Dr. Ana Crew believes in blooming where she’s planted. And she’s been planted in a lot of places. Daughter of itinerant Brazilian medical missionaries, she grew up in Peru, Costa Rica and Mexico, moving 26 times over her lifetime up to landing in Waco.
Today, as a doctor of osteopathic medicine in family practice for Baylor Scott & White’s Clinic on Fishpond and a professor at Baylor School of Medicine in Temple, she faithfully practices the simple lessons learned from her family: Serve those in need. Practice medicine compassionately. Walk in your faith daily. And through it all, bloom and thrive where you’re planted.
Tell me about your upbringing and growing up outside of the U.S.
My parents were medical missionaries from Brazil to the world, and very early on in their marriage they decided they wanted to travel and do medical mission work. My mom was a dentist and my dad was a nurse, and they had a shared vision to go into places where people didn’t have access to health care. People would ask my parents, ‘Why are you doing this work for free?’ And they would say, ‘We love you because God loved us first.’ So the name of their ministry was called Fundación Amor en Acción, the ‘Love in Action Foundation.’ They’ve now retired to Brazil, where they’re both from.
I grew up in Peru from the ages of 6 months to 8. Then we moved to Costa Rica, where I lived from ages 8 to 11. Mexico was the last country we lived in before moving full-time to the U.S.; we lived in Toluca, about 45 minutes south of Mexico City. After living in Mexico, my parents wanted us to do our college education in the U.S., which they felt was the best education in the world. My parents both struggled to get their medical careers certified in the countries
we lived in.
So you’re bilingual in English and Spanish?
Actually, I’m trilingual — my first language was Portuguese — it’s very similar to Spanish and we spoke both at home. When we moved to Peru, I started school in Spanish and all of my schooling was in Spanish until my senior year of high school. English is my third language; I learned it later in life through ESL programs here in the U.S.
Tell me about your work.
Family medicine is my specialty and what I did my residency in. My certifications are Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine [DO] and Masters of Public Health [MPH], and I practice at the Baylor Scott & White Clinic’s Fishpond location. I’ve been in Waco for four years, and before I moved here was practicing in rural Oklahoma. I was recruited to Baylor Scott & White because they were specifically looking for a family medicine doctor bilingual in Spanish and English.
Being a clinical doctor is only 50% of my work; the other 50% is serving as a professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Temple. I co-lead the family medicine clerkship, and I also co-lead a course for first-year medical students in
clinical skills.
Tell me about your post-secondary education.
My mom was able to get my brothers and me full-ride scholarships as missionary kids to Dallas Baptist University, and that was what brought us to Texas. I graduated high school in Mesquite [a suburb of Dallas]. I earned my Master’s of Public Health and Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degrees from Nova Southeastern College of Osteopathic Medicine in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and did my residency at the Medical Center of Southeastern Oklahoma in Durant.
Dr. Ana Crew grew up in the remote parts of Central and South America, helping her parents who ran the nonprofit Fundación Amor en Acción — Love in Action — a mobile clinic that worked out of a trailer that was half medical, half dental.
What’s your parents’ story?
My parents were the classic Romeo and Juliet story — in Brazil. My mom was brought up upper-class in the big city of Rio de Janeiro, and my dad was very poor from a small rural town in São Paulo, but they both ended up going to the same adult church camp. My dad was the nurse in the camp and my mom was a camp attendee. She broke both of her wrists playing volleyball and had to spend a lot of time with him as the nurse.
They fell in love and got married about eight months after meeting, and neither of their parents supported their relationship because of their different social classes. But they had this shared dream of doing international medical mission work and felt that their love could conquer all things, so they sold everything, packed up and said, ‘Let’s
go have a life of adventure and a family out there.’
What was it like growing up in a family of traveling medical missionaries?
I have one older brother and one younger brother and we’re all a year apart. We had this really cool childhood where we got to be a part of our parents’ ministry and the work that they did. I was my mom’s dental assistant or my dad’s nursing assistant, and my brothers played soccer with the kids outside and kept them entertained while their parents or siblings were getting treatment.
We moved a lot, so friendships were difficult. I don’t really have any contact with anyone that I knew from my childhood; that was before the internet. We just made friends wherever we went — I’ve moved 26 times in my life. We didn’t grow up setting down roots anywhere. We were just kind of gypsying along, and our core family of five and church family were our support system.
Wearing traditional Peruvian clothing, Crew (middle on the drums) leads a worship service alongside her brothers.
Tell me about your parents’ foundation, Love in Action.
It was a not-for-profit foundation that they founded with the support of the Brazilian Baptist Mission Board and local churches in Brazil. They had a trailer that was half-medical and half-dental that we traveled with wherever they served. They would partner with local churches and do mission work by showing the love of God.
