The Los Angeles County Medical Association’s District 2 gathered for dinner and a meeting in mid-September at the Arroyo Chop House in Pasadena. The event featured two speakers: John G. Elder, MD, of Sansum Santa Barbara Medical Foundation Clinic, and Tom Nolan, Multiangle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) operations engineer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
 
LACMA President Clayton Patchett, MD, and District 2 President Harold Rosenfeld, MD, along with 20 Pasadena physicians were in attendance. The event was an opportunity to increase physician knowledge and allowed new LACMA membership staff to get better acquainted with area doctors. “The Pasadena event gave us a chance to continue to introduce ourselves to LACMA members,” says Faye Mosley, membership director. “Since we are a fairly new team, we want to assure physician members that we will address their needs and we are here for them.”

Dr. Elder taught physicians how to better screen for diabetic nephropathy by looking for high amounts of microalbuminuria in the urine. Dr. Elder projected that more than 200 million people in the world will have diabetes by 2010. Many of those diabetic patients will inevitably develop diabetic nephropathy, as a disease complication.

Nolan enthusiastically shared his journey from being a dolphin show trainer at a California theme park to his current post as a JPL operations engineer for MISR, an instrument onboard the Terra satellite.
 
“Medicine and oceanography are very similar in that both offer a chase of the unknown, the urgency of finding the answers, then using that information to help mankind,” Nolan says.