Montserrat Andreys, DC, M.S., CCSP provides much-needed health care to Portland’s marginalized communities.
When one accounts for her personal and family history, UWS alumna Montserrat Andreys, DC, M.S., CCSP, seems almost destined to have become a sports chiropractor.
Dr. Andreys comes from a long line of wellness providers. Her great-grandmother was a midwife and healer in Honduras. Her grandmother provided massage therapy, a practice Dr. Andreys observed as a child while living with her in Chicago. “I would see people come to the house, and she would care for them,” she remembers. “I was always so curious about what she was doing.”
Dr. Andreys followed her grandmother’s path and entered massage school, but the path eventually sparked an interest in chiropractic medicine. At the same time, she was devoted to her calling as a dancer. Thus, she pursued a degree in dance while using her electives to fulfill premedical requirements, planning to merge both passions into a career in chiropractic.
“With my background, I already knew that I was going to be treating aesthetic artists,” she says. “Dancers, aerialists, contortionists, things like that.” With this plan in mind, Dr.
Andreys’ path eventually led her to UWS to earn her master’s degree in sports and exercise science while simultaneously pursuing her doctorate in chiropractic.
After graduating from UWS, Dr. Andreys started working right away in sports medicine, but she kept her eye on serving the fellow artists to whom she felt so connected as a performer. The fields of sports and the arts were never divided in her vision for providing care.
“My goal was to bring the principles of sports medicine but apply them to the arts communities,” Dr. Andreys says, “because the injuries are the same. I could have a
conversation with a photographer about slipping and twisting their knee from being in a precarious position while trying to get a shot, and I was going to understand that person as well as I could understand that same twisted-knee scenario for a soccer player.”
Building on a Foundation of Inclusion
In 2021, Dr. Andreys founded her own clinic in Portland. She describes Hey Doc Clinic as an integrative health care space, meaning it offers acupuncture, pelvic health care, physical therapy, massage, and mental health care as well as chiropractic. Hey Doc is open to the general population, but the clinic was conceived with marginalized communities in mind.
“We center queer, trans, and BIPOC folks,” says Dr. Andreys, who is queer and Latina, referring to LGBTQ+ communities and the acronym for Black, Indigenous, and people of color. “What that means is that everything we do … signals safety to people that have been most marginalized in health care, most mistreated in health care, most dismissed.”
Dr. Andreys underlines that, through internalized biases of which they may not be aware, health care providers can easily put unintentional obstacles in the way of patients from marginalized groups. Every caregiver inevitably encounters patients from communities with which the provider has little or no previous contact, so they’ll be less familiar with those patients’ unique experiences and needs. Unfortunately, says Dr. Andreys, such barriers can lead to providers not offering the quality of care their patients deserve and patients being less likely to speak up for their needs.
“It can shut them down,” Dr. Andreys says. “It can give them a sense of not wanting to give you all the information that would actually be the most helpful for them to receive care, or that they’ll be judged if they do tell you the truth. Sometimes that is what happens, and people are really mistreated as a result.”
Maintaining Communication and Safety for All
Given the hazards that come with potentially mismanaging marginalized patients, and with the Hippocratic oath in mind, it’s every health care provider’s duty to monitor their own biases. Hey Doc Clinic incorporates fail-safes to accomplish exactly that.
“Even before starting my business plan, I put together an advisory council,” Dr. Andreys says. “The advisory council is there to check me. You don’t want to give the responsibility of checking you to the person that’s harmed; you want them to have somebody they can talk to. The advisory council can catch something before it makes it to a point where it could harm somebody.”
Making the extra effort it takes to serve the needs of patients who otherwise go underserved is no burden for Dr. Andreys and her clinic; it’s a pleasure. “For me, it feels wonderful,” she says. “All of the things that we do on the front end … allow those signals that say you don’t have to be the one to tell us that we could be asking and doing things in a different way. We’re doing it.”
Still, Dr. Andreys is careful not to assume Hey Doc’s patients have no concerns or questions about the health care they get from the clinic, or that they’re comfortable when they walk in the door. “I always do a lot of talking, especially in my initial intakes,” she says. “Part of it is establishing rapport. Am I responding to their statements? Am I responding to the things that they’re saying instead of just bypassing or ignoring them?”
Rapport and questions are just two elements in a larger suite of communication and safety tools that Dr. Andreys employs to reinforce the quality of patient care. Displaying appropriate body language and other nonverbal communication, expressing sympathy, affirming patients’ experiences and emotions, and obtaining consent for physical contact during an examination: these are all critical to supporting a patient’s mental well-being during their care, she says.
Recognizing the Importance of Whole Health
Attending to a patient’s mental health during their appointments speaks to the importance of a whole-health approach to care. To Dr. Andreys, whole health extends even beyond the totality of a person’s body and mind to also include their household, their community. “We know that environmental factors play a huge role in our health outcomes,” she says.
To that end, Dr. Andreys realizes those external factors and that community include her, her clinic’s other providers, and its staff. And health care workers like them aren’t immune to suffering from the same biases and obstacles their patients endure. “There was a tremendous amount of xenophobia during COVID that created unsafe environments for providers in their clinics,” she says, pointing out that providers from marginalized groups often experience discrimination from patients who don’t want to be treated by them or believe they won’t be able to offer a high quality of care.
Those types of interactions can take a toll on providers’ mental and emotional health. That’s why Dr. Andreys is proud that Hey Doc Clinic serves as a haven not only for its patients but for her and her staff as well. As she puts it, “When I walk into the clinic that I’ve created, and the providers are laughing, the staff is happy, and patients feel like they’re being treated well, I feel like I’m dreaming.”