Career Highlights
Recent Experiences
Career Highlights
- Principal, Full Circle Consulting – SF Bay
- Certified, American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology
- Trainer of Trainers (Facilitator), Education for Physicians (Professionals) in End-of-life Care (EPEC)
- Licensed Avatar® Master
Planning and Operations, Enterprise Resiliency Group
- Licensed Avatar® Master
- Board of Directors, Abilities United
- Founder and Coach, Mentoring Programs, American Red Cross - Silicon Valley Chapter
- Former Area C3 Governor, Div C of District 4, now DTM, Toastmasters International
- Former volunteer facilitator, workshop writer, and coach with Nova/Connect/ProMatch
Career Highlights
- Volunteer with Abilities United, American Red Cross, Toastmasters, and ProMatch: Silicon Valley
- Medical Director, Non-profit: Life Loan Foundation; co-founder Enterprise Resiliency Group
- Proprietor, Neurological Consultations, working with students, healthcare professionals, and organizations in New York State: appointed to NY State Task Force on Life and the Law, NYS DMV’s Medical Advisory Board, NYS Chapter of American College of Physicians’ Health & Public Policy Committee, Medical Society of the State of New York’s Bioethics Committee, Board of Directors of PRO for HCFA in New York & New Jersey, Trainer of Trainers for EPEC Program, Lecturer at SUNY Upstate School of Medicine, Mentor for American Academy of Neurology’s Palatucci Advocacy Leadership Forum.
- Founding Chief, Neurology Service; founder, Home Health Care Service and Geriatric Outpatient Program, VAMC Shreveport, LA;
- Associate Professor of Neurology, UCLA School of Medicine
- Clinical Associate and Guest Scientist, National Institutes of Health
- Assistant Resident in Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital
- Intern, then Assistant Resident, Harvard IVth Medical Service, Boston City Hospital
Full Circle Consulting
In 2010, I decided to make use of skills I had learned in my scientific, teaching, and medical career, had honed in volunteer work, and to which I had added from my training and deliveries of Avatar® Courses. I became a consultant in getting teams to succeed (organizational leadership), in improving communication within and between teams, in resolving conflicts, in executive coaching, and also giving workshops on effective, practical ways to reduce stress.
Move to the Peninsula of San Francisco Bay
I retired in 2004 and moved with my new wife, Marika O’Baire, to San Jose, CA and then to Mountain View. Here I have helped deliver Cooperative and International Avatar® Courses as a Licensed Avatar Master, have worked on start-ups, most notably Life Loan Foundation, and helped found the Enterprise Resiliency Group. I volunteer with the Mountain View Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), with Palo Alto Area Red Cross and now American Red Cross, Silicon Valley Chapter, Toastmasters International, and serve on the Board of Directors of Abilities United in Palo Alto and on the World Community Service Committee of the Palo Alto Rotary Club. Finally, from time to time I have been asked to be a medical expert in legal matters.
Volunteer Work in Central NY
My youngest daughter introduced me to Pony Club and I learned horse management. I served as District Commissioner for the local Pony Club (Limestone Creek) and later became one of the US Pony Clubs’ Chief Horse Management Judges, Horse Management Organizer for the Western Region of NY, founder of the USPC Crisis Advisory Team, and member of the USPC Board of Governors. My wife, at the time, presented me to the Limestone Creek Hunt and I became a member with colors. I eventually served on the Board of Stewards, took the second field as Field Master, and acted as Point Whipper-In.
Music continued from Shreveport with the Central New York Flute Association and its choir (flute and bass flute), the National Flute Association, and as a cofounder and later president of the Performing Arts Association of Central New York. I also served as an officer, later President, of the Central NY Harvard Club, largely helping to organize and supervise interviews of several dozen applicants to Harvard each year. In my last few years in New York. I was a volunteer firefighter and EMT with the Cazenovia Fire Department (Owahgena Hose Company, Rescue Squad, and Rope Squad) and the Cazenovia Ambulance Service, working actively with each several times a week.
Music continued from Shreveport with the Central New York Flute Association and its choir (flute and bass flute), the National Flute Association, and as a cofounder and later president of the Performing Arts Association of Central New York. I also served as an officer, later President, of the Central NY Harvard Club, largely helping to organize and supervise interviews of several dozen applicants to Harvard each year. In my last few years in New York. I was a volunteer firefighter and EMT with the Cazenovia Fire Department (Owahgena Hose Company, Rescue Squad, and Rope Squad) and the Cazenovia Ambulance Service, working actively with each several times a week.
Solo Practice, Central NY
I left Shreveport to start solo private practice in Syracuse, NY. What really interested me were seeing patients in the emergency room, the ICU, and the wards; mentoring residents and medical students, and medical ethics and bioethics – the ethical principles underlying medical practice, principles sometimes supported and sometimes opposed by politics and social pressures. The latter led to membership in the Ethics (Bioethics) Committee of the Medical Society of the State of New York and membership in and consultations for ethics committees in three hospitals in Syracuse. The Governor of New York appointed me to the NY State Task Force on Life and the Law and to the Medical Advisory Board for the NYS DMV, for which I did planning, writing, and editing. I was invited to the Health and Public Policy Committee of the NYS Chapter of the American College of Physicians and served as co-chair of its subcommittee on Medical Care, dealing with the problems imposed on patients, physicians, and their relationships by managed care. I was trained as a trainer in what is now known as: “Education in Palliative and End-of-life Care” (EPEC), served on faculties to train others some 20 times in 5 states, and included treatment of chronic pain, and palliative and end-of-life care, in my practice.
