Dr. Lola Ogbonlowo '14 on Lighthouse Family Medicine & Wellness in VA

Dr. Lola Ogbonlowo ’14 is a family medicine physician who started her private practice, Lighthouse Family Medicine & Wellness, in Lansdowne, Virginia, in 2022. She provides full-spectrum family care, including gynecology services, obesity medicine, dermatology, and orthopedics. Dr. Ogbonlowo has experience in urgent care and hospital medicine, giving her a well-rounded understanding of patient care. She is passionate about serving underserved communities and has participated in medical mission trips. Dr. Ogbonlowo chose to attend the University of Medicine and Health Sciences (UMHS) for its accreditation, state-of-the-art facilities, and affordability. She completed her residency at Genesis Regional Medical Center in Grand Blanc, Michigan. Dr. Ogbonlowo encourages medical students to consider family medicine as a specialty, as it allows for a diverse and rewarding practice.

UMHS spoke to this ambitious young doctor recently on a winter morning when she had a rare moment to talk between patients.

UMHS Endeavour: Good morning, Dr. Ogbonlowo. Please tell us about what you're currently doing.

Dr. Lola Ogbonlowo: Thank you for having me, Scott. So, I'm a private practice physician here in Lansdowne, Virginia, and started my private practice in 2022. This was coming off the heels of COVID-19, and at that time, I decided I wanted to create a safe place for patients where they could feel like they were family and to provide a place where I could imbue my practice philosophies in their health journey. I got tired of hearing a lot of patients say that they were not being heard, they felt rushed through appointments, and that they didn't have a physician who was knowledgeable. So, I knew that that was something that I could fill in the gaps.

Full-spectrum family medicine

You started a full-spectrum family medicine practice. Could you explain what you mean by full spectrum?

Full spectrum just means that, as a family doctor, we see everyone of all ages and we can also do a lot. So, as far as primary care is concerned, most people envision just going for their annual physicals, but it's a lot more than that. As a full practice or full-spectrum family physician, we see women for gynecology care. So, we're putting in birth control, so IUDs and Nexplanons and doing pap smears. We're seeing people for obesity medicine, and talking with them about nutrition and helping to get their weight down.

This ultimately will control chronic conditions. We're doing dermatology, so we're taking skin biopsies. We're doing some orthopedics where we're also doing joint injections. So, full spectrum family medicine just means that we're trained very broadly and we're working at the highest level of our training.

I didn't realize that family medicine doctors do things like dermatology and gynecology well, so that it really is a full spectrum indeed. So, for current or prospective students, please tell us —for those who may not be familiar—what family medicine is and why it's a specialty future doctors might want to consider.

Family medicine is a great specialty. It's a little bit of everything. We get trained very broadly, and unlike specialists who may only focus on one organ system, we are treating the whole patient. We see the patient as a whole. So, a patient comes in and you're not just focused on their heart, but they may come in for palpitations, but it may be as a result of their thyroid function being unstable. So, we can treat them accordingly and not pass them back and forth and give them the run around because we don't know what's going on.

Urgent care experience

Can you please tell us about your experience in urgent care? I know that you have some experience in urgent care and family medicine. Please share your experiences.

So, my experience has been as a family doctor. When I first trained, I was very interested in all aspects of family medicine. There's a lot that we can do in the office, but there's a lot that you can do outside of the office, such as urgent care, hospital medicine. I did some moonlighting in urgent care for a few years, when I first started as an attending in urgent care, and that was amazing. The things that you may not see in the office, so treating a long laceration and casting, were things that we got to do a lot of in the urgent care.

I also did some rounding in the hospital, so some hospital medicine. I would see patients in the clinic. When they were admitted to the hospital, I would also see them there. I only just recently let go of that, but it really just helps to fully allow you to see all aspects of the patient's care. It helps you to really understand when they come back to the office, how to go about getting them stabilized.

