Between The Bridges Healing Center, Cooks & Company, ISJ Regional Women’s Imaging Center
Photos: Art Sidner
Mankato: Between The Bridges Healing Center
Earlier this year, Dr. Jeff Kotulski began Between the Bridges Healing Center in the former ProGrowth Bank building at 45 Teton Lane. Kotulski, a doctor of osteopathy, left Mayo Health System in Madelia earlier this year. Recently, Dr. Tony Jaspers, a former Mankato Clinic board chair and Lake Crystal-based family physician, joined him.
“I was with Mankato Clinic 32 years,” said 60-year-old Jaspers in a telephone interview. “But it was time for both Jeff and I to move on. The strength of our clinic is in being able to be more independent and to make our own decisions.”
Jaspers is a family physician, while Kotulski is a doctor of osteopathy, which is a form of medicine that uses manipulative musculoskeletal techniques along with conventional medical, pharmacological, and surgical procedures.
Kotulski receives many of his patients through referrals, most of which involve chronic back pain. Some use narcotics to manage their pain, and, in part, Kotulski helps wean them off the narcotics.
As for Jaspers: “I really enjoy getting people back to their normal selves, and also keeping them from becoming ill, such as trying to help them lose weight so they don’t develop diabetes, which is epidemic here now,” he said. “I’ve been successful helping people stop smoking, specifically through using Chantix—previous methods were less effective. Nicotine is extremely addictive, more so than heroin. I also encourage people to exercise to lower their risk of coronary heart disease and diabetes.” Jaspers was pivotal in getting the Lake Crystal Recreation Center started and was its first board chair. He is also the medical director of Biolife in Mankato.
Between the Bridges Healing Center uses electronic medical records, which is highly unusual for a start-up, two-physician clinic, said Jaspers. Contact: 507-388-7488. Visit Website
St. Peter: Cooks & Company
Veteran retailer Carol Hayes moved Cooks & Company last October to 316 S. Minnesota. This was the business’s fourth and likely will be its last location, after occupying three store locations in and around River Hills Mall. Hayes also owns Contents, the popular gift and home accent store with retail locations in downtown St. Peter and River Hills Mall.
Cooks & Company has a wide array of anything related to cooking, from very basic cooking tools, such as cutlery and cherry pitters, to hard-to-find gourmet chef items and any type of kitchen gadget imaginable, said Hayes. Lines sold include Wustoff, LeCreuset, Nordicware, and Epicurian.
Where did she get the idea for Cooks & Company? “It comes from my love of home,” said Hayes in a Connect Business Magazine telephone interview. “I truly love home, and anything having to do with it. I love cooking, decorating, gardening—anything involving home. My mother, Mary, wasn’t a gourmet cook by any means, but she was amazing nonetheless. She had a strong belief in family. Cooking is really what continued holding us all together as a family, such as the time we spent baking cookies or helping out with dinners or with meal planning.”
Hayes took a page from her mother’s book and began sharing cooking experiences with her own son, who today owns Rounders, a downtown Mankato sports bar.
She said, “Cooking is so fabulous. What could be more fun? If parents would just spend some extra time making Jell-O, a cake, or anything with their kids, they would be amazed what they could learn from their children and what their children could learn from them.” Hayes especially enjoys helping customers discover “their own design” and what works best for their home.
Address: 316 South Minnesota. Telephone: 507-934-1172.
Mankato: ISJ Regional Women’s Imaging Center
Chief Radiologist Dr. Michael Wolf helped open the ISJ Regional Women’s Imaging Center in January 2009 at 101 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. The Center provides breast imaging, ultrasound, and digital mammography.
Wolf grew up as the son of a family physician and eventually practiced medicine with his father in Dickinson, North Dakota, before relocating to Mankato. “I was bit by the radiology bug in medical school,” 44-year-old Wolf said in a telephone interview. “Radiology is a lot like playing ‘Where is Waldo?’ except in radiology Waldo isn’t there 95 percent of the time.”
As for the Center, he said, “It had been in the works more than three years. Before it opened, we were doing analog mammograms, but now we have two state-of-the-art digital mammogram machines.”
Bringing in digital mammogram capability did two things: 1) reduced the waiting period for patients receiving results to one day, and; 2) eliminated the problems analog mammograms had in finding cancer in patients with dense breast tissue.
“With the old way of doing things,” said Dr. Wolf, “a woman would have to schedule a mammogram, which could take two or three weeks alone. Then she might have to wait a week or two for the results and often would have to return for additional views. Only after that would it be determined if she needed a biopsy. If you tell a woman she has to come back for additional views, in her mind you’re telling her she has cancer until hearing otherwise. She will naturally worry about it.”
The new digital technology allows women to learn the results the same day, which will encourage more women to come in for imaging, thus leading to earlier detection. In 2009, ISJ Regional Women’s Imaging Center should perform more than 12,000 mammograms.
Contact: 304-7770. Address: 101 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. Visit website