VA Medical Center, Shreveport, LA
I left UCLA to take a position as the founding chief of a neurology service at the Veterans Administration Medical Center with LSU-Shreveport’s School of Medicine. Its Chief of Staff, James Schless, had converted a nursing home and country hospital into a successful tertiary-care medical center. He and other colleagues taught me the intricacies of the VA, its associations with medical schools, starting and running a clinical service and management techniques.
UCLA
The work at NIH began a decade’s collaboration with John Blass. It was largely exploring whether and how inherited problems in the conversion of pyruvic acid to acetyl~CoA might underlie some diseases in a spectrum of mental retardation, early onset ataxia, and an ataxia that in some ways resembles Friedreich’s ataxia. It included studies begun with W. King Engel on defects of muscle, such as treating defects of fatty acid oxidation (intermittent muscle weakness and breakdown) with a mild ketogenic diet. In turn this led to a successful trial of the diet in patients with ataxia who had abnormal pyruvate metabolism (collaborating with Maria Rodriguez-Budelli and Susan Perlman). The evidence we gathered suggested many of these particular patients might have a structural problem in an enzyme called lipoamide dehydrogenase. No other laboratory has as yet examined this possibility with the correct patients and correct laboratory techniques.
There were related studies on the effects of motor nerve on mitochondrial in muscle, on mercury toxicity, and on the effects of physostigmine on novel measures of clinical ataxia. Both at NIH and at UCLA, I collaborated on clinical problems, research issues, and administrative matters, and got to know what colleagues were working on, the problems they faced and how they tackled these. At UCLA I taught students in all four years of medical school, supervised residents in the wards and clinics, and mentored college students and graduate students in my laboratory. At its peak, the ataxia center had a laboratory of 15 to 18 people and a clinic 5 or 6 medical professionals. This work culminated in the first international conference on Inherited Ataxias and a book of its proceedings. UCLA was going to sponsor both but the key UCLA person wanted to drop the colleagues who had agreed to help me and use her name and mine as editors. Instead, my colleagues and I found our own publisher and several private agencies who funded the work. The conference and the book were successful. Partly because of my growing arrogance, my chairman at UCLA and I had a falling out.
There were related studies on the effects of motor nerve on mitochondrial in muscle, on mercury toxicity, and on the effects of physostigmine on novel measures of clinical ataxia. Both at NIH and at UCLA, I collaborated on clinical problems, research issues, and administrative matters, and got to know what colleagues were working on, the problems they faced and how they tackled these. At UCLA I taught students in all four years of medical school, supervised residents in the wards and clinics, and mentored college students and graduate students in my laboratory. At its peak, the ataxia center had a laboratory of 15 to 18 people and a clinic 5 or 6 medical professionals. This work culminated in the first international conference on Inherited Ataxias and a book of its proceedings. UCLA was going to sponsor both but the key UCLA person wanted to drop the colleagues who had agreed to help me and use her name and mine as editors. Instead, my colleagues and I found our own publisher and several private agencies who funded the work. The conference and the book were successful. Partly because of my growing arrogance, my chairman at UCLA and I had a falling out.
National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness, NIH
W. King Engel invited me to the Medical Neurology Branch of the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness. We clinical associates held the rank of Surgeon or Lt. Commander. In the first year, we evaluated patients admitted for studies, did muscle biopsies and learned to diagnose from slides of histochemical reactions of muscle. In addition, in collaboration with John Blass, I got involved in clinical and dietary studies of two patients with phytanic acid storage (Refsum’s disease) and of a young boy with intermittent ataxia (as if drunk) who turned out to have a problem converting sugar to energy: converting pyruvic acid to acetyl~Coenzyme A, thereby decreasing the amount of acetyl to be oxidized in the Krebs’ cycle.
Massachusetts General Hospital
Having been invited to spend National Service in the Neurology Service of the US Public Health Service at the National Institutes of Health, I spent a year as an Assistant Resident in Neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital under Raymond Adams. This included six weeks acting as a neurosurgical resident and allowed me to do detailed clinical studies and treatment of a man poisoned at work by elemental mercury, in collaboration with David Poskanzer, John Bullock, and G. Boylen.
Boston City Hospital
On leaving medical school, the Harvard Medical Services at the Boston City Hospital took me for a years’ internship and then a year as an Assistant Resident (under William Castle, Maxwell Finland, and Charles Davidson). The internship was a series of monthly rotations on the medical wards of the Services and a month or two each rotating in the Outpatient Clinics, the Emergency Ward, and the Neurology Service. The Assistant Residency was a series of similar rotations as the Resident running each ward and mentoring its interns, medical students, nurses, and others; on consultations, as the Resident in charge of a ward at the Mount Auburn Hospital and as the Resident in charge of the medical service of the Cambridge City Hospital, as well as a rotation in Neurology.
Throughout these years, we residents acted as mentors and coaches both to our patients and their families, to those on the clinical teams beside and behind us; and to the nurses, social workers and others helping with patient care. As an intern, I taught medical students; as a resident on the wards, the interns and medical students, and as the resident running the medical service at the Cambridge City Hospital, residents from other Harvard hospitals as well as interns. We made rounds several times a day; and each week at least we sat down with all the non-physicians on the service and reviewed each patient’s problems with an eye to helping them get to discharge and in society once they were discharged.