Dr. Lola Ogbonlowo treats patients on a medical mission trip to El Salvador in 2019. Photo: Courtesy of Dr. Ogbonlowo.

Certified in obesity medicine

You are also currently certified in obesity medicine. Can you just tell us a little bit about how you help patients lose weight and get healthier?

Obesity medicine is a relatively new specialty on its own, although we've always been practicing obesity medicine. Of course, we have the crisis of obesity in our country, and we found as family doctors that it has led to a lot of the chronic diseases that we treat. We found that if we were able to adequately explain to patients how to get their weight under control, then we saw diabetes and hypertension and asthma and COPD, and sleep apnea, and other chronic conditions resolve. So, I went into obesity medicine as well to just help patients really understand that yes, it is important to move, to be active. Yes, it is important to eat properly and well, but there are a lot of other aspects of weight that people don't realize.

So, making sure that you're sleeping well, but why aren't you sleeping and addressing that, making sure that you have good and great mental health and community, and also making sure that you're properly eliminating your bowels and detoxing. So, there's a whole spectrum that helps patients to understand that once we have all of these principles in place, then you're able to properly lose weight, and then we can really, really see those chronic conditions get better.

So, it's not just a matter of putting people on a diet or giving them meds. It sounds like it's very much a holistic process, definitely.

It's a very holistic process. Yes.

When you were in medical school, you did a lot of volunteer work and medical mission trips, which I think is so awesome. Can you tell us about that experience?

When I was in St. Kitts, I, with another classmate, co-founded UMHS Bridging the Gap, and it was our first volunteer club. The reason we did that was to help connect our students with local service opportunities, which was a lot of fun. We were able to organize a beach clean-up day with the local organization. We organized a health fair. We were able to organize a dental screening seminar. We volunteered at a children's home, an orphanage. So, that was really neat for us as students to give back to our community.

I also organized a mentor-mentee program, which was to help new incoming students assimilate well to the island. I also served on the SGA as a student affairs representative, which has helped to link the faculty with the students and just transfer back and forth what everyone needed. So, that was pretty interesting. Then, in residency, I got to go to Haiti on a medical mission trip. I was in Michigan at the time, and then in actual practice as an attending, I got to go to El Salvador, which was amazing.

Why UMHS?

You did a lot of really great stuff at UMHS. Now, we actually have a Global Health Mission program. I remember the beach clean-up, so it's awesome that you were one of the people who helped start that. Finally, could you just tell us a little bit about why you chose UMHS over other medical schools?

I chose UMHS because I first heard about it from a friend at the time who was attending, and decided to do some research. I called the New York office. They invited me over for an interview, and I had a really great interview, just answered all my questions. The big things I was worried about were the accreditation. At that time, I knew Dr. Ross at the time had a lot of experience with the previous medical school that he founded, and that school had done really well.

So, I knew if that school had done well, this school was certainly going to do just as well. It was amazing to see what the state-of-the-art facilities on the island were, the help that they were already providing for students on the island and those that were going to Maine at the time, and also the affordability. It was very, very affordable. So, just all of those factors guided my decision, and I've never regretted it.

Is there anything else that you would like to add about family medicine or UMHS, or anything you want to say to current or prospective students out there, or alumni?

I had a lot of my great formative medical years at UMHS, not just the faculty, but the friends that I made along the way, who are still friends today. I would say work hard. My friend group and I studied really hard, and we partied hard. You can't do one or the other. It has to be both. You need the downtime, but you also need the focus. So, in order to succeed, you've got to have that community around you and to just seek help and be open to serving others, helping others, and also just knowing what you need to move forward.

From Wisconsin to Nigeria & back

Where did you grow up, and did you always want to be a doctor?

