Thank you for visiting our site. We are Doctors MK Bhat and Sheela Bhat: physicians, owners of the practice, and your potential long term health partner. We have been serving the Tucson community since 2003 and plan to continue doing so for years to come. We are both very experienced, board certified internists who have been practicing personalized medicine and preventive care for decades.
Here are some important points of our practice philosophy to help you understand us better.
As is said, you get what you pay for. Though our charges are not cheap (about industry standard), neither is our service. You get your own personal MD, fully licensed and certified. We don’t assign you to a mid-level, a nurse practitioner, PA, intern, or anything of the sort. We bill your insurance for all the billable service we provide to you. We do not sell you any service that is not in your best interest, and we conduct our profession with the highest level of integrity.
To complement our level of experience, we keep ourselves up-to-date with all the latest developments in the medical field and apply them in your care. We are very detail oriented and dive in depth to your medical history. We want to know all about you in order to provide the best and most personalized care for you. As internists we are in a unique position to understand the complexity of multiple organ systems and their interplay with each other, allowing us to make the best decisions for your care. As such, we have you covered during this unprecedented pandemic with timely testing, expert advice, and the best possible care.
However, our true expertise lies in the early identification and management of the wide variety of chronic diseases that affect the American population, from obesity to diabetes to chronic kidney disease. These diseases can be ignored for decades until they cause one of the organ systems to fail, making people age rapidly, disabling them, and ending their productive life. That is where we come in. We specialize in getting them under control with lifestyle changes and strategic use of medications before they can pose a threat to your life.
Although we support appropriate use of psychotropic medications for the proper psychiatric conditions, we are against indiscriminate prescribing and prescribing on weak or unproven clinical grounds, of medications such as benzodiazepines (like lorazepam), sleep aids, opioids, stimulants, etc. We will not be an accomplice to chemical dependency. Chemical dependency on anything beyond a morning cup of coffee is simply unhealthy, whether it is done for relaxation or to relieve physical or emotional symptoms. The pharmaceutical mafia has managed to convince the government, physicians, and the public at large that it is best to have one quarter of our population subscribe to oxycontin or fentanyl for lifetime so they can stash billions while innocent Americans die of overdose or get hooked onto their dope. We are conscientious physicians. If you have substance or chemical dependence, whether it is simple nicotine or alcohol or even hardcore fentanyl or cocaine, we can still be partners. We can work together and try to get your life back together independent of this dependency.
In concluding, at Bhat Internal Medicine, we are always in partnership. People sometimes say we are demanding. They may be right. We work with conviction and ask you to make a sincere effort so that together we can get the best possible results for your health and wellbeing.
Our Doctors
Muralikrishna Bhat, MD
Dr. Bhat is a very seasoned internist with over 20 years of practice experience in a variety of clinical settings. He is very passionate about providing a quality medical care in a comprehensive manner using his medical expertise and present day technology. Murali, as his family and friends call him, born in 1965 in a beautiful rural South Indian community with lush greenery and coconut groves, spent his childhood in his native village Thodikana which is located in the foothills of gorgeous Western Ghats (mountains). Growing up in the village, his uncle was their family physician and was the only physician for the entire community then. Dr. Bhat took after his uncle and decided to become a doctor himself. He completed his medical education in 1990 at Dr. B R Ambedkar Medical College in Bangalore and received medical degree from Bangalore University.
In 1994 he met Sheela, a young physician and they got married. They both were interested in pursuing their career in internal medicine and wanted to practice high quality medicine in United States. They moved to New York in 1995. Dr. Bhat completed his residency training in internal medicine in 1998 from the prestigious Long Island College hospital New York. He has maintained his internal medicine board certification ever since. He worked at the Long Island College Hospital emergency department for a year. Dr. Bhat worked as an attending with faculty position at St. Barnabas Hospital, Bronx, New York for couple of years. He practiced primary care in Olean, a town in western New York for couple of years before moving to Tucson in 2003. Dr. Bhat and his wife have lived and practiced medicine in Tucson ever since. Dr. Bhat loves practicing medicine. He has great passion in delivering medical care using the latest available technology. He loves sports and plays tennis regularly. He has made a lot of friends with local tennis community. He likes to listen to Bollywood music. He loves to spend time with his family. He has a very close knit large family mostly in India, except a nephew in Australia, another in Israel and a niece in San Diego. He stays in touch with his folks constantly on WhatsApp. He is actively involved in social and cultural activities in Southern Arizona. He is multilingual, fluent in English, Hindi, Kannada and Tulu. He has maintained bilingual office staff.
Sheela Bhat, MD
Dr. Bhat is a respected and well-known internal medicine doctor in Tucson with over 25 years of practice experience. She is passionate about patient-centered care, and provides compassionate and comprehensive care for her patients.
Dr. Bhat was born to an Indian physician couple and grew up in a beautiful tropical town in southern India called Puttur. She grew interested in the medical profession at a young age as she watched and then helped her parents care for their patients. This sparked her interest to learn more about medicine, so she went to medical school at Mangalore University, India, and obtained her degree in 1993. To pursue a better life for their family, she and her husband moved to the United States. She completed her residency training in Internal Medicine at Long Island College Hospital, Brooklyn, NY. She practiced primary care in Olean, a town in western New York, before moving to Tucson in 2003.
In her free time, she likes to spend time with her family, practice and perform Indian folk/classical dance, and play the Veena, an Indian string instrument. Dr. Bhat is multilingual, fluent in English, Kannada, Hindi and Tulu. Dr. Bhat has maintained bilingual office staff in her practice.
Our staff and our vision
We strive for practice improvement and efficiency. We always look for better ways to serve you. We are constantly working on use of technology and workflow redesign. We are fortunate to have a group of very dedicated and friendly office staff. Our office staffs are carefully chosen for their education, training and professionalism. We place great emphasis on personal integrity and honesty. We value these attributes more than anything. Each individual is very personable and compassionate. They take great care to protect your personal and financial data. Our staff loves our patients and our patients love our staff. Within the practice, we keep an open channel of communication between management and staff. Our staff always comes up with brilliant and innovative ideas for practice improvement. We don’t wait to implement such ideas. We believe a well-compensated, happy workforce is the backbone of any successful business.