About

I’m a physician, mother, wife, triathlete and survivor. I’ve been described as resilient, strong, great diagnostician, and compassionate. But at the end of the day I really love looking at pictures of home and garden and planning the garden ahead.

FEMDOC stands for Feminist Doctor and has nothing to do with burning our bras unless you want it to but is a style of medicine. Feminist style is partnering together to make the best decision for the patient based on providing as much knowledge as we can gather at the time, helping with interpretation and allowing for adjustment for personal beliefs, style and intuition. It’s not patient centered care which to me sounds maternalistic. It’s not where the doctor just tells you what to do and you just comply (paternalistic). Both of the latter two models don’t have the doctor and patient working together.

Patient centered care has lead to many patients believing their doctor or health care system is supposed to cater to their every whim and desire and provide whatever they need (often at no or low cost to them) and operate irregardless of the financial burden it puts on the system. I call it maternalistic because I imagine a 4 year old saying I am scared that I have cancer somewhere so I want my full body scan and I want it now and my insurance should pay for it!

Traditional physician role was to just pat you on the head and hand you your prescription of  penicillin and say take this and you’ll be fine. Very reassuring I suppose unless they never mentioned they were treating you not for strep throat but for syphilis! So the patient here had almost no knowledge of what the doctor was treating, benefits, risks, and so on.