By Joyce Coronel
Dr. Zaheer Shah may be new to this East Valley neighborhood but not to reminding its residents what to do before they get sick.
Shah and his team of health care professionals just opened a new clinic in Tempe, helping to ease the area’s shortage of primary care physicians. With evening hours and same-day appointments, the practice is geared toward young, active families.
An Ivy-League-educated, board certified internist, Shah, along with Kayla Shelley, a physician assistant, recently opened Primacare Adult and Adolescent Internal Medicine in Tempe near Loop 101 and Baseline Road.
A third physician, Dr. Ahmed Akhtar, is awaiting licensure in Arizona after years of practice in other states and will join the practice at a future date.
Shah and Akhtar grew up together, and Shah and Shelley were in practice together on the East Coast.
Notably, Shah is quick to point out, while many people wait until they’re ill to consult a physician, it’s important to establish a relationship with a primary care physician before an illness or injury occurs.
“I like the old adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” Shah said.
“The preventive model is the one that everyone is moving toward and the one that we’ve dedicated our lives to.”
Establishing a relationship with a primary care doctor means that “someone gets to know you personally, gets to know your methods of communication better—gets to know your health better and can anticipate problems better. It’s hard to replace that kind of intimate relationship with occasional urgent care visits,” Shah said.
Shelley noted that patients who see a primary care physician are often able to avoid complications. Conditions such as high blood pressure or a chronic cough may in fact signal more serious underlying issues.
“Definitely with the high blood pressure…or somebody that had an on-the-job injury and then comes in and they hadn’t been seen in three years and their blood pressure is sky high — we find the underlying causes and processes with that,” Shelley said.
“Patients with a chronic cough, we have diagnosed lung cancer at our previous practice.” Not only that, they also treated patients with skin lesions that turned out to be melanoma, she added.
Shah said Primacare is dedicated to integrative health care and is open to the use of alternative remedies. For 20 years, Shah said he’s been using intravenous vitamin therapies to treat certain ailments like chronic fatigue and recurrent upper respiratory infections.
“We are very open to having conversations with patients that want to entertain using alternative remedies,” Shah said. And while vitamins, supplements and alternative therapies are becoming more popular, the role physical fitness plays in a person’s health also gets plenty of attention at Primacare.
Achtar pointed to fitness and exercise as a way to maintain health. “My greatest passion after all these years of practice is to keep people healthy to prevent disease,” Achtar said. “I find a great deal of pleasure in helping people live a more fit life.”
“Fitness can be fun too,” Shelley said. “It’s 2016 — it’s yoga, it’s Zumba. It doesn’t have to be miserable. It can be enjoyable for people these days.”
“Fitness can prevent further issues down the road,” Achtar said. “Diabetes and hypertension specifically.” He’s seen the value of exercise and its propensity to transform lives in his patients.
“It lowers blood sugar, lowers their hypertension, gives them a little more fulfilling life. They sleep better, their moods are better, and their relationships are better,” Achtar said.
And while many medical health care providers carry a laptop into the exam room these days, that doesn’t happen at Primacare.
“We pride ourselves on being very receptive, open and engaged with our patients,” Shah said. “Our effort is to answer all those questions and to do it in a manner where there’s eye contact and interactivity. We don’t want to be turning away from the patient and looking at a laptop.”
Shah said in many ways Primacare is a “one-stop-shop” in that he and Shelley are comfortable performing minor surgical procedures such as punch biopsies or draining abscesses.
They also have a background in emergency medicine, having owned two urgent care clinics on the East Coast, Shah said.
Primacare is at 2163 E. Baseline Road, Suite 101, Tempe. Information: 480-646-8123.
