Testimonials

“I’ve been seeing doctor DeStephens for over a year now. His staff is always friendly and helpful. Doctor DeStephens is one of the most caring and skilled physicians I have ever been a patient of. He takes a lot of time with you to find out how you are both physically and emotionally. He has a very whole body approach to medicine. I would highly recommend doctor DeStephans to any of my family and friends. I actually have. My wife and a few coworkers now see DeStephans on my recommendation and they love him too.”

“I saw Dr. DeStephens for a 2nd opinion after my heart doctor told me that I needed to have a surgical heart bypass procedure because he thought my chest pain was coming from my heart and my heart cath showed bad blockages.  He told me that it was urgent and that if I waited too long that I would probably have a heart attack and die.  Dr. DeStephens took a very detailed history of all my symptoms, examined me and reviewed all my records including the video of the heart cath.  He confirmed that I did have heart blockages but he said that they weren’t bad enough to require surgery yet.  He told me that bypass surgery was my ace in the hole and that I was still young, 48 years, and that I needed to reserve possible bypass surgery for if I become significantly worse in spite of all my medications because people are rarely given a second bypass surgery.  He offered me ECP therapy which is an outpatient treatment that over the course of 7 weeks stimulates the growth of new circulation all over the body but especially in the heart.  I checked and found out that my insurance would pay for it so I went through the 7 week course.  Afterwards, I had no further heart pain when I would do any of my routine daily activities.  Later I had a routine appointment with my other heart doctor who was the one who told me I needed bypass surgery and mentioned to him that I was having some shortness of breath.  He examined me and told me angrily that I had heart failure and that I should have listened to him about having bypass surgery.  I told him that I didn’t think I was in heart failure that maybe I was just having some cold symptoms.  He told me that he would prove it to me by doing a heart scan on me and comparing it to the original one that could determine the strength of my heart.  After he did the scan, he wanted to talk about something else but I pressed him to tell me what the scan showed.  Without looking at me in a low tone of voice that it looked a little better.  It turned out that I did just have a mild cold with some wheezing.  My heart was fine.  ECP worked!  And I haven’t wasted my ace in the hole!  But Dr. DeStephens says that if I take exceptionally good care of myself while correcting all the bad habits and chemistry problems that he explained to me that caused the blockages then I may not ever need bypass surgery.  That’s my ticket!”

“A couple of years ago, I went to see Dr. DeStephens because of some pain in my right side and back.  It turned out to be a kidney stone.  When it didn’t pass in a few days he sent me to a kidney doctor who scanned my kidneys looking for the stone.  He found it but told me that I also had a mass in the same kidney that he said was a 70% chance of being a kidney cancer.  I was 88 years old at the time and didn’t want to have my kidney removed which is what he recommended.  I called Dr. DeStephens who had earlier told me to call him if the kidney doctor wanted to do anything else other than to remove the kidney stone.  When I explained that the kidney doctor wanted to take out my kidney because he thought I had cancer, Dr. DeStephens arranged to have my scans looked at by another X-ray doctor.  After talking to the X-ray doctor Dr. DeStephens said that the mass in my kidney was actually a cyst but that there was some evidence of blood either in the cyst which would be common especially if a stone was blocking the flow of urine and the cyst which was full of urine was stretching causing it to bleed.  But he said there was a remote chance that the blood could represent angry cancerous blood vessels around the cyst.  So he recommended to just repeat the scan since my stone was already removed by then.  And boy was I glad to find out that all the blood disappeared since it drained out of the cyst after the stone was removed.  So Dr. DeStephens told me that I didn’t need to have surgery and told my kidney doctor.  Later I got a call from my kidney doctor and was told that it wasn’t a 70% chance of a kidney cancer but instead maybe around 50% and he still wanted to remove my kidney.  Dr. DeStephens told me that nobody cuts on his patients unless he approves and that he certainly didn’t approve this one and strongly recommended that I not have the surgery.  I agreed with him.  No surgery.  Its been 3 years now and my kidney is fine and no more blood in my urine.  I have never had a doctor who took not just a thorough but a personal interest in my health care and was willing to place himself between me and any of my consultants to make sure that what they were recommending passed what he calls his experienced sniff test.  I’ve never had a doctor willing to do that before.  He was like family to me and my wife.”

