Dr. Bachtold joins Bend Memorial Clinic staff

There's a new doc in town. Joseph F. Bachtold, D.O., M.P.H., F.A.A.F.P., has joined Dr. May Fan at the Bend Memorial Clinic (BMC) office in Sisters.

Despite all those letters after his name (we'll get to that), Dr. Bachtold laughs quickly and easily. He has spent the last seven years in John Day, arriving to practice medicine in Sisters at the beginning of May. He has a wife and two sons, ages 10 and seven (actually seven-and-a-half. That half is very important to his seven-year-old, said Dr. Bachtold).

Dr. Bachtold was well known to the group at BMC after he did residency training with the group at St. Charles Medical Center, and they became "like an extended family to me."

Ironically, Dr. Bachtold was in Camp Sherman on the Metolius River with his family when the call came from BMC that they needed another doctor in Sisters to replace Stephen Greer, who moved to Alaska. It was time for a change, and the offer was accepted.

Dr. Bachtold said his hope is to "offer comprehensive care to my patients ... I want to be an integral part of the community."

That was the case in John Day, where most people get their care locally and in that rural area, the doctor got "to know families and extended families. You become part of their lives, they were an important part of our lives. It was hard for me (to leave)," said Dr. Bachtold.

Dr. Bachtold did his undergraduate training at St. Thomas in Minnesota, attended medical school at Western University of Health Sciences in Los Angeles where he became a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.), got his Masters in Public Health (that's the M.P.H.) at the University of Hawaii, did his residency through Oregon Health Sciences University, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Family Practice (that's the F.A.A.F.P.).

As an osteopathic physician, Dr. Bachtold says his training emphasizes what the American Osteopathic Association calls "whole person." Dr. Bachtold says that "we don't divide the body up into all its pieces, and get too many cooks in the kitchen."

This is a strong emphasis from Dr. Bachtold. He believes that the direction of medicine in the U.S. toward greater and greater specialization is a poor use of resources.

"Eighty percent of medical care in other countries is done by primary care doctors, with the other 20 percent done by specialists. Here we have it backwards (with 80 percent done by specialists).

"That is costly and ineffective. Specialty care is exceedingly expensive and in many cases you don't need that. Too often there is no quarterback looking at the whole patient," said Dr. Bachtold.

Dr. Bachtold said he has no reluctance to tap the specialists if there is anything he sees in a patient for which he wants another opinion in consultation.

Even then, a family practice physician is a specialist of sorts, and Dr. Bachtold points out that even a family doctor now goes through three years of residential post-graduate training.

Dr. Bachtold's emphasis reflects well descriptions from the American Osteopathic Association, which describes both M.D. (allopathic physician) and D.O. (osteopathic physician) as the two types of "complete physicians in the United States." Education of the two are very similar, and the boards to pass in individual states are the same.

The AOA emphasizes that D.O.s stress the concept of the "musculoskeletal system as a key element of health... the body's ability to heal itself ...preventative medicine, eating properly and keeping fit."

With this philosophy, D.O.s often specialize in primary care areas, such as pediatrics, family practice, obstetrics and gynecology, and internal medicine, according to the AOA.

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