Stafford Family Care

03/19/2026

Hey friends! We have a surplus of formula samples sent to us from the formula companies. If you are one of our patients and would like some of the samples, please stop by between 8:30am-noon, or 1pm-4pm. If you are not a patient we will not be dispensing, to prevent unscrupulous people from trying to resale.

03/17/2026

Does everyone know what today is??????

**drum roll**

It's Baby Bella's birthday!!!! Today she turns 7!!!

Happy Saint Patrick's Day from O'Stafford Family Care!

03/16/2026

Happy Monday, everyone! Nurse Debi here. I felt the need to publicly discuss something important. There's a decided shift in healthcare away from face-to-face and a surge to try to do everything on telehealth. I have seen 3 clinics in my community announce closure over the past month.

I'm more than happy to offer telehealth, but I feel called to try & keep my clinic doors open, as well.

Why? Personal contact matters. Connection matters. Listening to your carotids, heart, lungs, abdomen, and the tone and inflection of your voice matters. Feeling your abdomen for changes matters. Checking your reflexes matters. Watching your gait as you walk in and leave matters.

I cannot give you a joint injection via telehealth. I cannot give you an iron infusion over a computer. I cannot administer Botox or micro needling from a computer, and to be honest, it's really not sanitary or safe to do it in a non-clinical setting. Any injector can inject something in bad lighting and non-sanitary settings, but a great one will make sure to have proper lighting, a clean working station, and keep the toxin under proper temperature.

Each person has a right to choose the kind of healthcare that works for each of us. Just know, the more you choose online services outside of our practice, the more you remove our ability to keep our doors open.

If you want your local primary care office to stay open, then support the brick & mortar locations. Whether you choose us or someone else, keep your access to primary care by supporting your primary care.

03/12/2026

Happy Thursday! Nurse Debi here. In a desire to provide access to healthcare for ALL people, we would like to offer our new service, TeleChat. For those who need to communicate with typed words instead of spoken, we now can offer telehealth with chats instead of speaking!

If you need a TeleChat, just text our office line at 865-340-6346 and we will schedule you a time and a link to log in. From there, we can still view each other but we will have a chat window to discuss your healthcare needs.

We hope this will help our friends who use Spelling and other methods to communicate!

We ask that you be in a place near reliable WiFi and not in a vehicle, in a quiet area, and your phone is set to airplane mode during our conversation.

03/08/2026

Please join me in wishing our official bug killer and all around glue, Operations Manager Glen Stafford, a big happy birthday!!!

03/05/2026

Hey everyone, Nurse Debi here. I have had several new mothers ask me about sunscreen for their babies. While we support natural sunlight, babies can and do burn. We first recommend hats, staying out of summer sun between 10am and 2pm, and shade to help protect delicate skin.

Breastfeeding moms, did you know that eating lots of phytonutrients can help? Tomatoes, carrots, sweet potatoes, watermelon, and other foods high in lycopene and beta-carotene are natural ways to help combat sunburn in you and will help nourish your baby, too!

All that said, none of those strategies are guarantees that a baby will not burn. So, Blue Lizard is the Stafford Family Care and Stafford Medispa best pick for the best sunscreen. Baby Bum and Thinkbaby are 2 others that score high on our recommendation list.

Please know, we do not profit in any way from endorsing these products. But if I was taking my baby to the beach (oh the sweet memories!) I would pick one of these to protect my baby. And, the FDA never endorses anything I say, so there's that disclaimer!

Happy sun & fun!

03/02/2026

Happy Monday!!! Nurse Debi here. This is my annual reminder that kindergarten roundup, 6th grade physicals, and sports physicals are picking up. Here's what we need:

Sports physicals - You MUST have your paperwork completed before the visit. If you show up without you paperwork, we likely will have to reschedule. Different schools may have different forms. We expect YOU to know which form you need and have the parent portion completed. Why? I am required to go over that info with you. If you do not know what you need, ask your child's athletic person. There is a general TSSAA form here:

https://tssaa.org/physical-forms/

School physicals - I provide you the form. It is a 2 page form that has both the vaccine record/religious exemption from vaccines, and the signature that physical occurred all on the same form. We print this for you. If your child had vaccines outside of TN, please bring that record with you to the visit.