“I have a couple of heart artery blockages that my heart doctor said was too complicated to attempt either to put a stent in them or to do bypass surgery for them.  I had been doing pretty well with only rare heart pain when I saw Dr. DeStephens in the office for some chest pain that I was worried about even though it didn’t feel like my old heart pain and wasn’t brought on my exercise of any sort.  Dr. DeStephens talked to me a lot about exactly what I was feeling and where and any other feelings that I might have had that went along with it and anything else that I thought might be important.  I can’t really remember all the questions that he asked but after then examining me and checking my cardiogram he told me that my chest pain was common for stomach acid reflux into my esophagus which was causing a burn that then caused my chest pain.  He told me how to treat it if it happened again and how to avoid it from coming back.  He also reminded me how I could tell the difference between acid reflux and true heart pain.  I took a lot of notes on that one.  He told me that if I had the pain after hours and he wasn’t sure that it was acid reflux that he should go to the ER and have it checked out.  I wasn’t figuring that I would have a chance to figure one out only two night later.  But I got scared and went to the ER.  By the next morning, I had already had my heart cath and the heart doctor was recommending to put 4 stents in those 2 bad arteries.  I called Dr. DeStephens and he reviewed it all with the heart doctors who weren’t aware of my acid problems 2 days earlier.  Dr. DeStephens convinced the heart doctor to do one of those fancy nuclear medicine stress tests to see if those 2 arteries were at a critical blockage level yet.  It turned out that they weren’t.  And I was able to walk out of there with no stents and a healthy shot of antacid.  Dr. DeStephens said that because the blockages were so complicated that there would be probably a 60% chance that one of those 4 stents would go bad within about 6 months.  Whew!  Dodged another one!”

“Dr. DeStephens was asked to see me in the ER about a year ago in consultation from the ER doc because she was concerned that my chest pain could be heart related and that I should be admitted to the hospital.  It took Dr. DeStephens no more than 2 minutes after walking in my ER room to make his diagnosis and it wasn’t my heart that was the problem.  He asked me if my chest pain was coming and going or constant.  I told him it was constant.  He asked me where it was and I told him on my left side.  He then asked me if I remembered what I was doing at the time that I first developed chest pain.  I told him I was playing a pickup game of basketball with my 17 year old nephew and fell down on my left side on top of the ball and its been hurting there ever since.  I suppose at the age of 57 I shouldn’t have been doing that anyway.  He told me that heart pain is never constant for 2 weeks like that as he examined my left side.  It hurt every time he pressed on it.  Hurt a lot.  He then got some rib X-rays and confirmed what he thought which was 2 broken ribs.  He said I could go home and that he would tell the ER doc.  It just needed time to heal.  But the ER doc refused to let me go home telling me that she needed to make doubly sure that I wasn’t having a heart attack.  She scared me so I allowed her to admit me for observation.  So there I was on the heart floor with a monitor and oxygen over night and into the next evening and still no answer.  It turned out to be just 2 broken ribs and no heart problems at all.  Dr. DeStephens was right.  It took him 2 minutes to figure out what they couldn’t figure out in nearly 2 days.  He told me that night in the ER that if he had seen me in his office that day, he probably wouldn’t have ordered any tests at all.  Not even a cardiogram.  Just the chest X-ray.  And if he wouldn’t have admitted me from his office then there is no logic to admitting me from the ER just because I showed up there.  I should have listened to him.  And you should have seen the hospital bill!  Dr. DeStephens wrote a letter to the hospital and told them to remove all the hospital charges except for the ER charges.  And they did!

