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  • Home
  • About Dr. Jensen
  • Services
  • New Patients
  • Office Policy
  • Books by Dr. Jensen
  • Contact

Office Policy

  • Office Policy
  • Get Help with Insurance
  • Current with Science
  • Latest Medical Treatments
  • Get Results

Office Policy

Emergencies: If an emergency occurs, please go immediately to the nearest Emergency
Room or call 911. Our office is not equipped to deal with emergency situations and your
care will be best handled by the nearest hospital.

  • Non-life-threatening emergencies: Call the office and inform who answers the phone there is an urgent situation and they will attempt to get ahold of the doctor and have
    him call you back ASAP.
  • Check In: Patients must check in with the Receptionist or risk not being checked in and causing their account to be billed as a “no show.” During check in it is the patient’s responsibility to inform us of any changes in address, insurance, or other demographic
    information.
  • Refill Requests: If you run out of medication, it means you didn’t schedule a follow up appointment as was discussed in the last visit or you missed an appointment. Don’t forget to plan ahead when you are leaving town on vacation. Pharmacies often send auto-refill requests when your prescription is low. While this may work for other practices, our policy is to deny these requests. Patients must make an appointment to get medication refills. If the patient misses an appointment they should not ask the pharmacy to call in a refill request to the office. It will be denied and only delay the patient from making an appointment.
  • To avoid this, we recommend scheduling follow-up visits at the end of each appointment instead of relying on noticing when your medication is running out.
    By the time you call to schedule something, there may be no appointments available and you risk having to go without medication.
  • Medication: Please don’t stop or change your medications without first talking to the doctor in person. There are risks to your health if you change medication on your own.
  • Controlled Substances: Prescriptions for Ritalin, Dexedrine, Focalin, and Adderall and Vyvanse cannot be called in to a Pharmacy and must be written out and picked-up at the office by the Patient or their Guardian.
  • Paperwork: Patients who need letters, disability paperwork, recommendation letters, prior authorizations for medications, or other paperwork are required to schedule an appointment with the doctor.
  • Prior Authorizations for Medication: Often when prescribed a new medication, a patient’s insurance company won’t pay for it until a “Prior Authorization” is completed by the Doctor. Unfortunately, we won’t know if one is necessary until the patient goes to the pharmacy to fill the prescription. We understand it is frustrating to have to make multiple appointments in a short period of time, but your insurance requires the paperwork and the doctor needs time to fill it out.
  • 3rd Party Billing: We won’t bill people other than the patient and insurance company for your visit.
  • Returned Check Fee: Any returned checks will be charged $20.00 plus a $15.00 office fee or whatever the Bank Fee is plus $15.00. The minimum charge billed to your account is $35.00.

Get Help with Insurance

Another Key Issue is Helping People with Insurance Issues!

Our administrative assistant does a great job working with people on the many insurance questions that come up…even if you haven’t started working with me.  Ask my assistant or receptionist your questions and we’ll do our best to help you sort out things in that jungle of insurance rules…

Thanks for all your work and dedication, guys! I couldn’t have a medical practice without your help and I very much appreciate all your hard work and integrity.

Relax!

The more relaxed and comfortable a person feels, the better able they are to tell me what is really going on so  I can find a way to help.  And that is important. Getting better also involves an accurate understanding of what is bothering you. Studies show patients getting better often don’t follow through with their medication or other strategies and doctors need to do a better job in forging stronger doctor patient relationships.

So our “homey environment” is all about helping you get better and stay better. To top it off I have put dozens of my wildlife photographs in the office for making the office more personal.  I threw out a bunch of money off coupon displays from drug companies to make for a less corporate atmosphere, in response to feedback from patients.

Current with Science

At Our Office, We Stay Current With The Science

To help people feel comfortable coming to our office for medical care, we’ve done a number of things:

  • Our office is at 3500 John F Kennedy Parkway, Suite 210, Fort Collins, CO.  It is quiet yet private. Our entrance is handicap accessible and there is an elevator up to my office.
  • We have early and late hours to accommodate people’s schedules: Mondays and Tuesdays we work until 6 pm and most days we start at 8 am.  People appreciate this!
  • Our staff strives to be sensitive and personable and understanding.
  • We offer coffee, tea and other condiments, as well as magazines and music and comfortable chairs.
  • And did I forget someone?  We have a“happy greeter dog” to meet you.  Sammy joined us in 2016 and is a “mellow lab,” greeting you with a wagging.  He’s a practical example of a service dog in action.
  • is stressful for many to come to a doctor and deal with life’s troubles, and a number of therapists and psychiatrists in the country have found pets help people take their minds off themselves for a moment.  A dog’s accepting and cheerful attitude can also be infectious!  And what better to complete the homey environment than a dog?

