Brownstone Institute BY
“To a Healthy Future” is the current tagline of the Executive Director of Jefferson County Public Health (JCPH) Dawn Comstock. Comstock is a PhD, otherwise known as an academic, who rules with an iron fist over one of the largest counties in the Denver area. Unfortunately for Comstock, her lack of clinical practice experience causes her to think that the definition of health means the absence of COVID-19.
Yet health is much much more, and is better measured at the individual rather than population level and by a primary care provider (PCP) instead of by an academic with zero understanding of how health is managed within the context of an intimate doctor-patient relationship.
I started to understand this myself only after I became a community pediatrician. Prior to this I too was in the land of academia. During my residency at Children’s Hospital Colorado nearly 2 decades ago I attended our daily Morning Report where we reviewed hospitalized cases from the community where children might have been seen on numerous occasions by their pediatrician before presenting to the hospital where the diagnosis was made. To me it was the unspoken desire not to be that village idiot pediatrician who seemed to have missed what now appeared so obvious.
