Today we’d like to introduce you to Mark Hancock. They and their team shared their story with us below:
Dr. Mark has always been inspired by integrative medicine. In medical school, Dr. Mark met and was inspired by Dr. Maurice Orange, who was using mistletoe as a cancer therapy in a clinic retreat in England. He knew he would also want to practice this way too. As a clinic, we started out very informally. Dr. Mark worked full time as a hospitalist and started seeing patients about ten years ago – initially home visits. We then subletted an office for a while in Little Five Points next to Sevananda. During this time, Dr. Mark did three years of intensive training at a German integrative hospital near Stuttgart called the Filderklinik. It is an inpatient hospital and part of the public system but the doctors, nurses, and staff are trained in a holistic approach to health called Anthroposophic medicine. It inspired us to make this Anthroposophic-integrative medicine available to more people over here. In the meantime, mistletoe therapy started getting more well-known as an adjunctive therapy in cancer through the work of Believe Big and the Phase 1 trial at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Mark wanted to do more intense work with mistletoe, like what he participated in England and in Germany. We started doing intravenous mistletoe for donation out of our home for a couple of years. This was very fulfilling to make an impact for people this way, but it became so busy that we needed to go to a different form. We found our current location five years ago and have grown into a multimodal clinic with myself, a consulting integrative oncologist, one oncology nurse practitioner, one dual-trained naturopath nurse practitioner, two infusion nurses, two medical assistants, a movement therapist, an art therapist, an office manager, and three receptionists. It is an amazing team! We wake up with goosebumps knowing that we are really doing some pioneering work and have the tools to help our patients in a deep and unique way. But most of all, we are so grateful to our patients who have so much heart, courage, and open-mindedness. It is a real honor to be a part of their lives!
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
We have made an effort to grow organically. We have a membership model of care called Direct Primary Care, where patients or their employers pay $75 per month for an individual and $150 per month for a family inclusive of all consultation costs. It was a big jump to leave the hospital – and the big hospital salary – and rely on a small but growing business. The pandemic was an unanticipated struggle – we initially assumed we would lose members as everyone was staying home but we had a surge of growth due to more people wanting to take their health more seriously.
Currently, we have a lot of staff working out of a small space and are in the process of expanding our integrative primary care to a second location.
Looking back, we are proud of how our staff have stepped up to the plate with each challenge that confronts us. Our morale is high – our company is governed through Sociocracy – so more democratic like a cooperative.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Humanizing Medicine?
We do integrative primary care. We attempt to offer the best of both worlds. For example – if a child has an ear infection, we know that most of the time an antibiotic is unnecessary and will have a lot of negative health effects. Our practitioners are trained in both conventional medicine and integrative approaches. A compress with an onion and a homeopathic can usually relieve the pain and resolve the infection – faster than an antibiotic and ibuprofen. But it is good to know the conventional side too – like when that antibiotic is needed. We know both.
We have a division that focuses all of these integrative therapies on cancer. We don’t aim to replace the value of conventional treatment but believe there are many supportive options – for both side effects as well as optimizing outcomes. And patients deserve to know about these options and have them available. We are specialists in using European mistletoe, or viscum album, which is given either as a subcutaneous injection or intravenously for the support of people who are undergoing cancer treatment. MD Anderson has just started enrolling for a Phase 2 clinical trial of this natural plant extract – which studies show acts as an up-regulator to the section of the immune system that identifies and kills cancer cells. Dr. Mark serves as part of the faculty that teaches other providers how to use mistletoe extract. He has co-authored a book on mistletoe, “Mistletoe and the Emerging Future of Integrative Oncology”.
We offer a broad spectrum of integrative therapies from a form of therapeutic movement called Eurythmy therapy, to herbal compresses, to art therapy.
We are proud to hear patients say, “Why isn’t all medicine like this?” We are most proud of our patients with cancer who have been given a terrible diagnosis and have overcome all odds and expectations from their conventional team.
What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
Dr. Mark has always been a listener and believes that most of the things he knows he has learned from listening to his patients. Healthcare today is based on an important scientific method called Evidence-Based Medicine. But we have gotten lost with this approach to patients as it no longer listens to them. It is sort of like a big medical cookbook where we know the most reliable things to do to get a certain outcome. But sometimes those things are really difficult, like an invasive procedure or a treatment with a lot of side effects.
So we like the three-legged stool approach. We don’t throw out Evidence-Based Medicine. It is one leg of the stool. The other leg is the patient’s wishes and autonomy of how they want to be treated and how they don’t. The third leg is a doctor’s expertise – which may be more practice-based than study based, but the relationship of trust between a patient and doctor is a big part of the healing transformation.
All three of these legs work together and with each patient, this takes listening and it takes time – and it is time well spent!
Pricing:
- Subscriptions:
- Individuals: $75 per month
- Couples: $125 per month
- Families: $150 per month
Contact Info:
- Website: https://humanizingmedicine.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HumanizingMedicine/
