Ira Schmelkin, MD
"If you listen, they'll tell you what's wrong."
A board-certified gastroenterologist, Ira Schmelkin, MD has an unusual specialty. Called wireless capsule endoscopy, the technique that Dr. Schmelkin has helped pioneer offers a new means of investigating the gastrointestinal tract.
The capsule is the size of a large vitamin pill (it's 26mm long and 11mm in diameter) but it is actually a camera in disguise. The patient swallows the capsule, sending it on a journey through the esophagus, stomach, and intestines. The camera records the conditions it encounters, snapping images that are sent by wireless technology to a data recorder the patient wears on a belt around the waist. The cache of images - a sequence of more than 50,000 pictures collected over eight hours - is downloaded to computer and read for diagnostic purposes.
"Right now this is especially useful for the small intestine," says Dr. Schmelkin. "That's an area we haven't been able to visualize very well. The scopes we have get the first four feet from above endoscopically, and we can reach six feet from below using colonoscopy - but that still leaves about twenty feet in the middle of the gastrointestinal tract to investigate." As a specialist in small intestine pathology, Dr. Schmelkin has found the capsule an invaluable tool.
Dr. Schmelkin earned his medical doctorate at the State University of New York, Buffalo, before going on to complete his residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in gastroenterology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. For fifteen years he was in private practice in Great Neck, New York, but came to Berkshire Health Systems in 2004.
Despite his high-tech specialty, Schmelkin says the old verities still apply. His philosophy is: "Listen to the patient: Patients know their bodies better than anybody else and, if you listen, they'll tell you what's wrong."
Today he travels regularly to conduct seminars for other doctors on how to perform capsule endoscopy on behalf of its manufacturer, Given Imaging Ltd. But he's happy to be back in the Berkshires, having spent weekends and summers in the region as a child and young professional.
