Consortium Creates Corridor of Care
Free monthly roundtables to address various health and wellness topics
MAY 16, 2023 BY Cassandra Shofar
A pocket of like-minded holistic practitioners have decided to take their synergistic vibes to another level.
The newly formed Corridor of Care on East Washington Street in Chagrin Falls hopes to provide people with a one-stop consortium every month that tackles health and wellness issues from multiple angles.
Bringing practitioners together with backgrounds in myriad areas — including osteopathy, massage therapy, integrative pain management, clinical mental health counseling, naturopathy, integrative yoga and reiki — for free monthly roundtables, the group aims to provide awareness and resources to address health concerns like chronic pain, trauma and insomnia, as well as nutrition and the mind-body connection.
“It’s a collaborative group of practitioners that are working to help people on their healing and wellness journey,” said Dr. Patricia Delzell, an integrative pain physician and owner of Advanced MMC at 8401 Chagrin Road. “I happen to do chronic pain. Many of the other people do that, as well as other things, too. A lot of people have a lot of chronic issues and either don’t have the proper people taking care of them or don’t know where to go for their issues and aren’t getting the relief they need with what they’re currently doing. The (Corridor of Care) practitioners are of varied backgrounds and expertise.”
FINDING HER CORRIDOR
Delzell, who previously ran the musculoskeletal ultrasound service at the Cleveland Clinic for 10 years, left in 2019 and opened her integrative pain medicine practice after feeling a call to do more.
“I would have clients that just kept having to come back … there was still a third of patients who had chronic pain that wasn’t getting better,” said Delzell, who decided in 2017 to do a fellowship at the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine in Tucson, Ariz. “I (ran) a pain clinic at the Cleveland Clinic twice a month and found it to be very helpful for people and rewarding.”
After leaving the clinic, Delzell, who thrives on collaborating with others, was missing that puzzle piece.
“I’ve been in research my whole life. When I would do research nationally, we had a collaborative group. We would meet together and present together from all over the country,” she said. “When I left the clinic, all of a sudden, I was not … in that environment anymore. I (wanted) to create that same type of environment to help me practice efficiently.”
And so became the Corridor of Care — which includes Delzell; Jennifer Cabic, a board-certified traditional naturopath, master herbalist, holistic health coach and advanced nutrition consultant; Jennifer Emch, a supervising licensed professional clinical counselor, certified dancing mindfulness facilitator and co-owner of Ubuntu Wellness in Chardon and Chagrin; Polly Manke, owner of The Heart Center in Bainbridge Township and a yoga therapy practitioner, certified health coach and reiki master; and Dr. Rob Truax, an osteopath who owns Chagrin Osteopathic – Medical & Massage with his wife, Colleen Truax, a certified massage therapist.
FORMING THE ROUNDTABLE
The Corridor of Care group was a natural fit — they were all already sharing a lot of the same patients, Delzell said.
“Even though we’re not in the same practice, we try to create a collaborative plan,” she said. “We try to share the same goals, so the treatment plan is very cohesive and collaborative.
“I look at what is the anatomic problem … the internal and external environment, contributors in people’s lifestyle, the food they’re eating, vitamins and minerals, social supports, sleep environment, physical activity,” Delzell added. “(The) third component is the mind-body component. I look at the patient from all the angles and then develop and individualize treatment for them based on their story, what’s happened to them in the past and what’s happening to them then and there.”
The group meets at 6 p.m. every third Thursday of the month at ReSet Lounge, 530 E. Washington St., for a roundtable discussion with the public on a variety of topics using a hypothetical patient as an example.
This month’s topic, on May 18, is chronic pain.
“Each practitioner will spend five minutes (talking) about how they would help this person, support this person through their condition and then it’ll be opened up to the audience,” said Beth Johnson, part-owner of ReSet Lounge and roundtable host and moderator. “The audience really highlights how you can better coordinate care. It’s not like every person will fit the profile, but they’ll understand what everyone involved does around pain.”
ReSet Lounge offers services ranging from personal training and health coaching — including Cabic’s varied services — to body and energy work, Johnson said.
“What was intriguing (about the roundtables) for us is we don’t diagnose, we don’t have the medical piece, but what we do have is a lot of things that supplement care for people who have different conditions,” she said. “One of the biggest things we have that is so important to health is things to help you relax your nervous system, things to help you detox and things to help lower inflammation. Regardless of what you’re battling or even if you’re simply trying to be the most vital healthy person you can be, keeping the nervous system in balance is just so important.
“The one thing COVID did, if it didn’t polarize you, it made people think about their bodies differently and about being in your best possible state to fight this stuff,” she added. “And that’s really what we have. We have things that preventatively help you be optimized.”
AN ORGANIC FIT
The Truaxes, who opened their business a year ago, already shared many clients with Delzell before she approached them about the consortium.
“She’s a natural extension of our referrals. In our clinic, if there is something that we feel needs to have more intervention, she’s one of the doctors we refer to — one of many,” said Colleen. “When Dr. Delzell approached us with her collaboration … it felt organic. We do massage and we do osteopathic manipulative treatment. We have a very straightforward clinic. You come to us for the least intervention of your pain, but sometimes it requires a little bit more. That’s when we send them to Dr. Delzell.”
