I spent the first decade of my clinical career inside hospital walls. Emergency departments, cardiac ICU, the cath lab during STEMI activations at two in the morning. I was good at it, and I cared about the patients I saw — but I started noticing something that bothered me more and more as the years went on. The same patients kept coming back. Not because acute care had failed them, exactly, but because nobody had ever sat with them long enough to ask why their body was producing the crisis in the first place.
That observation is the short version of why I left the hospital and built this practice in Columbus. The longer version is what this article is about. If you are trying to figure out whether I am the right clinician for what you are dealing with, the most useful thing I can do is tell you where I came from, what I do differently now, and what working with me actually looks like.
Seventeen years of acute care, and what it taught me
I started in emergency medicine. I moved into cardiac ICU and then into the cath lab — the room where heart attacks get fixed in real time with catheters and stents. Over seventeen years I saw thousands of patients in the worst hours of their lives, and I learned a particular set of skills: read a situation fast, prioritize what could kill someone, intervene precisely, hand off cleanly.
Acute care is the right answer for a heart attack. It is not the right answer for the twenty years of metabolic disease that produced the heart attack.
What I kept seeing in the cath lab was that the same physiology kept showing up in different bodies. Insulin resistance that had been climbing for a decade. Hypertension that had been treated with whichever pill was on the formulary, never with the underlying driver. Hormonal collapse in mid-life patients that nobody had ever measured because the standard workup did not include it. Sleep apnea that nobody had asked about. The crisis was the moment everyone paid attention; the twenty years before the crisis was the part nobody had been paid to look at.
I started reading on my off days. Functional medicine, the metabolic literature, the hormonal literature, the sleep literature. The more I read, the more obvious it became that the data was sitting there in plain view — fasting insulin, free testosterone, free T3, hs-CRP, sleep architecture — and that primary care was not ordering it because primary care was not built around it.
Why I moved the practice into Columbus
When I decided to build a practice around what I had been reading, the question was where. I am from this region. My family is here. The patient population in middle Georgia — Columbus, Warner Robins, Phenix City, the Fort Benning community — is the population I know best, and it is also a population that is poorly served by the standard primary-care model for the kind of work I do. People here drive long distances for specialty care that should be available locally. The military families rotate through and need a clinician who can pick up where the last one left off. The mid-life patients I see in Columbus — the same patients I would have been treating in the cath lab in another decade — were telling me consistently that no one was running the labs that would have explained their symptoms.
The Columbus location at 6901 Ray Wright Way opened to address exactly that. Warner Robins followed for the same reason — patients in Houston County and Bonaire were driving an hour or more for hormone or metabolic care that should not require an hour drive. I rotate between both clinics on a published schedule, and the protocols are identical at each, because the patient should not have to think about which building I happened to be in this week.
What I actually do differently than the hospital model
Three things, mostly.
I order the labs the standard panel leaves out. Fasting insulin. Free testosterone instead of just total. Estradiol with progesterone, not estradiol alone. Free T3 and reverse T3 in addition to TSH. Thyroid antibodies. Hs-CRP. Vitamin D, B12, ferritin. SHBG. The panel I order on a first visit is two to three times the size of a standard primary-care metabolic panel, because the standard panel was built to catch acute disease, not to characterize the slow physiology that produces chronic disease.
I sit with the data with the patient. The second visit in my practice is the lab review. We pull up your numbers, I show you what each one means in your specific context, and we decide together what to address first. That conversation is not a formality. It is how a treatment plan becomes something the patient owns rather than something the clinician imposes.
I treat the system, not the symptom. A patient who comes in for stubborn belly fat almost always has a hormonal driver, an insulin driver, a sleep driver, and often a medication driver. Treating the belly fat in isolation does not work; treating the underlying drivers in coordination usually does. The same logic applies to fatigue, brain fog, low libido, mid-life mood changes — most of what brings patients into my office is a system problem, not a single-organ problem.
Ready to schedule at Columbus or Warner Robins?
Online booking is open 24/7. The JaneApp portal handles both locations — pick the one that works for your schedule. Call either clinic during business hours if you prefer to talk through scheduling first.
Where the cath-lab background still shows up
Patients ask sometimes whether the acute-care years matter for what I do now. They do, in two specific ways.
I take cardiovascular risk seriously. I have stood at the table while a patient was being revascularized after a heart attack. I do not treat lipid panels casually. I do not treat blood pressure casually. When I optimize hormones in a patient with a cardiovascular history, the risk-benefit math is something I have actually had to live with at the bedside, not just read about. The conservative dosing approach in my practice is partly a reflection of that.
I recognize when something is outside my scope. The ER trains you to know when a problem belongs to someone else. If a patient walks in with chest pain that needs cardiology, neurological symptoms that need neurology, or a finding on labs that needs an oncology workup, my answer is the referral, not an attempt to keep the patient inside the hormone therapy framework. I would rather lose the visit than treat outside my scope.
What working with me actually looks like
The first visit is sixty to ninety minutes. We cover medical history, surgical history, every medication and supplement, family history, lifestyle, current symptoms in your own words, prior treatment attempts, and goals. Lab orders go out at that visit unless you have recent comprehensive labs already in hand. The second visit is one to two weeks later — labs back, sit together, build the plan.
From there, the practice catalog is broad enough to address most of what mid-life patients deal with: hormone therapy for women, men's hormone therapy including TRT and Biote pellets, medical weight loss including GLP-1 protocols, aesthetic treatments, and IV therapy for documented indications. Most patients I see end up engaged with two or three of these in coordination, because that is what the underlying physiology usually requires.
Reassessment is built in. Three months for hormone or weight-loss work, sometimes sooner if the protocol is more aggressive. The follow-up is not optional. It is the part that turns a starting dose into a calibrated dose.
A few practical notes for Columbus and middle-Georgia patients
The phone for the Columbus location is (762) 261-3880. Online booking runs 24/7 through JaneApp and handles both Columbus and Warner Robins. New-patient appointments are usually available within one to two weeks. If you have a medication refill that cannot wait, call the clinic directly and the front desk will route it.
If you are coming from Fort Benning, Phenix City, Auburn, Opelika, or anywhere south toward Columbus on I-185 — Columbus is the closer location. If you are coming from Macon, Warner Robins, Perry, or Bonaire — Warner Robins is closer. The clinical work is the same at both. Pick whichever drive is shorter.
Bring whatever recent lab work you have, even if it is from a different practice. Bring your medication and supplement list. Bring a written list of your top three concerns. The list matters more than people expect — sixty minutes goes faster than you think, and the written list is the thing that keeps the conversation pointed at what brought you in.
The next step, if you are weighing it
If you have read this far and the approach makes sense to you, the comprehensive workup is the front door. Five minutes of self-assessment routes you to the right consultation type, and the booking flow handles both Columbus and Warner Robins. If you would rather talk to a person first, call the clinic and the front desk will get you to me for any clinical question they cannot answer themselves.
The kind of medicine I left the hospital to practice is the kind that takes time on the front end and pays off over years. If that fits how you want to be cared for, I would be glad to be your clinician.
Medical disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Individual clinical decisions should be made in consultation with a qualified healthcare provider following appropriate evaluation. References to specific treatments, dosing, or protocols are informational.
Travis spent 17+ years in high-acuity clinical medicine — emergency, cardiac ICU, and cath lab — before founding Revitalize. He is a Certified Platinum Biote hormone therapy provider, the published author of You're Not Broken — You're Unbalanced, and the founder of the Rebuild Metabolic Health Institute. His clinical writing reflects the same precision he brought to critical care: specific, honest, and built around what actually works.
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