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The Northwest Osteopathic Medical Foundation

Announces Lifetime Achievement Awardees

Every year, the Foundation receives nominations from DOs around the country for a lifetime achievement award.

This year, this coveted award goes to John and Joan Takacs

Dr. John Takacs has been specializing in worker’s compensation injuries, motor vehicle injuries, and family practice for over 30 years.

As a youngster, Dr. John's passion was designing and building things, utilizing metals, plastics, clay and wood. Fascinated with aviation, space sciences, and undersea research, he became an expert with a microscope while examining, and making thin-section slides from whatever plants, pieces of organisms, muddy water, or goo that he could get beneath the lens. This skill held Dr. John in good stead years later when he became a professor’s assistant teaching microscopic tissue histology to other students while in pre-med at college. At that time, he also worked for a biochemist studying the side effects of drugs on eyeballs.

Being an airplane pilot at 16, and a rated SCUBA diver, Dr. John's high school education was supplemented with extra physics, mathematics and chemistry. During that time he also helped his parents in his family-owned grocery and butcher shop.

Dr. John's original training was of a Mechanical Aerospace Engineer, at Cornell University in Ithaca NY, while his wife-to-be, now Dr. Joan Takacs, pursued her dream of following her family’s tradition to become a physician. Through her, Dr. John became aware of the special life a physician leads, dedicated to understanding the complexities of human health, disease, injury, recovery, and healing. Dr. John studied the interactions of life forces, the physical body, soul, and spirit that facilitate a person’s wholesome well-being for living a fulfilling and productive life in concert with others, in the workplace and in family life.

Dr. John entered pre-med at Northeast Missouri State University, and then earned his Osteopathic physician and surgeon degree at Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine, thereafter moving to Portland Oregon for internship at Eastmoreland and Emanual Hospitals. Dr. John is board certified in Family Practice and Osteopathic Manipulation and has been practicing since 1986 at the current clinic location for about 25 years. During most of that time, he assisted with all his patients' surgeries.

Being chairman of an organization called “Hands in Peace," he has traveled to places like mainland China and Ecuador to bring together children of diverse backgrounds to work and play together in a model of the ancient Greek Olympics to facilitate overcoming prejudices and enjoy multicultural and ethnic diversity.

Another interesting chapter in his life was in the late 80s and early 90s, while continuing his regular medical practice. Dr. John went through the Portland Police Reserve Training Academy, was commissioned, and served several years as a Reserve Officer. Dr. John functioned as a part-time policeman and gained much insight into human nature, and served the community in that capacity while enjoying many adventures.

Currently, his practice is focused on work-related injuries, car accident, sport, musculoskeletal and nerve injury recovery in all age groups and FAA Basic Medical Exams. Dr. John always had a special interest in holistic, natural, and alternative medical philosophies and provides those options to his patients, while keeping up with the current changes in conventional medicine.

Dr. John's life and work have been enhanced by the philosophy and therapeutic techniques underlying the Waldorf educational movement, called Anthroposophy, and Spacial Dynamics®, that is used to improve movement, augment exercise and hands on treatment offered by the doctors and therapists at the clinic. Osteopathic training covers many different types of manipulation and soft tissue techniques, ranging from refined Cranial Sacral, Indirect, Fascial release, and Counterstain, to the Muscle Energy and Direct techniques like High Velocity Low Amplitude. Treatment is specifically tailored to each patient’s needs and preferences.

The clinic has special expertise in managing work-related injuries and car accident injuries, and navigating the often complex intricacies of those medical legal systems. Dr. John attends many accredited continuing education courses for physicians every year covering topics in manipulation, general medicine, surgery, and psychiatric care.