Dr. Melissa Miskell - Focus Total Health

I grew up in West Texas. I am a West Texas girl in Odessa, Texas. Then moved to Lubbock, Texas to do my college at Texas Tech University. I thought Lubbock was a Mecca compared to Odessa because it had trees and it had lakes. I actually stayed in Lubbock and got a Master’s degree and then I moved to Fort Worth and then that’s where I did medical school. So we were there for eight years. I had three kids there and then moved back to Lubbock to do residency. From there, I opened a private practice in New Braunfels, Texas and that’s where I’ve been. My original office is there and has been opened for 16 years now. Then we moved to Boerne, which has been opened about six and then San Antonio which has been opened three and now Austin which has been opened just a year. We concentrate now pretty much on bio-identical hormones and wellness. We still run a full gynecology practice but I don’t deliver babies anymore. Well basically I’d always wanted to do medicine, but actually when I was an undergraduate, I had a counselor tell me I would never go to medical school. And unfortunately I believed her and so it took me a few years to realize that that was actually what I wanted to do. I actually went to medical school when I was 30 and so it worked out really well. She was actually at the medical school at Tech when I did my residency there so I reintroduced myself to her since I was the chief resident at that time. Well really obstetrics was my first love. Before I went to medical school, I was a drug rep and we had a birth control pill and prenatal vitamin and so I called on a lot of OB/GYNs at that time and I really just fell in love with it. I had a child and really when I walked through the doors of that medical school, I knew I wanted to do OBGYN. The thing I was concerned about was surgery. I had never actually seen a surgery so I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to faint and it turned out to be an icing on the cake so it was great. I had three kids of my own and was starting to miss a lot of their things because obstetrics takes up so much time. Gynecology is great because I get to take care of my patients really from the time they start having periods all the way through menopause so gynecology is a fabulous area to be in. As I said, we do a lot of hormone replacement and a lot of wellness so we very much gear our practice to treating each person as an individual; what one person needs, another person doesn’t; that’s really what I love about what I do. We do cardiovascular assessment with the true health diagnostic testing. We do neurotransmitter testing. We do food allergy testing. We do full gynecology and then of course the hormone replacement. Our patients would be like “can you please help my husband, he’s worse than me” so we started to do some training and yes we do hormone replacement for men as well. Well I would say the most rewarding thing is, well it’s actually been funny, is I’ll be at HEB or whatever and run into one of my patients and she’ll be with her family and her family’s like “thank you so much for fixing my mom or whatever” so that’s probably the most rewarding when you actually can see a change in someone’s life on a daily basis. Well I have three children. I had one, my oldest, when I started med school, well I had two in med school, which I wouldn’t necessarily recommend but again, I was old when I started. My husband was a professional golfer when we met and when I started residency, he decided to stay home with the kids. I originally asked whose kids, but he’s done a fabulous job and that’s been 20 years ago so now he does, he’s a national rank amateur golfer now and would maybe like to do the Senior Tour at some point. My passion, other than my practice, is an organization called PINCC and I’m the medical director for that and we actually travel all over world training people how to recognize cervical dysplasia and treating it without electricity; so we train healthcare workers in third world countries and once they’ve been trained and pass our standards, we leave our equipment for them so they’re self-sustaining.