About Me

Hello, and welcome to my Web page. I hope that this page will allow you to get to know me and my practice. The advantages of working in the Kaiser Permanente environment became obvious to me when I realized that I could be both academic and practical at the same time. The relative informality of our system, which allows me to call patients (with their permission) for what are essentially "Hello how are you doing?" calls is a big benefit.

Biography

After four years of college in Buffalo, New York, I went to medical school at NYU in Manhattan and completed residency in the Bronx. This was enough winter for me for the rest of my life. So off I went to sunny California where I could raise a family, attend theatre and symphony with my wife, play sports, and go out without a coat all year round. Clearly the most important thing in one's life is his or her family and this dominated my goals. When I was not trying to play sports or piano or trying to cook, I was coaching in the Bobby Sox or girls' basketball leagues and thoroughly enjoyed it. I also have been teaching pediatrics at UCLA for 30 years and giving talks in the local schools about what it is like to be a doctor. With a group of my colleagues, I have been volunteering to do physicals in one of the local elementary schools over the last 12 or so years.

About my practice

My practice is focused mostly on newborns, both term and premature, graduating from the neonatal intensive care unit. The families speak English or Spanish since I am comfortable with both. I am particularly interested in babies with chronic problems, be they respiratory, or genetic or metabolic syndromes. I will usually follow the patients and their siblings until they reach the teenage years at which time our teenage specialists take over. Part of our neonatal team is comprised of doctors who work both in the clinic and the NICU and will share follow up of these patients with me as needed. In conjunction with the parents, nurses, case management and social service, we form a team to seamlessly provide needed care. It is important to me that the parents realize their central role in the child's care and that they feel free to communicate with me as needed.

How I thrive

To thrive, one has to maintain a sense of humor. Fortunately for me, my patients laugh at my jokes. But seriously, a visit to the doctor is not all objective. We will sit and tell stories about our families and our lives and our values. We share hobbies and interests which for me are sports and music, travel and languages, and food and wine. I work out daily doing usually four miles a day in two sessions, walking or running depending on my mood and my knees, and encourage my patients to do as I do. It is much easier to discuss exercise when you are doing it yourself and can share the fatigue, aches, and ultimate euphoria that result.