Dr. Joe Bates is a double board-certified award-winning psychiatrist and pediatrician who recently retired as clinical director at Rusk State Hospital in Rusk, Texas to spend more time serving his fellow veterans in his current role, leading psychiatrist for the Tyler VA Clinic. He is a native of Homer near Shreveport, Louisiana, and graduated from LSU School of Medicine in New Orleans, where he was president of the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society and was honored with the "Highest Ideals of Medicine" Award. 

 

Dr. Bates received the Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam with the US Army as a major in the Medical Corps. He completed residencies at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and has taken a leadership role in medical practice and teaching for the past fifty years. In 2013, Dr. Bates’s designed the Wellness Program that was the recipient of the David Pharis Award for making significant contributions to the safety and quality of inpatient care and outcomes for Texas state psychiatric hospitals. This program has recently been endorsed by the Joint Commission and is included in the national Leading Practice Library. 

 

Dr. Bates is a member of the Christian Medical Society and has traveled to Russia, Estonia, and Belize on mission trips. He was awarded The National 2015 Mensa Intellectual Benefits to Society Award for his work with cognitive remediation training. He and his wife, Paula, live in Tyler, Texas, and are the proud parents of four children and grandparents of thirteen. 

 

His latest and ongoing achievement is helping people age, think, feel and live better with a series of personal brain fitness workouts he developed proven to increase confidence, hope, well-being, energy, and best of all memory. The exercise method is called braincardio™. He is the author of the award winning book, Making Your Brain Hum: 12 Weeks to A Smarter You. The scientific success of the book stems from the CRT (cognitive remediation therapy) study that was published in Current Psychiatry, April 2016.