Welcome to a new chapter for Practical Portable Pediatrics. A name change to Dr. M’s Women and Children First was necessitated by the focus shift to include mother’s health principally and children’s health as the feed forward result. This is a podcast for parents and clinicians who are seeking the best science based approach to reducing antecedent disease risk through controllable human decisions. We are going to discuss the best health and wellness information available each and every week. Doc Smo, Dr. Paul Smolen, is still part of our team but I will be doing the bulk of the posts from this point forward. You are probably wondering who is Dr. M or Magryta? I am a pediatrician trained in both traditional and Integrative medicine, a father, a husband, and a seeker. Having watched my grandparents die far too young, I have known since a young age, I would spend my life trying to prevent disease. 

In 2003, my wife and I were handed Thomas and I was elated and confused at the same time. I was supposed to know it all after all my medical training, but instead, I felt unprepared and scared. I did not want to see my children or my patients experience the medical horrors my grandparents had endured. I realized that we had been given the gift of a child but I felt we didn’t have a clear roadmap of the healthiest way to raise him. It was at that moment that I realized it was time to seek more knowledge. For years, my amazing wife and integrative nutritionist, Nicole, had been whispering in my ear that there was more knowledge out there than what the hallowed halls of medical school had taught me. She was right. I turned my focus to Integrative and functional medicine, studying with Dr. Andrew Weil in Arizona. Since then, proper childhood metabolism and biological function has been my focus of study. Teaching, distilling this information down into palatable bites of transformational knowledge for parents and their children has become my life’s mission. Lecturing and writing prolifically on all things pediatric through the Salisbury Pediatrics Newsletter, a disease prevention education medium, has afforded me a path to share knowledge that I believe will help you and your family on your parenting journey. The newsletter, and now this podcast, are the step off point for our journey together. Let us get busy exploring wide ranging topics that lead to practical tips for your child to lead a healthy life.