ABOUT RICK NOVAK, MD

Greetings. My name is Dr. Richard Novak, and I’m the author of both The Anesthesia Consultant and of full length medical fiction. The Anesthesia Consultant is designed to inform and entertain both laypeople and medical specialists, and provides answers not found in traditional textbooks. Ricknovak.com is the home website for my fiction writing career. My fiction writing includes two editions of The Doctor and Mr. Dylan, as well as the soon-to-be-published Doctor Vita, currently in press with All Things That Matter Press.

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I’m a Stanford-trained physician, double-boarded in internal medicine and anesthesiology, and I’ve personally anesthetized over 30,000 patients over 38+ years. I’m currently an Adjunct Clinical Professor in the Stanford Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine.

I’ve learned a lot over these years, and my intent is to share my knowledge with my readers, who include anesthesia professionals and lay people. The Anesthesia Consultant contains more than 180 distinct pages and posts, all written by me. About half the columns are directed to the general public, so that they can understand anesthesia practice and the life of an anesthesia professional. The other half are detailed, well-referenced articles aimed at physician anesthesiologists, nurse anesthetists, and anesthesia assistants the world over.

I began my writing career in 2001, when I was the Deputy Chief of Anesthesia at Stanford University Hospital. Stanford is a mixed hospital, with both full time faculty and private practice faculty. I have been in the private practice of anesthesia since 1986, and my viewpoints are unique because very few private practice physician anesthesiologists have worked in a major university hospital for over thirty years.

Private practice anesthesia differs from academic anesthesia in important ways, and I began writing monthly Deputy Chief Columns in the Stanford Anesthesiology Department newsletter in 2001, to articulate these differences.

Once the total number of columns exceeded sixty, I created The Anesthesia Consultant website in 2010 to share my writing with readers outside Stanford. I continue to write 1 – 1 columns per month, in addition to maintaining a full time job as a clinical anesthesiologist.

As of 2023 The Anesthesia Consultant is rated the #2 anesthesia blog in the world by Feedspot.

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