About

The Gap

Most clinical training teaches you how to treat the body. Almost none of it teaches you how to talk to the person attached to it. The new patient who is scared, the family who is skeptical, the colleague who outranks you, or even the parent whose toddler is screaming.

You can pass every exam and still freeze in the room where a patient is waiting for you to say something.

That gap is what Health Student Mentor exists to fix.

Who I Am

I'm Nikolai Lee, DC.

I have been training people to talk under pressure since 2011. That is when I earned my EMT license and started running calls on the ambulance in Lake City, Florida. My paramedic certification followed in 2012. For six years I worked between the ambulance and the emergency room at Lake City Medical Center. I taught EMT, paramedic, and nursing students clinical skills with communication built into every one of them: how to deliver bad news, how to keep a panicking family calm, how to brief the receiving doctor in twenty seconds without losing critical detail.

I went on to earn my chiropractic degree from Palmer College of Chiropractic Florida in 2020. I was a faculty instructor at Palmer Florida from 2022 to 2025 teaching neurology, pathology, special populations, extremity adjusting, and the lab courses where students first meet real patients. I have also taught board review across the country with Irene Gold Associates since 2021, working with students from five different chiropractic colleges, in classes ranging from twenty to three hundred.

Outside of clinical training, I have practiced hapkido since 2000 and am the Secretary-General of the American Hapkido Alliance, teaching classes twice per week since 2007. I have also taught piano for years and currently work at Thrive Community Church. Those experiences all teach the same lessons you learn in the clinic: technical competence is the easy part. The conversation around it is what makes you good or bad at your job.

I built the first set of field cards for the version of myself walking into his first solo chiropractic encounter. The student who had prepared for the adjustment, but had no idea what to say in the ninety seconds before it. Health Student Mentor is the thing I wish I had on day one of clinic.

How Field Cards Work

Each card is one page. Six tips. One specific high-stakes conversation. Plain language, written to be read fast and remembered.

Not theory. Not motivational. Real sentences you can use Monday morning.

They are built to be printed. Throw them on the inside of your locker, the back of a treatment-room door, or the spot you stand for thirty seconds before walking in. The format matters as much as the content. Communication is not something you study once; it is something you drill until it becomes part of who you are.

On The Horizon

More healthcare discipline cards are in development. The conversations are different in each room and I want the cards to be perfect for you!

If you want to know when new content drops, sign up on the homepage.

— Nikolai Lee, DC