I was born in Madison, Wisconsin. My parents were there for school, and at the age of eight, we moved back to Nigeria, which is where we're originally from. I was there all through high school and moved back to the US at the age of 17. So, I started college in the Northern Virginia area and have been here since. So, as far as I can remember, I had always wanted to go to medical school. I have always heard my dad say that I had mentioned this when I was really young. One thing I do remember is that I was just always very inspired and impressed by what physicians and doctors that I knew at the time embodied. They seemed so caring, so kind, so patient, so knowledgeable.

I knew that was something I wanted to do. So, in college, I volunteered for an organization called Bread for the City, which is a free clinic in DC. One of the things that just really got me was the fact that they were offering quality care, quality medical care to patients who had nothing, who were underserved, but they served them with dignity and respect. I knew that was something I wanted to do.

Where did you complete your undergrad degree, and what was your major?

I was at Strayer University, and my major was Computer Information Systems. Strayer University is here in the Northern Virginia area.

Why primary care is so vital

We presently have a really alarming primary care shortage in the United States. What would you say to people who might be considering primary care? By primary care, correct me if I'm wrong, but that would encompass family medicine as well as internal medicine, your general practitioners.

I would definitely encourage you to consider it. Right now, there's a lot of turmoil in the insurance industry, how patients are treated, and how much time a physician has in the office. That is one of the reasons why I went into my own private practice. One of the ways to circumvent all of these insurance and other issues is to go into private practice. There's a lot more that you can do. There are a lot of wellness things that can be added to the practice that can help financially support a practice, but they also allow you to practice medicine on your own terms. If you decide you want to see a patient for an hour, then you can do that, and you're not forced into an insurance model. There are a lot of primary care doctors right now who are doing a concierge type of plan where patients are paying monthly, and that's an option as well.

So, you don't have to follow a model of a quota system or anything like that?

Correct. I have a lot more autonomy over how I can practice, how many patients I want to add on, because then I can also utilize other ways to bring in monetary sustenance for the practice.

New treatments in family medicine

What are new treatments that are available in family medicine that are exciting or breakthroughs that are making your job a little easier, and also better to diagnose and treat diseases?

I guess we can look at it from several perspectives, such as holistic medicine, functional medicine. So, even from a functional medicine standpoint, looking at a lot more labs that can help us direct patient care. Typically, the traditional lab work— just a lipid panel or just a hemoglobin A1C— sometimes is not enough. Adding on an insulin level or cortisol level can help us look at spikes and why patients are holding onto weight and not dropping weight, looking at thyroid antibodies, and realizing, "Well, maybe this was more of an autoimmune process before it became a thyroid problem." If we treat the autoimmune process, then it heals the thyroid problem.

Again, we're not discounting prescription medications. We still would use those, but we know a lot more, and it helps guide our process. There's a lot of new medicine involving hormone therapies, bioidentical hormone versus synthetic hormone therapies. There's a lot of research to back that up. I'm seeing it in patient care. The patients are doing really, really well. For a long time, we only had certain modalities, and now we have more. So, those are just examples of a lot that is out there. Some of these we did not learn in medical training, but as a physician, you have to keep learning, and you have to keep training and have to keep seeing what's out there. That's how we help our patients.

OB-GYN in family medicine

Just out of curiosity, you mentioned gynecological procedures like putting in an IUD. What are some other things that a family medicine doctor does or that you personally do that people might not be aware of? Just things that they think they'd have to go to a specialist for?

Outside of gynecology, I would say the joint injections. So, patients with a shoulder ache. We do an X-ray. They have arthritis, and it might take six weeks to get in with an orthopedic specialist. We can do a joint injection. We just mix two different anesthetics with the steroid. Once you're trained and you know how to do it, it's easy, and we inject it into the joint. Within a week, they're feeling much better. So, it cuts down that time for them to one, wait to get in to see the specialist, and two, go to a specialist and have to pay a higher copay for something that we are also trained to do.

When is it necessary to refer a patient to a specialist?

