It was a chance phone call that led Dr. Miguel Rivera to his professional passion. He was figuring out his next steps after his Sarasota-based integrative health practice had failed to take off when he got a phone call from Dr. Bruce Robinson, chief of geriatrics at Sarasota Memorial Hospital.
Rivera had rotated through Robinson’s service during his psychiatry residency training at the University of South Florida, where the latter had been a professor at the time. Now Robinson wanted to see if he’d do some consultations at local nursing home facilities.
That was how Rivera began treating people with dementia in the Sarasota-Manatee area — and it’s remained his focus for almost two decades, where he’s picked up the nickname “Dementia Doc,” working both out of his Lakewood Ranch office and as a mobile physician…