Frederick Axelrod, MD
SBCMS member since 2005
Frederick Axelrod, MD, a Palm Springs pathologist, was re-elected to the board of directors of America's Blood Centers, a federation of 77 community-based blood programs responsible for 600 North American collection sites providing half of U.S. and all of Canadian volunteer blood.
The board is charged with establishing the organization's strategic direction, to support the projected needs of the transfusion medicine community. Asked what challenges the Centers face, he names three. "One is the issue of a dwindling and aging donor base," he says, explaining that additional mandatory donor-history questions continue to diminish the number of volunteers.
"Then, how to invigorate a younger donor base because the people who were ambassadors for the last 30-40 years are going to relinquish that role," he says, adding that blood donation became a civic duty familiar to the World War II generation. Third, due to an increase in complex surgeries and the increasing longevity of patients the need for blood is growing.
Dr. Axelrod says that the Centers' updated strategic plan calls for several initiatives, the first of which is to create a "warehouse" for all of member centers' data, so that centers can find out which collection strategies work best.
The group also wants to involve member centers in developing evidence-based medicine submissions to regulatory agencies, which would hopefully use them to inform decisions, he says. The trade group is also thinking of ways to add affiliates, such as hospitals, who would otherwise be excluded from educational and other offerings, due to membership requirements. Last, the board of directors is establishing a rotating system to ensure smaller or less vocal blood centers have a voice.
Alberto Odio, MD
VCMA member since 1982
Alberto Odio, MD received the Regal Medical Group's first Physician of the Year award at a fundraising banquet held Nov. 30 at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley benefiting the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and other groups. The independent physician association bestowed its award to him in recognition of "outstanding achievements in his personal and professional life, his passion for medicine and great compassion for those he serves," according to a statement from the organization.
"I was happy to accept the award when they told me--I didn't go into details asking, 'Why did you pick me?'" says Dr. Odio jokingly. "I was fortunate to be the first one, and I've known [Regal] and they've known me for years," he says.
His accomplishments include running a family practice for 25 years in Simi Valley, holding several administrative and medical director positions, and teaching residents largely at Northridge Hospital Medical Center as part of the UCLA-David Geffen School of Medicine's Northridge Family Medicine Residency Program. Dr. Odio has also held a position on the board of directors of the American Heart Association as the minority committee chairman.
Among his current activities, Dr. Odio works with Angels Way Maternity Home, which helps unwed mothers get prenatal care, find shelter and obtain an education. Also currently, "we have a Dexa scan machine for osteoporosis so I decided that a community project might be possible through that," he says. "In our community there are three Dexa scanners, so we got together with the other two groups and put together a little coalition where we are each contributing some free scans" beginning in January for indigent community residents. "We're coordinating that through the county clinics in Moorpark and Simi Valley and through the free clinic in Simi Valley."
Bernard Bail, MD
LACMA member since 1956
In December, Bernard Bail, MD, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in Beverly Hills, published The Mother's Signature, his book detailing his unorthodox hypothesis that a child's mind is initially influenced by the state of mind of his or her mother.
"It's a book about my research," Dr. Bail says, explaining that it follows in the vein of a 2001 essay he wrote on the subject. He continues: "In the mother's unconscious mind, she projects whatever she does not like, whatever she can't bear, unconsciously into the fetus she's carrying. The fetus has--what I've seen, in the dreams of my patients--a shock reaction, with fear and anxiety ensuing. All the consequences of that, what I call the 'big bang' that goes off in the fetal state, has great repercussions for one's life."
The book contains essays by Dr. Bail and colleagues, as well as a series of case histories. Regarding the mechanism affecting fetal psychology, Dr. Bail draws an analogy from the finding that mothers can affect fetal gene expression, though he shies from embracing that explanation, preferring to label it "projection."
Dr. Bail breaks with the ideas of Freud, which he describes as "superficial." Instead, he describes psychoanalysis as a "pluralistic" field, rather than a science, in which no one explanation can be right, and several point to the truth.
The Mother's Signature follows Dr. Bail's 2007 Irmgard's Flute. After being shot down in 1945, then-Air Force Lt. Bail was a German prisoner of war, and became haunted by his love for two markedly different women, one on either side of the battle lines.
