Ronald Wyatt, MD, MHA

Imagine your role as a primary care physician, trying to help a patient who looks perfectly healthy aside from walking with a cane, but complains of dizziness, disorientation, inability to tolerate stimuli and passing scenery, short-term memory loss, hissing in the ears, phantom smells, and insensitivity to lights and loud sounds. Where do you begin, after you have reviewed a number of her negative test results from some of the most esteemed medical facilities in the country? Is this patient suffering from a medical condition or does she have underlying emotional or psychiatric issues? Where in the body do you begin to look – heart, brain, endocrine system, hormonal system, vestibular system, thyroid or elsewhere?

Dr. Wyatt faced these challenges while seeking the source of my mysterious symptoms. As an Internal Medicine specialist, he had to look at nearly every system in the body to rule out a number of conditions. He found a simple, but significant clue when blood pressure measurements revealed a 16-point drop in blood pressure when I moved from a sitting position to a standing position. This finding laid the groundwork for the tilt table test that ultimately led to my diagnosis and treatment. 

Dr. Wyatt is a 1985 graduate of the University of Alabama School of Medicine-Birmingham and completed his residency in Internal Medicine at the University of St. Louis School of Medicine in 1988. His passion for patient-centered care is not limited to his clinical practice. He has previously served as Medical Director of a community clinic and Chair of Utilization Review at a medical center. He earned a Master of Science degree in Health Administration from the University of Alabama in Birmingham in 2007. He recently completed the clinical effectiveness program at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Harvard Medical School with a concentration in health policy, quality improvement, clinical epidemiology, and clinical biostatistics. He is currently a George C. Merck Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement for 2009 - 2010.