Professional Recommendation
John Papa, DC, on Zeinab Arafat
Chiropractic physician; founder · Florida Orthocare · Action Physical Therapy & Chiropractic Care
BACKGROUND
John Papa has practised chiropractic medicine in Palm Beach County for more than twenty-five years, and over that time built Florida Orthocare and Action Physical Therapy & Chiropractic Care into practices operating across Florida, alongside his own circle of clinicians he refers to and depends on.
He met Zeinab Arafat in 2021. He sends her the patients he is responsible for, and he sends her his family. The referral runs in both directions: she sends him the patients who need orthopaedic or pain care for longer than an urgent care is meant to hold them.
FROM ZEINA
Dr. Papa has been treating patients in this county for more than twenty-five years, and he has built Florida Orthocare and Action Physical Therapy into practices that reach well beyond it. We met in 2021. His physical therapists introduced us and we went to lunch, and we have worked together ever since.
What I would want people to understand about it is that it goes in both directions. He sends us the things an urgent care is built for — a pre-operative check, a bad cough, a cut that needs stitches. We send him the patients who need care for longer than we are meant to provide it, to his orthopaedic and pain teams.
An urgent care is supposed to be temporary. Knowing who takes over when a problem turns out not to be temporary is a real part of doing this work well, and he is who we trust with that.
He also knows nearly every clinician in the area, and he is one of the few I have met who genuinely wants other people to do well.
THE LETTER
I have built Florida Orthocare and Action Physical Therapy & Chiropractic Care alongside a circle of clinicians I refer to and depend on. I am writing about one of them, Zeinab Arafat, because there are very few providers I trust the way I trust her.
Since then she has cared not only for me but for my immediate family — including [an older relative], which is where I have seen the truest measure of who she is. Caring well for an older patient takes more than competence; it takes patience that does not run out. Zeinab's never has. She listens, she explains, she follows through, and she treats [them] with the same dignity she would give her own.
What sets her apart clinically is the harder thing to teach: she catches what others miss.
I have watched her work through complicated cases that had stalled with other providers, arrive at the right diagnosis, and then actually carry out a plan — not just name the problem, but solve it. That combination is rare.
I send the people I am responsible for to Zeinab without a second thought, and I would do so in any setting you can imagine.
John Papa, DCFlorida Orthocare · Action Physical Therapy & Chiropractic Care
Signed original held on file. Signature and contact details are not published, and the letter itself is not published. Dr. Papa described a member of his own family. Brackets stand where the relationship was named, so that the person cannot be identified. Nothing else is changed. It comes down the same day if its author asks — see privacy.
WHAT IT DEMONSTRATES
The persistence patients describe in their own words, seen by another clinician. Patient Experience.