What is now Bayside Family Practice started two decades ago as a small practice on Milvia Street in Berkeley. A few years later it was joined to Bayside, and has been Bayside Family Practice ever since. Our senior physician is James E. Eichel, MD. Our second family practice physician is April Fredian, MD. We have four Physician Assistants, Sabra Daly PA-C, Heidi Heal PA-C, Michael De Rosa PA-C, and Sarah Pontell PA-C.

We work in two offices, one in Berkeley and the other in Alameda. We share both of these offices with the Bayside pediatricians. As a result when we see children we have easy access to consultants without your even leaving the office.

All of our family practitioners have families of our own, and understand personally how important it is to have a reliable professional at your side. When you have questions about your health, need help staying healthy or fighting an illness, or need to navigate our health care system to get services, we will be there for you.

We also realize that patients expect a different attitude from clinicians than did our parents. Patients now expect us to listen to your opinions about what is best for you, and to give you choices whenever possible. This is as it should be. We look at our relationship with you as a partnership and expect to have an ongoing dialogue with you to ensure that we share common goals for what we are trying to achieve together: a happier, healthier you.

As family practitioners we can see patients of all ages, from 0 to the 90’s. Since we are allied with pediatricians at Bayside, we generally leave the care of babies and children to them, but we are happy to take over somewhere during the teenage years and beyond.

We do adult internal medicine, we do office surgical procedures such as biopsies, we do gynecology and family planning (including IUD insertions), vaccinations, pain management, and Dr. Eichel even does obstetrics, delivering babies at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center. We leave the care of your teeth to the dentists, but there isn’t anything else on or in your body that is somehow “not our department”. We take care of all of you.

We also take the responsibility to coordinate with any specialists you might be seeing. In this day and age, we also know that some of our patients will be seeing so-called “alternative” health care sources. We don’t want to be insular, and think that only straight Western allopathic medicine is the only path to health. Some of our patients derive real benefits from non-allopathic health care providers such as acupuncturists, herbalists, or chiropractors, and this suits us just fine. It is important, though, to use common sense and listen to us when a potentially serious problem requires help that only Western medicine can provide.

At Bayside, we are strongly devoted to prevention. A bedrock of prevention is to have regular visits, or “check ups,” with us. Even if there is “nothing wrong,” we encourage you to see us on a regular basis. We can encourage you on healthy habits, detect early disease, and get to know you so in the future you will not be strangers to us. Examples of conditions we might be able to detect when you think there is nothing wrong would be hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes, cancer, arthritis, osteoporosis, and kidney disease. Knowing about these conditions can lead to many more years of healthy life, rather than actual chronic and debilitating illness.

Healthy men between the ages of 21 and 39 can do just fine coming in for screening exams every 3 years. Everyone else should come in at least annually for a check-up.

No matter how much prevention we do, however, people get sick. We have more and better ways to help you get well than every before, and our job is to use these appropriately. One of our jobs, we think, is to resist the temptation to “over-prescribe.” For example, we have known for over 20 years that bronchitis does not respond to antibiotics, so even if you really, really want an antibiotic prescription, we will try very hard to convince you that prescribing one for you in this case is not in your interest. On the other hand, patients sometimes resist other prescriptions, such as inhaled steroids for asthma, because they are afraid of “steroids.” In this case, we will try to convince you that these medicines are in your interest. These cases are part of the “art of medicine” – to work with you in a therapeutic alliance, and to help you with our professional knowledge and our understanding of who you are as a person.

Another part of the art of medicine is to use our clinical judgment to decide when to order tests, and when we can avoid them. We try to use our tests in a focused way and not be scatter-shot, and not to overuse. We find we can make most diagnoses right in the office. But if a condition is beyond our expertise, we will not hesitate to refer you to our specialist colleagues – and we will try to pick out the best ones we can. That is part of our job.

Finally, we know that sometimes our patients will wonder if we are correct in what we are saying and doing. That is only natural, we think, not a sign of disrespect. So we encourage you to talk with us and tell us what your concerns about your treatment may be. One of the advantages of a group such as ours is that you can get a second opinion without leaving Bayside at all – just make an appointment with one of us and get that second pair of eyes and ears attending to you. In addition, if you want to go outside of Bayside for a second opinion, just let us know and we will be happy to help you.

Finally, we want you to know that we regard the calling of medicine as something pretty sacred. We take our status as your clinician very seriously. That is why we went into medicine, to earn the trust of our patients. We work on this every day.

We intend to have an entire website devoted solely to Family Practice. When we have completed it, we should have many of the same features that you find on the Bayside Pediatrics website – information for you about health and disease, materials for you to start your visit at home, and other interesting features. We always try to be responsive to you, so if you have any suggestions for us, please email at info@baysidemedical.com. We like to listen to our patients