Rob, a family and sports medicine physician, said many chronic pains are musculoskeletal in nature and the best way to address them is through hands-on treatments and exercises.
“I’m qualified to determine whether someone’s pain is not safe to exercise or safe to exercise,” he said. “For some people, their pain gets worse because they’re afraid to exercise. They don’t know who to ask and that’s where our clinic plays a role.”
Rob picked the May topic of chronic pain because of its prominence in many people’s lives.
“A lot of people come in to us and they’re not taken seriously. They say, ‘Why am I feeling this pain, is it all in my head?’” he said. “We hope that when they come to this roundtable, they walk away (thinking), ‘My pain is being taken seriously,’ that they get a good idea why it’s so difficult to diagnose and a care pathway that doesn’t just involve one thing, but several things to try (and) some direction.”
BRINGING MIND & BODY TOGETHER
For Emch and Manke, helping people connect the physical with the mental and emotional is the epicenter of their wheelhouses.
“It sounds simple, but it’s so critical and foundational just giving people the tools within themselves to be able to regulate their nervous system,” said Manke, who specializes in what she calls integrative yoga and movement therapy that works with the limbic system. “We are living in a very stressful world and many people are shallow breathers and it puts a lot of stress on the nervous system. We help people down-regulate the nervous system or up-regulate (as needed).”
Manke, whose business is at 8456 E. Washington St. in Bainbridge Township, is excited to be a part of a consortium and what she sees as a new model of collaboration rather than competition.
“It’s part of a solution instead of the problem … of the whole picture of health and well-being. It’s great to be working with these doctors. It’s something I’ve been dreaming of for a long time,” she said. “They can do the medical assessment and then I can help their clients develop skills that help regulate their nervous system — movement that can bring our energy up, calm us down or focus us in.”
Every one of the providers is holistically minded, whether they call themselves integrative or holistic practitioners, they see the mind, body and spirit system as one, Manke said of the Corridor of Care.
“It’s not separate … the mind, the body and spirit, they’re not separate,” she said. “So, every one of the practitioners involved gets that concept. Where our medical model seems to break down is that it compartmentalizes the body. Nobody (here) sees it as separate.”
Emch — who specializes in trauma work and is certified in eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, clinical hypnosis, mindfulness-based stress reduction, motivational interviewing and other cognitive behavioral strategies — is “beyond excited” to sit at the table.
“There is not a ‘one size fits all’ approach to health and wellness and so many people may not even be aware of some of the clinicians, doctors and healers, and programming that the community has to offer to support one’s wellness journey,” she said. “Also, we want people to understand that we don’t work in ‘healing silos’ and there is a lot of collaboration and shared referrals between all of our services and businesses.”
Emch’s goal is to reduce the stigma of mental health and provide education about the mind-body connection, including how intertwined they are and how they impact physical and emotional well-being.
“Our thoughts, emotions, behaviors, attitudes and how we interpret the world matters. My passion is working with trauma, whether that be emotional or physical. What we often find is that our stories can ‘get stuck’ in our bodies and can manifest in a variety of ways,” she said. “Trauma directly connects to our body’s central stress response system and can make us more reactive to stress and kick our bodies’ production of cortisol, the stress hormone, into overdrive.
“As with anything that we have too much of in our bodies, chronic and high levels of cortisol can be toxic over time and can potentially lead to increased risks of health conditions, anxiety, depression, migraines, chronic pain, IBS and heart disease, to name a few,” Emch continued. “My work over the last 20 years has really continued to highlight the need for a more widespread understanding of these connections and how we can work to heal together.”
In addition to counseling services, Ubuntu — at 201 and 203 Main St. in Chardon and 516 E. Washington St. in Chagrin — offers massage therapy, reiki, yoga and a variety of other wellness workshops and programming.
“Our services, whether individual or group format, are beautifully curated to the specific needs of those we serve. Our clinical counseling services are robust with evidence-based interventions to help people address ‘the issues in our tissues,’ whether that be emotional or physical,” Emch said. “I hope those who attend this month’s discussion will not only gain education regarding chronic pain, but also learn ways to address/manage it, as well as education about the wide scope of services the community has to offer.”
UPCOMING ROUNDTABLE TOPICS:
May 18 – Moving Beyond Pain: Collaborative Approaches to Fibromyalgia, Myofascial Pain Syndrome and Generalized Chronic Pain
June 15 – Food for Thought. Is Food Medicine?
July 20 – Body and Mind in Harmony: A Collaborative Approach to Overcoming Anxiety, Stress, Depression and Their Physical Manifestations
August 17 – Why Doesn’t the Rotator Cuff Matter?
September 21 – From Fear to Freedom: Moving Beyond Physical or Emotional Trauma
October 19 – The Pharmacy of Sleep
Registration is not required but is appreciated. To sign up for the roundtables, click here.