My parents would provide dental and medical services in remote areas, whatever people needed. Right after people’s treatment, the church would help them with basic needs like food and shelter, and then my parents would provide spiritual teaching along with the church. My dad was also a trained pastor, so he helped train up pastors and deacons very much like the first churches in the Bible.
Once things were going pretty well, we would pick up the trailer and move to another town. We lived in rental houses in lots of different cities and towns, and my parents would usually find a private school for us to go to.
What was your childhood like always being on the road?
We each got one suitcase per person, and that’s where all our toys, clothes and anything we wanted to keep had to go. We learned to not acquire things or get attached to them, because you could only keep what you could carry, right? We lived a very, very simple life but it was really the best upbringing in the world. I mean, we didn’t have any family heirlooms or even any furniture. We learned very quickly that things are dispensable in life, but people are not. So we learned to treasure relationships much more than things.
Are you used to American consumerism by now, or does it still give you pause?
Oh, it still gives me pause. I’d rather use my money to travel and have experiences instead of acquiring more things. It’s part of our culture in Latin America that when you’re appreciative to someone, you give them a gift. Patients ask me all the time, ‘What can I give you? What can I bring you from Mexico?’ And I say, ‘I don’t need things. Things aren’t important to me. Just bring me something that you make with love.’ That’s how we do gifts in my family: Give me a handwritten card that tells me how much you care about me. That means more than an expensive gift.
That’s just part of my upbringing:
Love in action.
Tell me about your journey to become a doctor.
I was sort of expected to be a dentist like my mom. And very quickly I was like, ‘I don’t like this.’ But when we were in Costa Rica and I was in middle school, we started partnering with American churches that would send doctors on mission trips to provide free healthcare. During one of those partnerships, I met an American osteopathic physician who opened my eyes to a very specific way of practicing medicine: How to use your hands and not just your stethoscope to diagnose and treat patients.
And I thought that was fascinating, because I had worked with some local physicians who would just take a list of the symptoms and pull out a prescription. When I worked with this osteopathic physician, prescriptions were the last thing on his list. He was really trying to get to the root of the problem, like a puzzle that you had to put together.
Crew, pictured in the back wearing the backwards cap, often assisted doctors that worked alongside her parents, including an American doctor providing dental work on a patient in Mexico.
So talk to me about osteopathy, because it’s not necessarily a well-known medical practice.
MDs and DOs are both fully licensed doctors who diagnose, treat and prescribe medicine, but DOs are trained to use a whole-body approach that looks at how muscles, bones, organs, lifestyle, diet, stress and overall health work together, rather than focusing only on the specific illness or symptom.
Osteopaths look at the physical, emotional and lifestyle factors that affect your health, not just at the symptoms. Instead of treating pain only with medication, they try to understand why the problem is happening. With back pain, for example, an osteopath might ask about your job, posture and daily movements, because if you don’t address the cause — like poor lifting technique or weak muscles — the pain will likely keep coming back even with medicine.
You mentioned diet — how do you encourage your patients to eat healthier?
Diabetes is one of the most common conditions we treat in family medicine, and I do have a lot of diabetic patients. I know that if we don’t fix their dietary problems, we’re never going to get good control of their diabetes. If I just throw more medication at them, that’s not going to fix their diet. I’m a lot more holistic in my approach in that I have medications in my arsenal of tools, but I don’t always start there. I want to try to find a more natural approach to treating the patient than just pharmacotherapy.
With my Hispanic patients I have to take a different approach. Understanding the Mexican diet makes it a lot easier to counsel patients on how to make changes. Many of my Hispanic patients worry that they have to completely give up foods they love, like tortillas or tamales, so instead we talk about simple adjustments. For example, eat carbs earlier in the day when you’re more active, and then eat smaller portions of carbs later in the day. Because I lived in Mexico for many years, I can help patients make small, realistic changes to their traditional diet that can still make a big difference in their health.
I hear you talking a lot about educating your patients as well as treating them.
MDs and DOs are both fully licensed doctors who diagnose, treat and prescribe medicine, but DOs are trained to use a whole-body approach that looks at how muscles, bones, organs, lifestyle, diet, stress and overall health work together, rather than focusing only on the specific illness or symptom.
Osteopaths look at the physical, emotional and lifestyle factors that affect your health, not just at the symptoms. Instead of treating pain only with medication, they try to understand why the problem is happening. With back pain, for example, an osteopath might ask about your job, posture and daily movements, because if you don’t address the cause — like poor lifting technique or weak muscles — the pain will likely keep coming back even with medicine.
How much of your interaction with patients is in Spanish?
