The clinic is a multidisciplinary clinic intended to serve patients who have issues with their
bile ducts, biliary disorders and non-malignant conditions of their pancreas.
Specifically, patients who have chronic abdominal pain or actute or chronic pancreatitis.
If you can imagine walking around every day with chronic, severe debilitating pain with
repeated visits to your physician or the emergency room and hospitalizations and constantly being
told we can't find anything wrong with you.
This is a chronic disorder.
By the time they reach our clinic, they've had multiple physician visits, diagnostic
tests, interventions, without relief.
This clinic will provide those patients a central place and multiple disciplines, fantastic
physicians from endocrinology, gastroenterology and surgery and a dedicated nurse coordinator
to always contact and always have options available.
This is the first clinic in the region to be able to serve this patient population.
These patients are managed by their primary care physicians maybe gastroenterologists
and a lot of times, primarily by emergency room physicians who don't follow these patient
long term and who maybe don't specialize in the pancreas.
This is a place where we can offer endoscopic therapies, medically manage these patients.
It's exciting to be able to offer total pancreatectomy and auto-islet cell transplant as an option
for patient with chronic pancreatitis.
Total pancreatectomy with auto-islet cell transplant is intended for patients who have
the chronic severe debilitating pain.
The procedure involves removing the entire pancreas and harvesting the islet cells which
produce insulin and injecting them into the liver where they'll set up and hopefully begin
producing insulin and avoid diabetes.
The goal of the clinic is really to just serve this patient population and give them one
central place they can call and have multiple people and disciplines and therapies to offer.
Previous to coming to this clinic they feel like they're not being heard.
Not necessarily mis-managed, but just not getting answers while they continue to have
issues that affect their daily lives.
They can't go to school, they're missing work, sometimes they're on disability.
Sometimes daily interaction with their families becomes too much.
So a lot of them are dependent on narcotics.
They're really just stretched thin and at the end of their rope When they contact us.
So to give them hope is really exciting.