“As I stood up to examine him, he offered a unique observation.”

Michael Gerdis has worked as a specialist, a primary care practitioner and an emergency room physician, and is currently the chief of gastroenterology at Mount Sinai Doctors of Westchester. He has been passionate about health care since volunteering at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia as an undergraduate student at University of Pennsylvania, after which he attended NYU Medical School and completed a gastroenterology fellowship at LIJ Medical Center. He has experienced the profound changes in medicine that have resulted in a profession that has become almost unrecognizable. He sees what we have lost, why we lost it, and why it is imperative we get it back.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost in April 2026.