If we do a sports physical and you realize you needed the school physical form, we CAN provide that form for you at a later time. A sports physical CAN count as the school physical.

If you do the SCHOOL physical visit and find out later you needed a SPORTS physical we CANNOT sign off because you never did your part on the parent interview and we did not discuss it. Please do not ask, the answer will be no.

I hope this helps clear things up.

TSSAA is a nonprofit, self-supported organization, conceived by school people to promote good sportsmanship and cooperative spirit among member schools.

02/26/2026

They’re here!!! The first-ever tissue biopsy test to determine autism risk! If you have a child with autism and are concerned your newborn may be at risk, this is THE test. It is a skin biopsy test. If you are giving birth to a son and plan to circumcise, the fo****in can be used for this test. Ask your OB about this test or ask us at your child’s next wellness exam. We can perform the tissue biopsy, which is a very small pinch of skin.

02/25/2026

Hey everyone, Nurse Debi here. During health care visits with many of you we talk gardening. I've had so many people tell me they would love to learn how to garden and they would love to know what I know, I have been convinced to start an Instagram channel of my gardening adventures.

I do not profess to be a garden expert. I just love it and love learning how to grow things. If you want to follow along this spring, summer, and fall and see what I'm up to on weekends (and what I sucker Mr. Glen into building me), feel free to follow my Instagram channel. My channel videos will be family-friendly and hopefully encourage each of you that you can indeed be in control of much of your own food.

I'll share places I get my gardening goods and websites/books with good info. You're gonna see the messes and the failures. Because life isn't perfect and neither is gardening!

Here's what I planted last weekend.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DVCgjBYgW_E/

02/24/2026

A big shout out to Huxley & Kent for giving Bella a new dog toy. She absolutely loves it but when I took photos she acted as if I was going to take it away.

02/23/2026

A big shout out to Marsh Wind Farms for their home-grown & processed chicken! They make Powell deliveries if anyone wants to put in an order. Remember to shop local and support our local farms!

02/19/2026

Happy almost weekend!!! Nurse Debi here. Let's talk fertility for a moment. Our clinic is NOT a fertility specialty. However, we are functional in our approach to care. There's been a lot of talk about declining fertility in the US in recent years.

Did you know poor nutrition could be one of the leading causes of infertility (SKoracka et al, 2021)? We know that our society is changing genes. This means mom & dad may have normal genetics but our offspring are jumping genetic variants. One of the famous genes everyone likes to talk about are MTHFR variants. It's made popular by social media influencers, many trying to profit from the fear. Did you know MTHFR variants are very common now, with 30-40% of the US population carrying at least one genetic variant? But there are scores of other gene variants that impact nutrition and fertility in women AND men, such as VDR, DBP, TCN2, PEMT, FADS1, FGC3, and the list goes on.

Genes don't equate to poor outcomes, but they can mean increasing nutritional intake. Many of these genetic variants mean we need to check our nutrition and take targeted supplements to normalize and optimize our body, including fertility. And, having proper nutrition can help prevent birth defects in our babies that we so badly yearn to have.

So, if you want to make sure you have the best nutrition possible and optimize your fertility, come see me (Nurse Debi) and we can do whole body nutrition testing. From this, we can create a compounded supplement using clean ingredients just for your results.

Please give us a call, 865-340-6346 if you want to explore this testing and optimization. We can do in-office or telehealth and ship the testing to your home.

Skoracka K, Ratajczak AE, Rychter AM, Dobrowolska A, Krela-Kaźmierczak I. Female Fertility and the Nutritional Approach: The Most Essential Aspects. Adv Nutr. 2021 Dec 1;12(6):2372-2386. doi: 10.1093/advances/nmab068. PMID: 34139003; PMCID: PMC8634384.