Dr. Marilyn Roderick has opened what residents have told her is the first full-time medical clinic in Hanalei town in around 15 years. She is seeing patients at the Hanalei Center on Kuhio Highway, across the street from Ching Young
Dr. Marilyn Roderick has opened what residents have told her is the first full-time medical clinic in Hanalei town in around 15 years. She is seeing patients at the Hanalei Center on Kuhio Highway, across the street from Ching Young Village.
Office hours are 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. weekdays, though the practice is closed Wednesday afternoons. Drop-in hours are noon to 2 p.m. daily, and 10 a.m. to noon Wednesday. Please call 826-9349 for appointments and more information. Her brown-bag lecture series continues each Friday until further notice, from 12:15 p.m. to 1 p.m., with the lecture this Friday, Dec. 28 on the U.S. Task Force on Preventive Medicine’s recommendations for public health.
On Friday, Jan. 4, peri-menopause and menopause are discussed, and on Friday, Jan. 11, prostate health and other men’s issues will be covered. Roderick has taken about the harshest weather the island has been able to deliver, being on the island through both Hurricane ‘Iniki in 1992 and some of the nastiest rain storms recorded before that.
Still, she and her family decided to relocate here from the mainland, falling in love with the place and its healing properties, she said. Before attending Stanford Medical School from 1978 to 1983, she was a nurse in Boston for 10 years, after attaining her bachelor’s degree in nursing in 1968. Roderick was one of the world’s first nurse epidemiologists, studying infectious diseases and their spreading, and developing methods of preventing the spread of diseases especially in hospital settings. She has lectured nationally and internationally on viral hepatitis, infection control in critical-care units, and similar topics, and helped develop national guidelines for infection control in hemodialysis units.
Further, Roderick collaborated with the national Center for Disease Control and equipment manufacturers for development of safe cleaning methods for sigmoidoscopy and colonoscopy equipment. After medical school, she had partial residences in both internal medicine and obstetrics and gynecology at Kaiser Hospital in Santa Clara, Calif., and Stanford Hospital. Her solo practice in the Bay Area focused on women’s health issues, but after finding herself spending more time discussing insurance matters than actually treating patients, finding the need to spend more time with patients than insurance companies would cover, and being told by insurance companies what medicines, tests and referrals could be used, she opted out of insurance contracts, going back to the old way of taking care of patients.
That means seeing fewer patients but spending more time with them, and developing with patient input plans for their care. She has brought that philosophy with her to the Hanalei practice, along with an intense interest in learning about ancient Hawaiian healing practices.
