{"id":4284,"date":"2014-11-04T14:06:08","date_gmt":"2014-11-04T19:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/?p=4284"},"modified":"2014-11-04T14:06:08","modified_gmt":"2014-11-04T19:06:08","slug":"emil-ray-dominguez-85-caring-for-neighbors-in-need","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/2014\/emil-ray-dominguez-85-caring-for-neighbors-in-need\/","title":{"rendered":"Emil Ray Dominguez \u201885: Caring for Neighbors in Need"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Kimberly S. Slover<\/em><\/p>\n

In the late 1970s, when medical school recruiters called on Emil Dominguez, then an undergraduate at Harvard College, they dismissed his intention to work with children in underserved Latino communities as youthful idealism. But Dr. George Margolis, recruiting for Dartmouth Medical School (now the Geisel School of Medicine), acknowledged Dominiguez\u2019s career goals as genuine and convinced him that a small school in Hanover, New Hampshire, could prepare him well for his future. Margolis was right. Dominguez thrived in the close-knit community of faculty and students at Dartmouth\u2014and in his pediatric residency at the Kaiser Program in southern California, near where he had grown up and would later launch his medical practice.<\/p>\n

\"Dr.
Dr. Emil Dominguez '85<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Today, Dominguez operates two pediatric practices in La Puente and West Covina, near Los Angeles, where he and a physician\u2019s assistant serve nearly 4,000 mostly Latino children from low-income families. Eighty percent of his patients are enrolled in Medi-Cal, California\u2019s Medicaid program, and many others are uninsured. Their medical issues reflect troubling trends in urban communities: a high incidence of autism, diabetes, obesity, and the pernicious health effects of premature birth and substance abuse among parents.<\/p>\n

As a self-declared \u201cold school\u201d doctor, Dominguez uses paper charts and works long hours, six days a week. His quiet voice rises when he asserts his feeling that computers compromise medical care by stealing time from direct doctor-patient contact. And with his large practice, he has neither time for nor much interest in computers.<\/p>\n

Dominguez chose pediatrics because he likes children, and he jokes that \u201ckids are more my size.\u201d Children look forward to seeing the \u201clollipop man,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Dominguez\u2019s patients and their families feel comfortable with him, too. They speak openly about their lives because he speaks Spanish with them, shops at the same stores, and attended the same schools.The severity of his patients\u2019 medical conditions are often related to their families\u2019 lack of education and good employment opportunities, poor diets, and unhealthy lifestyle choices. His patient pool also reflects Dominguez\u2019s insistence on accepting most referrals of patients whose medical problems he says other pediatricians find too complex and costly to treat.<\/p>\n

For Dominguez, treating such a challenging population is a simple choice. \u201cThese kids and their families are my neighbors,\u201d he says, \u201cand they need my help.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The close-knit community of faculty and students at Dartmouth helped alumnus Emil Ray Dominguez ’85 to prepare for and achieve his goal to work with children in underserved Latino communities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":480,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[17,255,459,23,101,102],"class_list":["post-4284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-news","tag-alumni-2","tag-alumni-album","tag-emil-ray-dominguez","tag-global-health","tag-health-equity","tag-pediatrics","post_format-post-format-aside","author-15"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2014\/03\/logo-460.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4r3h1-176","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4284"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4287,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4284\/revisions\/4287"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}