Meet Your Personal Doctor

Whether you come into the doctor’s office, or receive a home visit, you can expect high quality, personalized care that addresses all of your concerns, not just your ‘top three complaints’. With PrivateMD, you won’t be waiting in lines, scheduling appointments with receptionists, or not knowing what type of provider you will be seeing. Instead, you’ll have direct access to your medical doctor on their personal cell phone, and your visits will be an ongoing conversation about your health and well-being.

While he has been in active medical practice for over 30 years in a wide variety of practice situations, both inpatient and outpatient, both here and abroad. Dr. Neil Louwrens’ journey began as a U.S. citizen born and raised abroad, in a small rural South African town. He remembers his own family physician well, and the old-fashioned model of healthcare that included friendly office visits, and more urgent home visits — the physician standing calm and confidently at the door with his iconic leather doctor bag. Years later, memories like these helped shape the model for PrivateMD and coin his slogan practicing ‘modern medicine the old-fashioned way.

After completing his medical degree from the Afrikaans (Dutch) University of Stellenbosch, Dr. Louwrens gained experience in tropical medicine, infectious diseases, general surgeries, delivering general anesthesia, delivering babies including performing cesarean sections, and neonatal and pediatric care, while also becoming experienced in trauma, intensive care and emergency room medicine.  From there, Dr. Louwrens and his wife Sanette traveled to Canada, where he completed his Canadian medical qualifications and served primarily in Emergency Rooms, providing life-saving emergent medical and bedside surgical interventions. Acceptance into the Internal Medicine specialty program at the renowned Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, prompted Dr. Louwrens and his family to then relocate to the U.S., and upon completion, Dr. Louwrens practiced primary care in a borough of inner-city Philadelphia before relocating to Cody, Wyoming. In Cody Dr. Louwrens was the only Internal Medicine primary care provider at the Montana based Billings Clinic for 8 years. In addition to providing inpatient intensive unit care, and outpatient primary care services, he developed and ran a comprehensive Diabetes Clinic for which he received CDC and NIH recognition and several awards. His leadership roles included leading a Federally partnered Pandemic Response team tasked with providing preventive strategies for the local county and for the federal employees of Yellowstone National Park during the H5N1 Influenza pandemic.  

The Louwrens family moved further west to Redding, California where Dr. Louwrens has been on active clinical staff at multiple local hospitals including in several Physician leadership roles for the last fifteen years. For over a decade he has trained UCDavis Medical residents (many of whom are practicing locally now) in Internal Medicine as an Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine - Rural Faculty. In 2010 in response to a local community need, and ignited by his love for minor surgical procedures, he was one of the founding Physicians of the Mercy Medical Center Advance Wound Care Center in Redding. Then in 2014 due to a similar growing demand in Tehama County he help start the advanced wound care clinic at Saint Elizabeth Community Hospital in Red Bluff.

While Dr. Louwrens specialty skills in Internal Medicine and its focus on complex multi-system diseases have helped him develop a comprehensive approach to providing advanced wound care, and his CPE (Certificate of Physician Executive) demonstrated his commitment to influence positive change at an administrative level in healthcare, raising seven children with his wife anchors him in a steadfast commitment to well-being and comprehensive health care.