By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Nicole Lampman "briefly" considered not traveling to Thailand for two weeks in mid-January because of the tsunami, but her mission trip with a friend from Kalamazoo had been planned for more than a year.
Leprosy is a bacterial infection which causes the loss of fingers and toes. "It's basically been eradicated" in the United States, except for a colony near New Orleans. "If a new case is found, it's treated."
The Rochester native lived in the Caribbean for six weeks and has traveled in Europe, but this was her first trip to Asia.
She just bought a house in Dowagiac and considers it home. "This community has just opened its heart to me. I have all of these little surrogate families that take care of me. It's a wonderful community. I've really been impressed by Dowagiac. There are so many people in this town who do overseas work."
Lampman, Dr. Jashu Patel's certified physician's assistant at Michiana Medical Surgical Clinic since the fall of 2002, graduated from Rochester High School in 1996, then attended Michigan State University.
Lampman completed physician's assistant training at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. Her credential, PA-C, means a "certified physician's assistant" who passed the national examination. Michigan requires all practicing PAs to be certified. Before that she had been in the medical field an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) and worked in nursing homes and as a pharmacy technician.
She eventually steered herself toward becoming a physician's assistant "because I knew I wanted to go into medicine and I knew I wanted to do something involved with diagnosis, such as what a physician would do. But I was looking for something with a little more flexibility and the opportunity to spend a little more time with my patients. And that's really what a physician's assistant or nurse practitioner can do."
Being a PA is similar to being a doctor or a nurse in terms of seeing patients, dealing with their medical problems and counseling them in health education, "but at the same time you get to see routine primary medical health care. I can specialize in those types of common issues without having to see some of the more complicated things."
Becoming a PA in Michigan takes a bachelor's degree, plus at least 1,500 hours of health care experience. "After that, it's a two-year, year-around master's degree," Lampman said. "Six years of school training, as opposed for a physician, it's eight years of school training, plus a residency."
Lampman said most of her family teaches, although her relatives were "excited" she went into health care. Her parents are retiring to Coldwater.
Her older brother is a band director in the Ann Arbor area.
Lampman doesn't feel like she bucked the teaching tradition.