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When Dr. Kenneth Fox began telling his Manhattan colleagues about his decision to relocate his practice, he was met with raised eyebrows and gaping mouths.

“Virtually everybody I told I was moving to Mississippi had shocked or surprised looks on their faces,” said Fox, a physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist who joined Methodist Spine & Joint Center in Flowood this past spring.

A native of the New York City area, Fox was ready for a change after skyrocketing rents in the city drove up his operating costs — while reimbursements for his work were staying relatively flat. After looking into practice opportunities in nearly every state in the union, he chose Mississippi as a place where few doctors were working in his specialty area.

“There’s no shortage of any type of practitioner in New York City,” he said. “Here, I’m one of only two people in Jackson doing acupuncture, but in New York City there’s somebody doing acupuncture on virtually every street corner. It’s a much different healthcare environment up there.”

Weighing those two environments, Fox found Mississippi to be “more physician-friendly” as a place where he could better focus on the needs of his individual patients.

“I’m not a businessman and I don’t want to have to run my practice like a business,” he said. “In coming to an area that’s underserved, you can provide quality healthcare and still survive without the pressure to see a large volume of patients.”

Since opening his outpatient practice in April, Fox sees patients ranging from senior citizens with arthritis to amateur athletes suffering from sports injuries. Methodist Spine & Joint Center, affiliated with Methodist Rehabilitation Center in Jackson, is already seeking a second physician to help expand the practice, he said.

“There’s definitely a need down here,” he said.

A graduate of Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., Fox attended Columbia University’s pre-medical program before beginning his studies at New Jersey Medical School in Newark. He earned his medical degree in 1990 and completed a residency in physical medicine and rehabilitation at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City.

He is board-certified in physical medicine and rehabilitation and certified as a physician acupuncturist. He is also a member of the American Academy of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine.

Back in New York, acupuncture was a larger part of Fox’s practice than it has been in Mississippi, due partly to differences in insurance coverage.

“It’s a way of treating pain without medication — and that’s important when a patient comes in and is already on a lot of medications,” he said. “You don’t want to add yet another medication into the whole pharmacological soup.”

Even so, he said, a chief advance in his field over the past 15 years or so has been the improvement in medications available to treat chronic pain.

Looking forward, he expects a new standard for pain management to involve diagnostic ultrasound. At Fox’s request, Methodist Rehabilitation Center recently purchased a diagnostic musculoskeletal ultrasound machine, which he uses to diagnose injuries.

“This application of ultrasound will be utilized more and more in the future,” he said. “It’s still a fairly new application of the technology that’s usually only available at large medical facilities affiliated with a medical school.”

Along with the hospital’s willingness to invest in the high-tech equipment he needs, Fox says he’s been impressed both with the center’s national reputation and with the quality of physical therapy being provided through its services.

“I’ve learned that with physical therapy, the most valuable part is the hands-on part — and that doesn’t always get done,” he said. “But here, the physical therapists are doing a quality of work that I’d certainly want to be associated with.”

Since the Methodist Spine & Joint Center is housed on the same Flowood campus as Methodist Outpatient Rehabilitation and Methodist Orthotics and Prosthetics, Fox has also enjoyed easy collaboration with professionals who specialize in conditions such as sports-related trauma, repetitive motion injuries and shoulder, neck, back and joint pain.

Fox arrived at his own specialty through an early interest in sports and exercise, and particularly in the way bad techniques or poor work-station setups can cause musculoskeletal injuries.

Today, the physical therapy he prescribes for patients includes not only exercises to aid in recovery from injuries, but also suggestions for changes in their everyday work stations that may help prevent pain from recurring. He’s even offered tips for staff members at Methodist Rehabilitation Center after observing them at their computers.

“Sometimes just small adjustments in how a person exercises can eliminate pain they’ve had for a long time, but just had no idea what was causing it,” he said.

As he settles in to a different pace of life, Fox says he’s appreciated many of the changes from life in the Big Apple. He enjoys a quick commute to work and is driving a new car after years of not owning a vehicle in New York.

Meanwhile, the intense schedule of running his practice in New York had caused him to cut back on pleasure reading, exercising and other downtime activities. In Mississippi, he’s been glad to be able to pick them up again.

As for the perception that his northern friends had about his new home state, Fox says only one aspect has proven to be right-on.

“I was warned about how bad the summer would be,” he said. “And it has lived up to its billing.”



October 2007

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