Tom Rodriguez

Dr. Tom Rodriguez is a Hispanic-American nurse born in the Texas Panhandle city of Muleshoe. He was raised in various locals – all within Texas including Friona, Canyon, Austin, and Houston. Tom obtained his bachelors and masters education in nursing from the University of Texas at Austin in 1988 and 1993 respectively. His master’s degree was as a clinical nurse specialist in psychiatric and mental health nursing. His minor was psychology with a functional concentration in teaching. After receiving his master’s degree, Tom worked as a nurse manager at Austin State Hospital where his focus was the care of the State’s elderly and chronic-mentally-ill population. Later, he worked as a clinical nurse specialist with prescriptive authority at Austin Regional Clinic’s Mental Health Associates at Jefferson. While at ARC, Tom received extensive supervision in adult psychiatry by the clinic’s five staff-psychiatrists. In 1998, Tom received a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) pre-doctoral fellowship in substance abuse and mental health services administered by the American Nurses Association.  He then went on to receive his PhD in nursing in 2004 from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. It was during his doctoral education that he received education and training as an adult primary-healthcare nurse practitioner.

Since the time of his doctoral studies, Dr. Rodriguez practiced as a nurse practitioner for Baylor College of Medicine’s Population Program and as a psychiatric clinical nurse specialist for Dr. Robert Bacon, an African-American psychiatrist with a large practice in Houston. In addition to his clinical work, Dr. Rodriguez served as assistant professor of nursing at Texas Woman’s University in Houston for a little over three years. He also briefly taught at Houston Community College and at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. His dissertation research was a randomized, controlled, clinical trial involving two treatments for hypothyroidism. The findings from his research were published in his dissertation and in Endocrine Practice, the Official Journal of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Dr. Rodriguez has also published clinical, research-methodology, and philosophy of science articles in other peer-reviewed journals as well as an abstract on teaching methodologies. Prior to leaving his post at Texas Woman’s University, Dr. Rodriguez received funding for a qualitative study describing the lives of patients with adrenal insufficiency. This study was recently finished. Later in 2008, he obtained an additional year of supervised internal medicine practice with Avanta Health Professionals, a medical clinic in Houston.

Late in 2009, Dr. Rodriguez hired a medical collaborator and turned his attention to establishing his own private counseling and psychiatry practice which he called Houston Mind-Body Counseling. Through his participation in the Medicaid and Medicare insurance programs, Dr. Rodriguez provides psychotherapy and psychiatric care to a large proportion of minorities. Since there is a large, Spanish-speaking, Hispanic population in Houston, Dr. Rodriguez also provides services in his native Spanish language. The clinic’s services include, but are not limited to, psychiatric evaluation, pharmacotherapy and medication management, stress management, hypnotherapy, and individual, group, and family psychotherapy. In 2012, Dr. Rodriguez obtained certification as a clinical hypnotherapist through the International Certification Board of Clinical Hypnotherapy. Dr. Rodriguez continues to live in Houston.