Alumni Profile: The Doctor is in -- at your house

Have you ever been a traveler in an unfamiliar city and come down with a cold or the flu, or simply slipped and twisted your ankle? You don't want to go to a hospital, where you might spend hours in a busy waiting room. You just wish a doctor could come in, diagnose your problem and provide some relief.

But, of course, doctors don't make house calls anymore, right?

Wrong. In fact, Ronald Primas, MD, is one doctor who specializes in them. Primas was named 2002 House Call Doctor of the Year by the American Academy of Home Care Physicians, a professional society devo ted to promoting the art, science and practice of medicine in the home, as well as improving the access and quality of care delivered to home-bound patients.

Primas, an internist, started doing house calls when he set up his own practice in New York City. As a specialist in travel-related diseases, he treated travelers from all over the world. He regularly received calls from patients who wanted him to treat them in their homes or hotel rooms. "Many were from South America or Europe, where house calls are common practice," he said. At first, he refused, but people's persistence won out. "I realized house calls are a forgotten art," he said.

Ronald Primas '82 with his wife, Sheila Martinez Primas '85, and their children, ages 7 and 2

The more house calls he did, the more benefit to patients Primas began to see. Convenience is the obvious one. But people also heal better in their own home environment, Primas said. Plus, they're at lower risk of complications due to hospital-acquired infections.

"Doing house calls keeps you on your toes," said Primas. Although he and the physicians who work with him carry a lot of equipment -- ranging from portable electrocardiographs and nebulizers to blood and rapid strep-throat tests -- they still don't have everything at their fingertips, he noted. "You have to fine-tune your diagnostic skills," he said. "You have to develop good listening skills and really hear what the patient is saying."

Primas' interest in travel medicine took root after he completed his residency in internal medicine, did a fellowship in public and international health. He refined his expertise when he served as the director of an AIDS clinic in Bedford-Stuyvesant, an underserved, impoverished inner-city neighborhood of New York. "I saw many cases of HIV-infected people who also had exotic tropical illnesses," he said. "It's one thing to read about these in medical texts, quite another to see it right in front of you."

For example, last fall Primas diagnosed two patients from New Mexico who had the bubonic plague. "They were exposed before they came to the city," he said. "They had gotten it from flea bites. Thankfully, we caught it before it became contagious." Both patients recovered, but the case made quite a stir. "I did about 30 interviews in two days!" said Primas.

Primas has built a thriving medical practice based on four categories of medical service, all of them offered through his TravelMD.com website.

Because he offers such a variety of medical services, Primas finds that "every day is different, new and exciting," he said. That's why he loves his work. "You never know what the day will bring," he said.

An avid aquarist

At BU, Primas majored in biology with the idea of becoming a marine biologist. But his then-girlfriend/now wife, Sheila Martinez Primas '85, put the nix on that idea. "She said, 'You're not going to be out on a boat six months of the year,'" recalled Primas.

So Primas became a doctor instead, and indulges his passion for marine life by keeping a reef in his home -- in a 55-gallon salt-water tank with live coral, fish and sea stars. "The tank is beautiful to look at. The colors are so brilliant," he said.

Primas' ambition is to build a 600-gallon tank in his home. "The greater the volume, the more the natural behavior of the fish comes out," he said. "That's when you begin to see schooling properties."

Primas called his avid devotion as a reef keeper his only vice. "I don't golf; I don't follow sports," he said. "My kids (a girl, 7, and a boy, 2) know so much about marine life. They love it. My daughter, who's in first grade, learned about ponds in school, and already knew about the interaction of gravel, algae and fish."