We began the system now called "the collaborative practice" in 1993 to fill what we believed to be a gap between what the patient expected and desired from her doctors and what she commonly received.

Surely, medical care has improved greatly over the last fifty years. People live longer, more productive lives, and fewer babies die due to prematurity. Much of this progress has been made due to the development of new medicines and the application of new technology.

However, at the same time, a certain depersonalization of medical care seems to have taken place. In an age when the doctor could do little but empathize with, rather than cure, their patients, the patients were grateful and pleased with their care. Why in an era of medical miracles, are the patients apparently less satisfied with their caregivers? The art of medicine seemed to us, and to our patients, to be disappearing. We seemed to be curing more people and they were enjoying it less!

So, we began a journey to do what we could to bring back high-touch medicine to compliment the developments in medical technology.

Our Collaborative Practice is composed of eight doctors (all board-certified Ob/Gyn's), three men and five women, and seven midwives (all board-certified), all women, that practice in three centers spread out across Northern Virginia.

We believe that, whether you are a woman seeking advice about what could be your first sexual encounter, a woman in the prime of her reproductive years, a woman in that transition time of her life, or a woman dealing with senior issues, you deserve a compassionate, as well as knowledgeable, caregiver who has the time and inclination to offer advice and support, as well as the latest in modern tests and medicines.

Our prenatal care focuses on education and empathy, as well as blood tests and sonograms. Remember, most pregnancies are normal. In a given office visit, you may may see one of our doctors or one of the midwives. Our doctors and midwives are experts on the best ways to deal with the changes in your body, as well as the impending changes in your life. If a disease develops, the doctors and midwives, as a team, pursue optimum management. Each patient in labor is cared for by both an obstetrician and a midwife. We believe that more human support in labor leads to better pregnancy outcome. Indeed, we find that our patients undergo cesarean section as much as 30 percent less than the average area woman, vaginal birth after cesarean success is 50 percent higher, and episiotomy and serious vaginal tear rates are substantially lower.

Our gynecologic practice looks at the complete woman. We think that a woman is more than the sum of her reproductive parts. We believe that medications and surgery can be sustaining and life giving, but without a complete understanding of your condition, medicines and/or surgery are useless, and moreover, at its worst, surgery without solid indications can be harmful.

Lets take, for example, a 39 year-old woman, married mother of three children, consults us. She reports that she is tired all the time and perhaps a little depressed. She also has heavy menses and pelvic pain and has been told that she has fibroids. A hysterectomy has been suggested by her gynecologist. Is it necessary? Perhaps, but perhaps not.

If she is rising at 5 a.m., getting the kids off to school, commuting to work, picking up her children after school, cooking dinner, supervising homework, and then falling into bed at midnight after doing a load of wash, her tiredness, pain and depression might not be all fibroids, and hysterectomy may not be the cure.

The right answer may not be the easy answer. The patient could need blood work to demonstrate or refute an anemia or other medical condition, a sonogram to document the size and location of the fibroids in her uterus, an endometrial biopsy (a small office procedure) to rule out malignancy, and a couples therapist to find out why she seems to lack support from her spouse.

A life solution that includes some help at home, an exercise program, a stress-reduction class, along with hormone therapy might be just what the doctor (or the midwife) orders.

If you would like to be listened to, as well as cared for, then you will find our "collaborative practice" worth investigating.