Meet Dr. Barry Nemon, director of Chelsea Community Hospital emergency room

(Chelsea Update would like to thank Dr. Barry Nemon, director of the Chelsea Hospital Emergency Room, for the information in this new column.)

My name is Dr. Barry Nemon and I have been the Director of the Chelsea Community Hospital emergency room for the past 28 years.

I’m excited about having the opportunity to communicate with you about the ER and general medicine topics on ChelseaUpdate.com.

I hope you will find the articles informative, interesting and engaging.

So, where to begin?

I’ll start with some personal background. I did my undergraduate training at MSU and Wayne State University where I attended medical school, graduating in 1976.

The summer before I graduated, I explored different specialties, and I found myself most interested in the Emergency Room.  I loved the variety of patient problems, the fact that we took care of every age group, and the challenge of making important decisions very quickly.

In 1976, there were only a few Emergency Training programs in the country; it was not yet a specialty, and in fact, was looked down upon by some people.

I did my internship at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, where an Emergency Medicine Residency had been launched, and I was accepted into its second class.

In 1979, when I graduated, Emergency Medicine had just been granted its status as a specialty. We should all be proud to know that many of the early founders of the specialty of Emergency Medicine are from Michigan.

In 1979, I joined seven physicians to staff the ER at Saint Joe’s in Ann Arbor.  In 1981, we were the first all board certified group of ER doctors in the state and we formed Emergency Physician Medical Group (EPMG).

In 1984, I became the Director of the ER at McPherson (now known as Livingston) in Howell, and the next year, in 1985, the ER directorship at Chelsea opened up.

I went out for a visit and never left.

In 1985, there were four beds in the Chelsea Hospital’s ER, with 2 beds just outside of the ER, which we could use for overflow. We were seeing about 8,000 visits a year and a lot of the visits were for minor complaints, like a bad cold.

We didn’t have a CT scanner.

We didn’t have some of the immunizations that we have today, so some of our patients had diseases that we no longer see.

We didn’t have medications that lower cholesterol or a way of opening up arteries around the heart without major surgery.

In 1985, the Chelsea ER took care of major trauma; we were small, but we took care of a lot of sick patients.

Next Sunday, we’ll look at how all that has changed.