My goal is to provide the most comprehensive, capable, compassionate and current care to all my patients in a way that will make people feel at ease with doing what is necessary to maintain and restore health and well-being. I have devoted my life to this calling for the past 40 years. I bring to the practice of medicine a background in broad liberal education and humanities.

I am known to patients and referring physicians alike for spending more time than average to make difficult diagnoses, treat difficult problems, and explain even the common ones in depth to help my patients come away from their visit healthier and more able to manage their medical conditions.

I teach 3rd year medical students from Yale University School of Medicine in the office at some times during the year. I write a blog on medical subjects entitled "prescriptions" that is carried on the American College of Physicians blog site, blog.acpinternist.org.

While I am proud of my Ivy League education, I firmly believe that it is the scholarly practice of medicine that is more important than where the scholarship was pursued.

I have a number of personal interests outside the practice of medicine that I am happy to discuss during visits if time allows.

My care philosophy is outlined in my personal statement above. My role models are the great doctors who preceded me, some famous in the history of medicine and some who taught me directly. A great physician said our mission as doctors is to cure sometimes, relieve often, and comfort always. Another doctor much admired said that the secret of the care of the patient is caring for the patient as a person. Finally, the founder of Johns Hopkins Hospital, where I trained, said famously that it is even more important for us to know what sort of patient has the disease than to know what sort of disease the patient has. These precepts have guided my practice since entering medical training in 1974.

My academic credentials speak for themselves. Patient reviews of doctors on web sites such as this one are often furnished mainly by those with an axe to grind and should be taken with a large "grain of salt". My patients seek me out by word of mouth, and anyone who I have cared for can attest to the quality of care I have provided.

I maintain my professional skill with continuing education through journals, conferences, courses, workshops, discussion with colleagues, and individual scholarship. I am privileged to work with a highly skilled and knowledgeable group of physicians at my practice, which is located at a small but state-of-the-art community hospital.  

Patient satisfaction surveys, as I have noted above, are often distorted and unreliable because they select for people with strong opinions, sometimes positive and sometimes not. Surveys often count into  a doctor's score many factors that don't deserve so much weight, such as the average wait time to be called in from the waiting room. In fact, some of the best doctors have the longest office waiting time. For that reason, satisfaction surveys should be greeted with skepticism. I do periodically check on my own reviews, but these are often colored by patient experience with office staff and environment, which even the most capable doctor may not have complete control of if he is in a group practice as most of us are.