Despite an abiding love for music, Dr. Medeiros came from a family of physicians and knew she was headed for a career in medicine from an early age. Her Bachelor’s degree is in Music, and she led and participated in choirs and singing groups at every opportunity throughout her higher education. She remembers the moment at Loma Linda University School of Medicine in Southern California, where she obtained her MD, when she knew primary care was her calling:

“During my Surgery rotation I saw a patient in clinic with a severe diabetic foot infection. It was my job that day to deal with his foot, possibly planning for amputation, but he had no primary doctor to manage his poorly controlled diabetes, which didn’t sit well with me. It was suddenly clear that what I wanted was to care for the whole patient.”

After completing Internal Medicine residency at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, Massachusetts, Dr. M pursued a second board certification in Preventive Medicine, earning a Masters of Public Health (MPH) from UMass Amherst with a concentration on Epidemiology along the way. An underlying burden to care for the underserved led her to consider correctional (prison) health, but marriage and family became a new priority in the meantime. She redirected her focus to instead become an academic hospitalist at her training ground in UMass. She found the educational role incredibly fulfilling, but the hospital setting left something to be desired: a long-term relationship with patients. In search of this, she landed at Reliant Medical Group in Milford, MA, at last in the field of Primary Care. After a few years building up a complex and interesting panel of patients she cared for deeply, Dr. M felt crushed by the increasing administrative tasks making it seem impossible to do justice to medical practice while upholding the priority of her family, that is, until she discovered Direct Primary Care.

Dr. M is well known for ‘turning off the clock’ when she enters an exam room, a method that does not mix well with the ‘burn and churn’ pace of traditional primary care. Looking patients in the eye and connecting with the full story surrounding an injury or illness are the hallmarks of how she approaches diagnosis and management. She feels education is a much more powerful therapeutic tool than are prescriptions, and teaches at every opportunity, considering patients to be her students now. She also keeps her passion for music alive by singing and playing the guitar at local Open Mics from time to time, but her first and last passions by far and away are her husband and two energetic sons.