Christina Fritsch, MD

	Joined Jul, 1997 Department: Chronic Pain Title: Physician Degree: MD Interests: Swimming, Running, Gardening, Cooking, Pottery and Mosaic, Hiking, Backpacking, Traveling Languages: English Physician Homepage
Bio I was born and raised in Los Angeles but always wanted to live a life of adventure. I wanted to discover new continents. So, I left college after a year and moved to Alaska where I lived in the bush in a cabin and had a dog team and fished salmon commercially and worked for the first private non-profit salmon hatchery and all sorts of jobs that allowed me to stay in the North. Eventually I migrated south to Sonoma County. I went back to school at Santa Rosa Junior College and Sonoma State University and attended University of California, Davis, School of Medicine. I always wanted to come back to Sonoma County and jumped at the opportunity to join the medical staff at Kaiser Permanente in 1997. I took over as Physician Chief of the Chronic Pain Management Program in 1998. I find it very challenging and satisfying to work with patients who have chronic pain. It is a difficult problem because, for the most part, chronic pain has no cure. This doesn't mean, however, that there is nothing to be done, nor that there is no possibility for a rich and meaningful life. It is natural, in this technologically advanced world, to think that chronic pain can be fixed through the use of a medication or procedure. Research shows that this is not the case. Rather, medications and procedures may be used in addition to activities such as regular exercise, stress management techniques and other skills to reduce the level of suffering and enhance quality of life. My goal is to help my patients reclaim their lives. Since we know we can't make the pain go away, we shift the focus to helping people do those things that make their lives meaningful. What is so gratifying to me about my work is the experience of patients who have made sometimes small, sometimes huge, changes in their lives as a result of learning and practicing the skills we offer. They come back to say, "you know, the pain is still there, but my life is so much better now."
My Medical Specialty
My specialty interests and affiliations within my field: In addition to my work in Chronic Pain Management, I am interested in Palliative Care, a relatively new field of medicine concerned with helping patients and their families deal with the issues, medical and otherwise, that occur at the end of life. I am also interested in the area of Chemical Dependency, the treatment of alcoholism and drug addiction. One of the things I do is to help patients taper off from certain prescription medications. I think the unifying factor among these three areas is that there is no known cure for chronic pain, alcoholism, addiction nor the end of life. And yet, from the process of dealing with these difficult situations can come something good and profoundly meaningful. This I have seen over and over again. Great health resources that I refer to: Here are some of my favorite resources. I encourage you to check them out. Books: Managing Pain Before It Manages You by Margaret Caudill Celebrate Life: New Attitude for Living by Kathleen Lewis Strong Women Stay Young by Miriam Nelson and Sarah Wernick The Anatomy of Hope by Jerome Groopman, MD The War On Pain by Scott Fishman, MD Stretching by Bob Anderson Websites: The Arthritis Foundation www.arthritis.org The National Pain Foundation www.painconnection.org Alcoholics Anonymous www.aa.org Narcotics Anonymous www.na.org Al-Anon www.ola-is.org Codependents Anonymous www.codependents.org And, for you swimmers... www.swimmersguide.com
Interests
I learned to swim in the ocean in Southern California. I swam competitively as a kid until I was about 16 years old. There were only four or five girls on our team then and I remember the close camaraderie. We swam hard and talked story in the locker room showers. As we grew up and finished school or developed different interests we quit swimming or moved on to college teams. And that was that. I have found the same type of relationships at every pool where I swim regularly. I see the same people year in and year out. We may not know each other's last names, but we know about each other's lives. We know each other by our strokes, by which end of the pool we get in and by the gear. We know who is fast, who is slow. We might chat for a few minutes in the pool, across the lane lines. But, mostly, we swim. When swimming, you get into a rhythm. It takes a little while to warm up, but then it is almost meditative in its way. Sometimes I feel great, like I could swim in the next Olympics. And sometimes I feel like I have a bulldozer tied to my waist. But it's the doing it day in, day out, year in, year out, rain, sleet, hail, or shine. The body moving in a particular way. Breathing in, breathing out. Generally slower as the years go by, but moving none the less. I share a large vegetable garden with several neighboring households. We grow artichokes, asparagus, berries of all sorts, flowers, salad greens and winter greens. Summer times, we grow tomatoes, summer squash, winter squash and pumpkins, melons, beans and corn and sunflowers. We share the chores, turning the ground, making and spreading compost, planting and watering. And we share the harvest! In our family bed, I grow eggplant, all sorts of peppers, lemon