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Home › Dad of the Month

Dr. John Dorsey

By Kelly Burgess

Each month, iParenting.com spotlights a father who inspires and moves us, who embodies the qualities that we all admire in a person, a man and a father. Above all, the Dad of the Month is dedicated to his children. Rich or poor, famous or not, he shines as an example of what fathering is all about.

At age 80 most people think about retirement, maybe hitting the links or just catching up on their reading list. Not Dr. John Dorsey. He's still going strong, still maintaining a busy pediatrics practice that he's built up over 50 years and still treating underserved segments of our population.

Dr. Dorsey's long tenure as a pediatrician has resulted in something almost like a fan club made up of patients, some of whom are now bringing their children or grandchildren to see him. It's also garnered the professional respect one needs to establish an organization dedicated to the idea that, when it comes to health care, no child should be left behind.

A Single Talent

Asking Dr. Dorsey, a board certified staff member of William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., partner at Beverly Hills Pediatrics and iParenting expert advisor, why he decided to go into medicine doesn't result in one of the more predictable answers. Rather, he says that was the only thing he was good at.

"Way down deep inside I probably was first drawn to medicine because my dad was a doctor, but I didn't float in because of any default choices," Dr. Dorsey says. "The things I liked to do and were good at were the subjects that were suited for a career in medicine. Those were the things I liked so it was a natural fit. I must have made the right choice because I think this is still a fun job to go to every day."

Since then he's only had one little stutter in his career, and that was because he started off practicing internal medicine and found it wasn't for him. After one year, he says, "It [internal medicine] was far too boring so I switched to pediatrics and never looked back."

Giving Back

Dr. Dorsey's most recent cause is helping children of incarcerated parents get ongoing health care through his organization PPM Kids (www.ppmkids.org), which stands for Partnership of Pediatricians and Mentors. The idea is to work through the organizations that already work with kids of incarcerated parents – assistance programs already in place that provide mentoring, counseling and social support – and add the missing layer: health care.

"There are free clinics available to these kids, but it limits their care," Dr. Dorsey says. "We are trying to put together a program to provide a full range of medical care and to give the child a primary care physician who is familiar with that child's history. The goal is to identify and treat chronic health conditions so these kids have the best chance in life."

According to PPM, because of the social and emotional family dynamics that accompany incarceration, a vast majority of children of jailed parents do not receive regular medical care and are at risk for the havoc that ongoing, undiagnosed illness can wreak upon children. Some researchers estimate that 70 percent of these kids will enter the juvenile and/or criminal justice system themselves. PPM hopes that programs like theirs will decrease that percentage.

"This is an entirely new area of public service," Dr. Dorsey says. "This is a target population that had never been described or defined until I started checking into doing this, so the past year we've been going through the intricacies of putting it together, but we hope to eventually make it something people are aware of on a national level."

Dad to All

In addition to the thousands of kids Dr. Dorsey has looked after over the years, he's the father of three grown children, stepfather to three others and grandfather to three. He's been married to his second wife for 31 years and is proud that all six of their children are self-sufficient – something he says is the best outcome a parent can hope for.

In his 50 years in hands-on practice Dr. Dorsey has seen a lot of changes. His conclusion is not that the changes are necessarily for the worse, but that today's pediatricians probably aren't equipped to handle the wide variety of situations with which they may be confronted.

"In the 1940s and 1950s kids just kind of did what their parents did and lifestyles were very similar," Dr. Dorsey says. "Nowadays, there are so many issues that we never even heard of that are given to pediatricians simply because that's who parents go to."

He mentions, specifically, single parenting, electronics, addictive behavior of all kinds, kids making more lifestyle decisions than ever, obesity and the lack of free play and exercise. These are problems that are well-documented, but with solutions that seem to be out of reach.

Part of the answer, Dr. Dorsey says, lies in mentoring, much as the answer to the problems of children of incarcerated parents lies in mentoring. Only, in this case, the mentoring needs to come from doctors, like himself, who have the experience and knowledge to pass along. And that's why he's so adverse to the idea of retirement.

"I work for a large organization and have worked with hundreds of doctors in my time," Dr. Dorsey says. "Sometimes after they retire they give their licenses over, and I think that's a terrible waste. Doctors who have years of experience have a built-in quality that a first year doesn't have and can only see in someone who has grown with each decade in practice. It's always a sad day for the community when an otherwise able doctor retires just because it seems to be the thing to do."

For Dr. Dorsey, retirement is not an option. When medicine is what you're good at, that's what you do. And when you believe strongly in being a mentor and in guiding younger doctors, the best way to achieve that is to show up every day, ready to do what you do best.



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