Dr. Radis brings a singular perspective to his creative non-fiction medical writing. Following graduation from Bates College in 1976 with a degree in biology, Dr. Radis committed to a career in osteopathic medicine after meeting a D.O. family practice bush pilot in Baja, Mexico.
After completing his internal medicine residency, the young doctor moved his family to Peaks Island off the coast of Maine and provided primary care to four year-round islands in Casco Bay. In addition to his clinic duties on Peaks and Chebeague Islands, he traveled year-round by boat to the outer islands and logged more than 100 yearly house calls.
On Call: Photo, Jim McCarthy
Although Dr. Radis eventually left his Peaks Island medical practice in 1991 for fellowship training in clinical immunology/rheumatology at the University of Pittsburgh’s Presbyterian University Hospital, he returned to Maine to practice rheumatology. For more than three decades he has lived on Peaks Island, commuting year-round on his boat, Dasakamo Ja, to the mainland. His children, Kate and Molly, attended the Peaks Island grade school–at 40 students, one of the smallest grade schools in Maine—and graduated from Portland High School, where more than 30 languages are spoken by immigrant students from around the world.
Dr. Radis is proud of his D.O. (doctor of osteopathy) degree. He believes the focus on the whole person he received at the Kansas City University of Medicine and Bioscience has enabled him to better connect with his patients. In recent years his public health work has included a collaborative project training traditional birth attendants in South Sudan and support for Acholi refugees in the United Nations Kiryandongo Settlement in Uganda. (For more information on his non-profit, the Maine-African Partnership for Social Justice, go to http://www.mapsj.org
His academic appointments have included Tufts Medical School, the University of Vermont Medical School, and the University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine (UNECOM), where he is a clinical professor of medicine. For more than 20 years medical students at UNECOM have interacted with Dr. Radis’s patients in an annual, Guess what disease I have? emphasizing physical diagnosis to sharpen diagnostic skills.
Dr. Radis has been married for 44 years to Sandi Korpela Radis who began her career as a social worker and later worked as a Peaks Island plumber and electrician assistant. He counts himself fortunate to have a recreational lobster license and occasionally brings home something for dinner.