If you were to look at my number of Hispanic patients, it’s probably 25% or less. But I feel like I’m speaking Spanish a lot of my day, because often even if patients list their primary language as English, their home language is Spanish and they want to do the entire visit in Spanish. So I do.
I didn’t do medical school in Spanish so when I’m speaking to my Hispanic patients, I talk in layman’s terms. I don’t use big medical words with them, because they don’t know big medical words either. That’s the education piece. I spend a lot of time just going over general anatomy terms. The Spanish that I know is just really basic Spanish that most people know, so I can talk to people in terms that they understand.
What do you bring to the table as a multicultural and multilingual doctor?
A level of compassion in understanding Hispanic culture, food and family dynamics. Since I didn’t grow up in the U.S. and came here as an immigrant, I understand both sides, right? I married into a traditional American family so I understand the positives and negatives of both cultures. I also understand the struggles of learning a new language
and culture.
What’s the biggest challenge in your medical practice?
Time: Not having enough time with each patient. I wish I could be with each one for an hour, not the 15 or 20 minutes we’re allotted. I wish there was less time having to do administrative tasks. The biggest draw to family medicine is relationship, and it’s often difficult to build a relationship with people when your time is so, so compressed.
How have you integrated into Waco’s Hispanic community?
Waco is very diverse, and when I moved here in 2021 in the middle of COVID, I didn’t know there was such a large Hispanic community. Interestingly, how I met most other Hispanics at first wasn’t as patients but through soccer. My three sons all started playing recreational soccer and with the predominately Hispanic soccer boys, I started meeting Hispanic soccer moms. Then I joined a Hispanic Women’s Soccer League myself, and started playing with them and getting to know their needs. Twice during my season somebody got hurt, and they would say excitedly, ‘We have a doctor on the field!’ I very quickly learned that there was a tremendous need for Spanish-speaking doctors. Through word of mouth, Hispanic patients started coming to see me and my practice grew very quickly.
Crew poses with her mother while on a medical/dental mission trip in Venezuela just before leaving for medical school.
Is soccer still a part of your life?
I haven’t played in about a year because I sustained an injury but am working on getting back in shape. My boys play club soccer, so we spend most of our weeknights at practices and our weekends in Dallas for games and tournaments. We live on a ranch in Crawford and have our own little soccer field. My husband loves soccer too, and when we’re at home as a family we love nothing more than to get out on the field. Soccer is our family love language!
What else do you do for fun?
I love reading and traveling, and there are so many places on my bucket list. I’d like to visit Italy because of my family roots, Japan for its delicious and healthy cuisine and Australia because I’ve heard it’s stunning — though those long flights are a bit daunting!
I also co-lead a group in Waco called ‘Brazil in Central Texas,’ which is a gathering of the local Brazilian community. We get together every couple of months and cook Brazilian food, speak Portuguese and just bond. The kids play soccer together. We probably have 50 or 60 people when we get together and it’s been so fun getting to know these families!
You’ve said that you see Waco as your mission field now that your family is planted here. Tell me about that.
Waco is 100% my mission field. Every place that I’ve been has been a mission field in itself. I just live life with open hands, praying, ‘God, take me where you want me to be, and help me bloom where I’m planted.’ Right now I’m planted here in Waco and very happy to stay here and put down roots.
My husband Steven and I have three sons who are 6, 10 and 14: Daniel, Lucas and Sebastian. Steven is a stay-at-home dad, and I’m incredibly grateful for his selfless love and dedication, which allow me to pursue my work knowing our family is cared for with such devotion and heart.
What fills your spiritual cup?
My family and my church family. We’re very active with our church, Fellowship Bible Church on Speegleville Road in Waco. But most importantly, being in God’s word every single day is the spiritual food that I live on. I make that a big priority because if I don’t, my cup is empty. My husband and I do a devotional together every morning, and I have audio devotional time on my commute to Temple on the days that I teach.
How does your faith play into your medical practice?
It’s an integral part of what I do to trust that God is going to use me to touch somebody’s life. Sometimes it’s not even medication. Sometimes it’s listening to them and just being an ear, right? Sometimes it’s just giving them a hug when they’ve had a hard week. God called us to take care of and love those around us, so that’s what I do. This is not just a job for me. I’m not motivated by money; I’m motivated by really making a difference. Faith is the root of everything in my life.
What does it mean to you to model a servant’s heart?
It’s everything to me. I became a physician because I genuinely feel that God called me to take care of people, and to do it with humility and understanding. Ultimately, God is the great physician, and I’m just a tool in His hand. Before I come to work, I pray for each and every patient that I’m going to see that day, and I ask that God give me wisdom to figure out what’s wrong so I can give them good recommendations.
