the initial exam, and then to observe a faculty chiropractor complete the first-visit workup and treatment, was exceptionally valuable. “When I was working with Dr. Katherine Smith, I had two patients where I went through the MRS (motor, sensory and reflex) testing and orthopedic tests that we’ve learned here, and found that the patients’ pain did actually follow the same dermatome pattern and match up with their areas of pain and joint restrictions. The pieces of the puzzle were really coming together.”
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| Carl Cleveland IV and Cynthia Duffy, in white coats, with Linda Gerdes, CCCKC Community Outreach Representative. |
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On a personal note, Devin adds that she understands first-hand what many free clinic patients experience. “I’m a single mother and I haven’t been insured for two years. For me, volunteering was such a good way to get into the holiday spirit of hope and people taking care of one another.”
Other student interns volunteering at this event were Carl Cleveland IV, Cynthia Duffy, Melena Keeth, Amy Ketner, Ryan Nogle, Suzie Weege and Candice Yancy.
Daniel Redwood, DC, is an Associate Professor at Cleveland Chiropractic College – Kansas City and Editor-in-Chief of Health Insights Today and
The Daily HIT blog.
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