Dr. Hanna Shanar, DO.

Dr. Hanna Shanar is an emergency-medicine-trained physician completing residency at HCA Houston Healthcare – Kingwood, a Level II trauma center, and transitioning to attending practice. Emergency medicine is, at its core, the discipline of acute decision-making — sorting what is dangerous from what is not, and acting quickly with incomplete information.

That training maps onto injury care. An emergency physician is comfortable with pharmacology, fluent in the triage instinct for when a symptom needs imaging or a specialist, and unintimidated by the ambiguity of a fresh injury. The same judgment that runs a trauma bay is what decides, calmly, how to manage a patient's pain in the days and weeks after a collision.

Telehealth suits this population — people in pain after a collision are often least able to travel and most in need of being seen quickly. It also has limits, and this practice states them rather than waiting to be asked: manual motor grading, reflexes, straight-leg raise and palpation cannot be done down a camera. Those findings come from the referring chiropractor’s documented in-person examination, and they are attributed to their source and date in the note. Any decision that turns on one of them triggers a request for an in-person exam before the decision is made.

Dr. Shanar works alongside chiropractors, physical therapists and specialists, and owns the decision about when a patient escalates and to whom — against thresholds published in full on this site.