“I sprained my low back awhile ago and went to see my therapist that I had seen off and on over the years for my various fortunately minor aches and pains.  But this time, it was much more severe.  I couldn’t walk without pain in my lower back and pelvis area even though the pain was not going down my leg.  My therapist worked on me 2 and 3 times a week for two months without anything other than temporary relief.  I was frustrated.  I went to see Dr. DeStephens for something entirely different but mentioned my persistent back problems.  I didn’t know that Dr. DeStephens has developed a broad experience in physical medicine he told me mostly because of trying to solve his own periodic back problems as a result of minor sports injuries over the years.  He explained that my spasm was so severe that the therapist couldn’t break through it without reducing the severe inflammation that is always associated with bad sprains.  The therapist has to be able to get deep into the area of the sprain and as necessary both stretch and mobilize the area if its jammed or twisted which is usually the case.  Dr. DeStephens gave me a shot of a cortisone like medicine with a numbing agent right into the worst area in the lowest area of my back on the right side. Within 5 minutes my pain had reduced by about 90%.  He explained that when the numbing medicine wore off in about an hour or two that the pain would return but that the relief by the shot said that the cortisone was placed in the right spot.  He sent me back to the therapist 2 days later and with my pain still reduced by about 50% from the cortisone reducing the inflammation my therapist was finally able to get deep into the area and to properly stretch and mobilize the area.  But that wasn’t the end of it and Dr. DeStephens told me that in advance.  When I jammed and twisted my spin by doing Lord knows what, I caused a stretching and weakening of the ligaments that supported that area of the spine.  He further told me that this combined with left over muscle spasm would cause this segment to tend to get jammed up again on its own until I could correct the chronic posture problems that was causing all of my instability not being able to hold the proper balance.  My therapist gave me exercises to do at home but Dr. DeStephens worked to teach me the fundamentals of a good posture that my therapist never reviewed to the extent that Dr. DeStephens did.  He even gave me a 7 point printout so that I could understand the foundations of how I can know that I am in a good posture when I am sitting, standing, walking and even during my own routine activities at home, work and play.  He taught me about the critical importance of core strength with everything that I do.  I never knew anything about that before and no one had ever explained it to me.  I still have some problems with my low back from time to time but that’s usually when I stop doing my core and posture exercises and stop being careful about my posture with every thing that I do.  He says that I need to be as obsessive about my posture as a good classical dancer or martial artist is during their routine day.  He’s also introduced my to flexibility training with yoga and recommended Tai Chi as a form of exercise to develop learning to move naturally with good posture.  I never heard any of this before.  I’m not perfect but I keep trying to get better and better all the time and its working. He says its a lifelong commitment to proper body mechanics focused around using and developing good core strength the way all of the best athletes and dancers just do automatically.  Its a lifelong process.  I know that.  But I won’t allow myself to be trapped by avoidable chronic pain.  And I don’t want the frequently inevitable surgeries and arthritis that happens by not paying attention to the fundamentals. Wow, I’ve written more than I thought I would.  But I’m passionate about how much better I feel.  Its a lifelong commitment to doing things the right way and I’m glad Dr. DeStephens was able to open my eyes to these fundamentals.  If you’ve been struggling with similar things, see what he can suggest for you as well while coordinating with an excellent therapist as necessary.  If you need special studies or consultations to figure out exactly what the problem is, he can order them.  For me though, I didn’t need all that done because I got better just by doing those things I mentioned before permanent arthritis set in.  Thanks to Dr. DeStephens, I caught it in time.”

“Thank you so much for your excellent skills and care during my recent Thermage procedure. I appreciate how you and your staff made me feel extremely well cared for, and took the time to explain just what I should expect from the procedure. It has been about two months now and so many of my friends have noticed how much younger my face looks. The best part, is it has been a slow and gradual change, which was important to me as I did not really want everyone to know I had undergone a cosmetic procedure. I am very pleased with the results and was especially please when I could return back to work the very same day. I am surely glad I was a candidate for Thermage and was able to avoid having cosmetic surgery. Thanks for all you have done!”

In 2007 I was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes. It would have been easy to kid myself and say it was because of family history or genetics. But I knew it was my obesity and what I was eating that were the cause. I was eating all of the wrong kinds of foods – white flour, white sugar and potatoes. In mid-January we got the details of the diet and began our journey. After weigh in on January 12, when I weighed 290 pounds, I set a goal to lose 25 pounds. Though I knew that wasn’t enough, I had tried so many diets and struggled with my weight enough to know that it would be a huge success for me. The first few days, as my body went into ketosis, I went through “carb withdrawal” and I so wanted to quit the program. But after I saw the results from just the first week – 12 pounds – I knew I was on the right track. I also saw my blood sugars go down dramatically. I also set a new goal for myself – to lose 90 pounds and get myself to 200 pounds for the first time since my early teens. My weight loss has been dramatic. We took a cruise in late March, a mere 11 weeks after starting our diet, and I had already lost over 55 pounds – well above my original goal. By following the plan on the cruise and only cheating occasionally, I actually lost 2 pounds on the cruise. On July 19, 27 weeks after beginning my diet, I was able to hit my goal. It has been 75 days and I have been able to maintain my weight, fluctuating within 2-3 pounds. I have also recommended the program to friends who have seen me undergo my transformation and have wanted the same for themselves. I strongly recommend this program for anyone who has a need for serious weight loss. The food choices make it very easy to stay satisfied all day, even for a picky eater like myself.

“Over the years, the density and coarseness of my facial hair has increased. The proverbial five o’clock shadow typically showed up by noon each day and getting a close shave was, lets say… not possible. All that has changed now since I underwent the hair reduction treatment at Youthful Images. After receiving a number of treatments with the Pulsed Light hair reduction system, I can go almost two full days without shaving. Better yet, the hair growing now is much softer, making it easier to get a close shave without nicking my face and causing my skin to get irritated. Many thanks!”