The specialist is still important. We work with them, but there's a lot we can still do because a lot of patients don't want to come to the doctor, and they tell us that. So, while they're here in the clinic, especially for their annual physical exam, for all men over 50, in addition to their regular blood work, I will order a PSA [to screen for prostate cancer]. If it does come back abnormal, then they are very willing to see a urologist at that point, because sometimes fear does guide them going in.

I would imagine that you can order a woman to get a pap smear or a mammogram, or a referral?

We do the pap smears in the office. If it does come back abnormal, we're able to do another procedure called a colposcopy, and that's just going in with a specialized instrument to go in and take samples from the cervix, and then we can send that out. If it still comes back abnormal, then we can send them to the gynecologist, who would take them into the operating room and do something further called a LEEP, where they're taking a bigger chunk of that cervix out to help remove all of that bad tissue. But as far as the mammograms, yes, we order those all the time. For colonoscopies, we refer them to specialists to get that done.

Mental-health screening

Let’s switch gears. What can a family medicine doctor do to screen for mental health issues? I don't know if you ever prescribe any of the meds or if you refer them to a psychiatrist, but what can family medicine doctors do to screen patients just to see if their mental health is okay, to get them the help they need?

So, all family doctors are trained in basic mental health. We all have that psychiatry rotation during med school, as well as several during residency. So, for instance, I do a screening with every new patient that comes in, a depression screening, and the insurance does pay for this, and then subsequently, once a year or if they're in the office and there's something going on, we'll screen them again on the spot. But I'm very comfortable with a lot of the basic anti-anxiety and anti-depressive medications, the SSRIs, and just a few others. It also helps because of the shortage of psychiatrists in our area.

I've had patients who have had difficulty getting in, especially since COVID, because most of them were only telemedicine. So, we've been able to get patients started on antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications while they're waiting to get in to see the psychiatrist.

That's a very good point. I don't want to get political here, but think it’s either Medicare or Medicaid—one of them is going to stop paying for telemedicine. I think that might affect some older people or folks who are poverty-level and might be on Medicaid. It’s possible that some will not get the care they need. Your thoughts?

They go back and forth about it. They keep pushing the date back, so we're hoping they keep pushing the date back.

One would think that the insurance companies would want to or the government insurance would want to, cover telemedicine. Telemedicine is a lot cheaper than a doctor's visit. Especially for a lot of psychiatric evaluations, a lot of it can be done via telemedicine, right?

Exactly. We've seen a lot more patients come through who normally wouldn't if they were forced to as an in-office visit. It's helped because once you break the ice, and then they're willing to come in for a regular visit, but sometimes it's also access to care. Sometimes people are snowed in, or they are juggling childcare and other things. It is easy to be able to get a telemedicine visit completed, especially if they don't need a physical exam.

Why consider family medicine as a specialty?

You've really been a wonderful interview. Is there anything else that you'd like to add about family medicine that we haven't discussed, or anything about UMHS that you think is important to note?

I would really like students to strongly consider family medicine. There's a lot of satisfaction, and you can make it what you want. Although we are trained full spectrum, the big thing with family medicine is that you can tailor it to your own needs. I have family physician colleagues who are primarily just doing obesity medicine, or are primarily just doing sports medicine, or are primarily just doing gynecology care, and even colleagues who did a fellowship in obstetrics who are just doing C-sections and surgical gynecology.

So, there's so much you can do. I also see newborns, and that's a great part of my practice. It's so nice to be able to look at the schedule and have a newborn on and then a 21-year-old and then a 65-year-old Medicare annual wellness and then a joint injection. It's just so varied. It's very exciting. It's never boring. Contrary to the bad rep that primary care gets because of the 25 patients a day or the lower reimbursements compared to our specialty colleagues, it is very rewarding, but you can make it what you want it to be for you.

Email Dr. Ogbonlowo at purpletulipsmd@gmail.com

(Top photo and center inset photo): Photos courtesy of Dr. Lola Ogbonlowo.