cucumbers and herbs. All seasons of the year we eat straight from the garden. It is a fine way to live by the seasons, slowing down to the rhythm of the growing things. When I am harried by the stresses of modern life, an afternoon weeding, watering, picking vegetables or fruit brings me back to the sure knowledge that this is the true human pace. Spending a lot of time in the woods has fostered an interest in native plants. I have planted many California natives around our home. I love the sculptural quality of the manzanita, the muted greens of many of our shrubs, the spicy fragrance of the sages and the conifers. In the late winter, spring and summer I enjoy the progressive displays of wildflowers and in the fall I love the rich smell of earthy decay released by the first rains. I have become interested in collecting seed and plant propagation. In fact, at any time of year, you can find small piles of seed I have collected drying on scraps of paper towels or torn pieces of envelopes resting on many of the horizontal surfaces of the house. I get a lot of fond teasing from my husband! I am an avid reader and like to read in the quiet of the evening to relax. I have been a lifelong reader of the New Yorker magazine and look forward to Thursdays when it arrives in the mail. I especially enjoy the nonfiction articles. They tend to be well written and well informed. I always read the "Annals of Medicine" pieces. They are about complex medical and ethical subjects written in a manner that is clear and accessible to non-medical readers. I will often refer patients to articles or books they have written: "A Knife in the Back" about lumbar fusion surgeries and "Hurting All Over" about fibromyalgia by Dr. Jerome Groopman, "The Pain Perplex" about chronic pain by Dr. Atul Gawande, and "The Pima Paradox" about obesity by Malcolm Gladwell. I recommend The Anatomy of Hope by Groopman as he discusses his observations and thoughts about how hope and despair can influence the course of a patient's disease. He writes about his own experience with chronic back pain after a fusion, and he describes how he came to live again fully and without fear. It is a skinny little book and he is such a good writer that it is a quick read and a most enjoyable one. For the sheer beauty of language, I am a fan of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. Currently reading: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson My favorite book or author: As noted above I am a New Yorker addict. I also enjoy Ceramics Monthly Great movie: Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits	Hobby Photos & Links: Summer Vegetable Garden Sunflower Tipi and Corn Annadel Lupine Lupine a guide to swimming pools all over the world. check it out!
Family & Friends

My pets: Feral cat: Jip
Travel
An adventure I've had: Right before I finished medical school, I went to Kenya for a couple of months to do medicine in a small hospital in Maua, on the lower slopes of Mt Kenya. Maua is in the tea-growing region of Kenya. The colors were red, green and blue. Red earth that turned to mud every evening with the short intense downpours of the season called "the long rains." Every shade of green one could imagine: grasses, wide-leafed plants, leafy forest trees, bright and bold cotton fabrics. And the sky, a perfect blue, with high billowing clouds continually forming as the air moves off the dry savannah and hits the slopes of Mt Kenya. Our hospital served about 350,000 people who lived in villages scattered across the countryside. The villages were decentralized assemblages of small family farms and very small stores. People traveled for hours by foot or bus or "matatus" (Toyota trucks, converted and packed full of people) to come to the hospital and clinic. The medical conditions we saw were very different from those in the US. On the Children's Ward we took care of kids with malnutrition, malaria, measles, tetanus, TB, parasitic infections and burns. On the Male Ward, most common admissions were for machete wounds, HIV wasting disease, TB and malaria. Same on the Female Ward. Conditions were very crowded. In the Children's Ward there were 3 children to a bed and each child's mother stayed with them, making 6 people to each bed. In the Male and Female Wards, there were only 2 men or 2 women to each bed. We had only a few medications. Six or seven antibiotics, Tylenol or Ibuprofen for pain (even after surgery), some older antimalarials. We tried to stabilize patients and treat them with whatever means we had until their own bodies could rally and begin the mending process. At some point, after I got used to things, I realized our current expectations of what doctors, nurses and hospitals can do for us evolved from conditions very similar to this. Overcrowded wards with more than one person to a bed were once the norm in some parts of our own country just 100-150 years ago. I think about the Civil War or WWI in Europe. I am glad to have had the opportunity to both experience living and doing medicine in another country, another culture, but also glad to have been able to glimpse into our own medical past. If you are interested in reading some short stories about people who do health care in underserved areas of the world, check out this book: A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies, by John Murray.	Travel Photos: Samburu Giraffe Childrens' Ward Chai Tea with New Friends