In late 2016, I started sending bulk messages to all of my patients, mainly as a way to offer preventative advice on what to do to avoid getting a cold/flu that season and also what to do in case they did, just realizing that it's always useful information and I spend a large amount of my time every November-April telling people individually about the same advice.
It was received really well and so I kept on doing them every month covering a broad range of topics that I felt people regularly asked about, just feeling like while there is a lot of good information out there, I think I have my own tone that might speak to people more than something generic from the Mayo Clinic website. Also, the more you search for things on the internet about your health, the more likely it is to tell you that you have cancer so I was trying to circumvent that often undue anxiety.
So I've slowly been coalescing this blog and now that I've gone through to try to arrange all the topics, it seems like I really do have the oft-touted interest of preventative medicine I've liked to think I had all this time.
I spent a good number of years in Northern California so the topics may skew that way, but I'm a native Texan and repatriated in 2020 to Austin where I am an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School and clinician for UT Health Austin.
I'm a board-certified Internal Medicine doctor and outside of medicine enjoy spending time with my family, woodworking, volleyball, cycling and making terrible dad-jokes.
If you want to see more, my current employer made this video about me and my practice. Ignore all the views - I think it was mostly just my mom watching it over and over.