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Medical Specialty Clinic

Medical Specialty Clinic, at 27 Medical Center Drive, is a multi-specialty clinic offering care in gastroenterology, cardiology, dermatology, oncology/hematology, and pulmonology/critical care medicine. Call 731-424-1001 or 800-221-9603.
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Screenings can prevent colon cancer

Guidelines for getting a colonoscopy depend on whether you are at average risk or at increased risk of getting colon cancer.

• For most people, their first colonoscopy should be at age 50. If nothing is found, they won’t need another colonoscopy for 10 years. If precancerous polyps are found, screenings are recommended every three to five years.

• People at increased risk for colon cancer should have earlier and more frequent tests, based on their doctor’s advice. These include people who have symptoms, longstanding inflammatory bowel disease, a personal history of polyps, or who have a first-degree relative (father, mother, sibling) with a history of polyps or colon cancer.






Other stories with our doctors

Skyline Endoscopy Center offers convenience

The Skyline Endoscopy Center, housed in Medical Specialty Clinic’s building, offers patients the convenience of having a colonoscopy and other endoscopic procedures outside of the hospital setting. The center, which opened in 2008, was awarded a three-year term of accreditation from the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care Inc. for meeting the association's high standards of patient care.

Dr. Charles Hertz, Dr. Robert Hollis, Dr. Michael Ibach, Dr. Dan Kayal and Dr. Ami Naik, all gastroenterologists practicing at Medical Specialty Clinic, are doing procedures at the new center. They specialize in diagnosing and treating problems of the gastrointestinal tract and liver.

“We do a lot of endoscopic procedures in our practice,” explained Dr. Ibach. “Most of these procedures can be safely and less expensively done in an outpatient surgery center. Most are done on healthy patients who have a low risk of complications and who don’t need to be in a hospital environment.”

“The Skyline Endoscopy Center is much more convenient and intimate for the patient and makes us more efficient in our practice of medicine.”

The same equipment and same nursing experience as that at the hospital are used at the endoscopy center, Dr. Ibach said.

A frequent procedure that is done at the center is a colonoscopy, a procedure done under sedation in which the physician uses a special scope to examine the lining of your large intestine (rectum and colon) for abnormalities and remove any polyps, which are then sent to the pathology lab for analysis. (See related story.)

Other procedures include upper endoscopy to look into the food pipe or esophagus for gastrointestinal reflux disease and its complications, dilation of esophageal strictures to investigate swallowing problems and looking at the stomach and small intestine for ulcers.

Having the endoscopy center onsite also allows the Medical Specialty physicians to look into clinical research opportunities, Dr. Ibach said. “These would not be available to us without the endoscopy center.”

High-risk patients and those preferring a hospital setting still can have their procedures done at the hospital, he added.

Before being scheduled for any procedure at the endoscopy center, the patient will first see one of the doctors in the clinic.

The 5,600-square-foot endoscopy center has three procedure rooms and nine pre-op and post-op rooms. Patients enter the center through Medical Specialty’s GI waiting room. Procedures are done every weekday, except Tuesday, and two Saturdays a month.