There has been an explosion in new medicines for a variety of concerns in recent years.

There are now medications for fibromyalgia (lyrica), chronic fatigue (provigil), and a whole host of new medications for other concerns:

  • Depression (more than two dozen new medicines)
  • Bipolar Affective Disorder (more than a dozen new medicines)
  • Panic Disorder (more than a dozen new medicines)
  • Alcohol Dependence (antabuse, campral, revia)
  • Nicotine Dependence (chantix)
  • Borderline Personality Disorder (dialectic behavior  therapy and several new medicines)

Increasingly my own medical journals have gone beyond medical research alone and tapped in to an enormous base of hundreds of scientific journals  in the new field of brain science.  A leader in this field is the psychiatrist Eric Kanfield, winner of the Nobel Prize for his work in this field, defining the molecular basis of learning in neurons in the central nervous system.

You, as a result, will benefit from my readling in these fields.  I have many articles copied on my computer as well on paper in my office for your perusal.

These include articles from well respected peer-reviewed journals in science, such as:

  • Archives of General Psychiatry
  • American Journal of Psychiatry
  • Journal of the American Psychiatric Association
  • National Institutes of Mental Health
  • Natural History
  • Neuropsychopharmacology
  • Biological Psychiatry
  • Nature Medicine
  • Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience
  • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
  • The Journal of Neuroscience
  • The Journal of Neuroscience
  • Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health
  • Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience
  • American Family Physician
  • Archives of Internal Medicine
  • The New England Journal of Medicine
  • Molecular Psychiatry
  • Neurobiology
  • Annual Reviews of Neuroscience
  • Journal of American Medical Association
  • Psychiatric Annals
  • Science

Are you beginning to get a picture of the explosion of information about how the brain works?

You don’t have to read these journals.  I have!  I’ll simply share with you the  “nuggets of gold” of information relevant to your care.  If you want to read some summaries of new science, I can refer you to web sites I’ve personally visited and found to have accurate information.

Latest Medical Treatments

At Our Office, We Stay Current With The New Medical Information As Well

Medicines can help the brain heal from “chemical imbalances,” or structural problems such as defective serotonin pumps, or inflammatory processes such as depression, and I will share with you scientific evidence for this fact.

It is important you understand why we believe a medicine works and how we believe it works.  I will either show you the scientific study that proves a medication works, or I will show you how to find that study by doing an internet search yourself.  Now days, people want to take an active role in their medical care.

“Expert opinions” about what a medicine is good for is not enough now days, people want to see “proof” because the placebo effect and “tricks with statistics” can make herbal preparations, alternative and traditional medications look like they work for a given problem, when they don’t.  Everyone has heard stories of drug companies “covering up” research studies that showed a certain medicine didn’t work.

Get Results

People Want Results and That’s What I’m Here For!

As a trained physician, my approach is “driven by the evidence.”  The days of a doctor just making educated guesses is long gone.  We have evidence now to inform us of what medications work for what concerns, and likewise what counseling strategies work for what specific concerns.  We even have a deeper understanding of the nature of the underlying brain structures that are not working right.

For instance, with depression, a major factor in depression is thought to be with early life stress activating the otherwise dormant s allele of the promoter region of the SERT gene (SLC 6A4), which leads the serotonin nerves to make defective serotonin reuptake  transporters (SERT), thereby causing the serotonin nerves to be ineffective in reabsorbing serotonin it has released.  This is a major way serotonin nerves “recycle” serotonin by reabsorbing and repackaging it so its readily available to be released again. (1)

Another study found antidepressants stop the reduction in serotonin 1A receptors due to stress, allowing serotonin nerves to better respond to stress and calm down the depression center in the brain (thalamus) and fear center (amygdala).  This also allows the brain to more dynamically respond to “natural remedies,” too.  Exercise releases about 4 times more nerve growth factor in rats that used an antidepressant compared to rats that ran 2 kilometers per night and didn’t use an MAO inhibitor antidepressant.  I have a number of patients using daily exercise and medication and exposure to sunlight to “beat back” their depression, when medication alone didn’t give good enough results.

The Information Age has truly brought about much healing in the area of mental health by allowing us to understand our brain more effectively.

References

  1. Google search, “National Center For Complementary And Integrative Health.” Also, “Complementary Medicine,” British Medical Journal.
  2. Search for: “Positive Psychiatry: It’s Time Has Come,” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
  3. See Wikipedia, “Biomedical Model,” and “Psychiatry.”
  4. See Wikipedia, “Alternative Medicine.” See also: https://nccih.nih.gov/health/integrative-health
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