Specialty Critical Care Medicine Facility Vallejo Medical Center Department of Anesthesiology Address 975 Sereno Drive Vallejo CA 94589 Map & Directions Telephone Non-urgent voicemails: 707-651-2037 Office: (707) 651-3450 E-mail your doctor View your preventive services

About Me

I became a physician because I instinctively knew this was what I wanted to be. My mother's father was personal physician to Theodore Roosevelt and enjoyed a private practice of internal medicine in Chicago. He loved his patients and was a strong, kind man and grandfather. My father was chairman of the Department of Physiology at the University of Illinois Center for Health and Science in Chicago. My mother was a medical illustrator. She brought our family to sunny California in 1974 when she was asked to run the graduate program in medical illustration at UCSF.

I chose anesthesiology and critical care medicine as my specialty because it was the best fit for my gifts and my desire for challenges. I love the fact that a knowledge of the underlying abnormal physiology and medicine can help pull someone out of an unstable medical state and save a life.

What I like about Kaiser Permanente is the ability to continue to grow and develop new skills that can make a difference in patient outcome. I also like the fact that no one department has such power over another department to control job security. In private practice, I witnessed too much of putting the business of medicine before the safety of patients. If a patient isn't ready for surgery at Kaiser Permanente, I can safely speak up and be heard. I also have opportunities to help advance practice, such as implementing the use of peri-operative beta-blocker medications that I started in Vallejo in 1998.

My philosophy on healing is that the body is an amazing thing, if taken care of. The body's intrinsic ability to stay well and also heal itself is profound. Clearly, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Focus on treatment of known risk factors (for example: SMOKING, HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE, MORBID OBESITY, high CHOLESTEROL, DIABETES) can make a huge difference over the long term. The peri-operative period is one excellent opportunity for physicians to summarize health risks and reinforce risk factor modifications with the patients.

When a disease process exceeds the body's capacity to self-heal, modern medicine has many fantastic treatments that really can save people who in prior generations would have died or been terribly compromised. I am proud to be part of a team that can help when a disease process overwhelms the body's defenses.

My main personal interest is my family: my wife, kids, our dog, our cat, and last but not least, our horse. A personal interest of mine currently is tennis. I find it challenging, demanding, great for cardiovascular fitness, and social. It's my way of trying to keep the doctor away!

My Credentials

Medical school	Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA
Internship	Stanford University Hospital, Stanford, CA
Residency	Stanford University Hospital, Stanford, CA
Fellowship	Stanford University Hospital, Stanford, CA
Board certification	Anesthesiology, American Board of Anesthesiology
Board certification	Critical Care Medicine, American Board of Anesthesiology

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