We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dr Elizabeth Livengood a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Dr Elizabeth, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear stories from your time in school/training/etc.
One of my students asked me whether they should focus on the basics or look for the worst case scenario with their new patients. My answer was, “both!” I gave an example of two patients I had during my residency. The first one saw me every week for acupuncture (and a little talk therapy) for his anxiety. Finally, during the sixth visit, I asked him exactly how much coffee he drank daily and he said “one”. One 14-cup pot, that is! Bingo. We finally made some headway when I addressed the basics of nutrition with him and reduced his caffeine intake. Another patient came in with a straight-forward case of headaches. After a thorough set of questions, I sent him home with an experiment: drink coffee at bedtime and see if the morning headache disappears. If it does, then it’s a “hypnic” headache. If it doesn’t, then we have to get an MRI of the brain. The latter situation prevailed and by the third visit, after reviewing his MRI, I diagnosed him with a brain tumor. So we have to address the basics while always keeping a watchful eye on the most dire possibilities.
Dr Elizabeth, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I love when new patients ask me if Livengood is really my name. Yes, it is! I aim to live up to it while providing my patients the tools they need to also live a Good Life. From childhood, my internal drive and purpose has been to help, heal, teach and serve. This hasn’t always been easy or financially rewarding, but it’s fantastic to look back and see how every experience and new phase of life has been the correct next step on my path. My interest in medicine was sparked in sixth grade and happily took a 20 year detour where I could discover more natural and integrative approaches to health. During that time, I earned a Master’s in Education and taught health and science for over ten years. Upon completion of naturopathic medical school, I was awarded the prestigious STAIR Integrative Residency, the only one in North America. Fast forward eight more years and I now practice in a new, lakeside, multi-room space that offers a complete array of holistic services and integrative primary care. It has been a slow build, but always perfectly timed and guided, filled with the best staff and the most wonderful patients. Most of our new patients are referrals, which is a great honor. Returning patients comment on how serene and welcoming our office is; how responsive and caring our staff is; and how thorough and detailed their healthcare is. They also appreciate having holistic services such as massage, reiki and aesthetics on site. Patients often come to me when they can’t find solutions elsewhere. I provide an overview, which is frequently lacking in the conventional medical silos of specialty doctors. At the same time, I dig deep and research when necessary to find detailed answers and solutions where others gave up too soon.
Providing the best possible care is my personal standard and because this is my daily task, I sometimes lose sight of how special this is for my patients. One of my proudest moments was when a covid patient returned to thank me for “saving his life”. I didn’t realize that’s what I had done at the time. I thought I was just doing my job. But the tears in his eyes and the gratitude for not having to enact the legal documents he put into place, told a grander story. There are many other similar stories of patients who couldn’t find care or medicine or were turned away at the emergency room and finally found someone to listen. That’s me. That’s my job. Integrative primary care means integrating all the tools I have to provide you with the best possible care for every aspect of your life.
Putting training and knowledge aside, what else do you think really matters in terms of succeeding in your field?
In my industry, compassion and sincerity are essential. We have to start with a genuine positive regard for each and every person who walks in our door. One of the best pieces of doctoring advice I heard was, “Listen to your patients. They already know the answer”. Somehow this has been lost in our modern, insurance-driven, 8 minutes-per-visit model of medicine. Listening takes time and patients need to be heard. Their answers lie in their stories. My job is to listen and apply my knowledge, skills and intuition to solving the problems at hand. This is the Art and Science of medicine.
Have you ever had to pivot?
Most everyone had to pivot in the early days of the pandemic, including my practice. I had a brick and mortar practice which nearly shut down, yet most people had not yet adapted to telemedicine. (I learned this the hard way a couple years earlier when I tried to open a virtual practice and failed). Ironically, my pivot was to accept a telemedicine contract job with another practitioner. She was swamped with covid calls and needed help. I got the call to start working on my first day of a month long sabbatical to Florida! I helped more patients that month than I had in the previous three months combined. I studied, learned the protocols, added my own knowledge and value and listened to their concerns. Many of them had been told there was nothing they could do to stay well or get well and so were incredibly grateful to find a doctor who dug deeper to provide hope and resources. This is the marvelous secret about natural medicine: we don’t have to rely on prescriptions all the time. There is always SOMETHING we can do to improve our patients’ health. When I returned from my “sabbatical”, rather than shutting down my practice, I was now well-equipped to handle the new influx of referrals that propelled my practice into a bigger, more beautiful brick and mortar space. My lesson was to follow the open doors. Show up. Have faith and trust I am exactly where I need to be.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.livengoodhealth.com
- Instagram: @drelizabethlivengood
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrElizabethLivengood
Image Credits
Elizabeth Livengood Rosemary Watson