Pediatrician explains her decision to create Alexandre Centre for Children’s Health in Fayetteville, a practice that provides a variety of medical, holistic and wellness services to children
By Chris Motola
Q: How did you come to found The Alexandre Centre for Children’s Health?
A: So, my background is in pediatric medicine and pediatric emergency medicine and I practiced in Florida for like 10 years. And then I became a mommy and ended up moving back to Syracuse, which is my hometown, where I grew up. And I really struggled as a mom, finding a pediatrician that was as supportive as my kid’s pediatrician in Florida was.
Q: What did you encounter?
A: As I just kind of worked my way through, spending time and struggling to find a provider for him, I found that a lot of parents in our community were struggling with the exact same thing I was. And there was this very common theme of “there’s not a lot of choice in this area. The doctors don’t respect the parents. They don’t have enough time to talk to you.” It was their way or the highway kind of situation. And it really just broke my heart because I’ve never really experienced medicine in that way. We’ve always just been very respectful of parents’ wishes and very much wanting to meet families kind of where they are.
Q: Was it a question of resources?
A: I just noticed there were a lot of barriers here in Syracuse, like a lot of specialists that were needed for kids weren’t available. The wait times were really long. And then, really, there’s this global shift toward holistic or natural medicine. You can find that in a lot of areas of the country, but it was particularly difficult to find that for pediatric care in our community. I got this bug in my ear. Maybe I should just branch out on my own and try to build like a group practice where we’re able to provide the services that are lacking in this area. To me that was holistic and natural medicine, combined with traditional Western medicine, allowing avenues where parents have multiple choices and more freedom for their children’s treatment. I also wanted to increase access, easy access to care. If your kid is sick, your kid needs a physical, your kid needs whatever and there’s not a six-month wait or a two-week wait. Or if you just have a quick question, having access to a nurse or a doctor just to be able to get like some simple advice when you don’t actually need to come into the office and be seen.
Q: How did it start coming together? What kinds of services does the centre offer?
A: I just gathered as many folks as I could. It took about a year, but little by little, we built this center. So it’s not really a traditional pediatric practice. It’s a center for children where we exclusively provide a variety of medical and holistic and wellness services to children in our community that are unavailable in the area. We have a whole mental health arm with therapy and psychology, vagal nerve therapy and acupuncture. We have this whole wellness arm where we do breath-body connection for trauma, whether it be physical or emotional. We have reiki, we have yoga and then we have a therapy arm for kids with developmental issues that would include physical therapy, speech therapy, feeding issues, occupational therapy. We try to be very community based. So every month we host a speaker from our community to educate us about something in the medical field that is not mainstream. And then we have our traditional, naturopathic arm where we have two naturopathic doctors that treat children in a more holistic, natural way with nutrition, supplements, with visceral manipulation, cranialsacral therapy, chiropractic work. And then there’s just little old me. I do just the medical pediatric stuff, stitches, school physicals, colds and flus.
Q: Holistic medicine has a lot of appeal for adults, who may be more open to experimenting. What’s driving the demand for parents for their children?
A: What I’m seeing is we have this explosion of chronic medical and chronic health conditions in children now right from autoimmune disease like Type 1 diabetes to rheumatoid arthritis. There is also tick-borne illness like Lyme causing chronic neurological issues. We have a lot of kids that have mental health issues that are related to anxiety and depression, a lot of sensory and motor tics, developmental delays, social impairment. And then there are the big ones like ADHD and autism. So we’re trying to tackle a lot of those complex medical conditions in other ways. If they have another doctor or they’re seeing like a specialist at the hospital or a clinic, we collaborate and coordinate with their care. But a lot of the parents are coming because they’re like, well, listen, my kids had this problem for like four years and they’re not getting better. And no one’s offering me a treatment plan other than go to therapy. They want their children to function on their own, be able to feed themselves, dress themselves, go to school, interact with mainstream children their age.
Q: What do you think is driving all of these stubborn issues, apart from issues with an obvious vector like Lyme disease?
A: We think it’s a combination of a lot of things. There are environmental toxins, in our food, in our air. There are all these medications kids are on and their side effects. Science and technology is also developing and getting better at diagnosing these things. But I think the reality is we don’t have a cure for a lot of these problems; we just have treatments. And I think people and especially parents, are looking for something more. And they’re being referred to specialists, which are doing a wonderful job in their own specific niche, but aren’t coordinating their knowledge and their care with the other providers. As a field we’re not looking at the human body as a whole. We’re looking at tiny, teeny parts. And we know that the human body doesn’t work like that.
Q: Does the centre accept insurance?
A: We don’t have contracts with insurance and that’s by design. We want the parents to have full medical freedom in how their children are treated. If we’re providing medical services that New York state insurance would reimburse for, we give them what’s called a super bill, which they can get reimbursed. Labs, imaging, an M.D. visit and even things like physical therapy and acupuncture. But things like naturopathy they won’t reimburse.
Q: Are you a concierge services?
A: It’s a concierge service, so we treat our families like family. They come in and out, the kids come into play, moms come to have a cup of coffee, they pop in just to say hi. So it’s very community-based in that regard. All of our families have our personal cell phone numbers, so if anything comes up with the kids, they can reach out to us directly and not have to wait. So usually they’re getting an answer from us almost immediately, if not within an hour or two. They’re getting advice and support almost continuously.
Lifelines
Name: Shareen Ismail, M.D.
Focus: Specialist in pediatric emergency medicine
Position: Pediatrician and creator of The Alexandre Centre for Children’s Health
Hometown: Syracuse
Education: Graduated from Ross University School of Medicine (2007), completed a three-year pediatric residency at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2010 and an additional three-year fellowship in pediatric emergency medicine at the University of Florida College of Medicine in 2013.
Career: Practiced pediatric emergency medicine at Wolfson Children’s Hospital in Jacksonville, Florida until 2018 before moving back to her hometown of Syracuse.