Dr. Barry Friedberg, MD – Founder of The Goldilocks Foundation
Born and raised in southeastern Pennsylvania, Dr. Barry Friedberg attended and graduated Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA before attending and graduating Temple University medical school. He is exclusively practicing office-based anesthesia for elective cosmetic surgery. Friedberg is also president of the non-profit Goldilocks Anesthesia Foundation dedicated to making brain monitoring a standard of care for major surgery under anesthesia. He encourages prospective surgery patients to download and read his free book ‘Getting Over Going Under, five things you must know before anesthesia’ from www.goldilocksfoundation.org and share this critically important information with their friends and family members on social media.
What’s your favorite film and why?
Casablanca. It is the all-time classic love story. I even named my daughter Ingrid after the Swedish female star, Ingrid Bergman.
What’s the best advice you ever received?
To follow my passion. Mine is giving better anesthesia for my patients than I received on the two occasions before I went to medical school.
What are your aspirations in life?
To see widespread adoption of my anesthetic concepts known as Friedberg’s Triad: measure the brain, preempt the pain, emetic drugs abstain. The triad is the basis for more humane, simpler, safer, better, more cost-effective and numerically reproducible anesthesia.
Measure the brain: without a brain monitor, patients are guaranteed of receiving 30% more drug than needed. 16M of the 40M patients (40%) every year wake up from anesthesia with brain fog that can include delirium, dementia and even one death every day from anesthesia over medication.
Overmedication is the routine practice when anesthesia is given without benefit of a brain monitor. Found in 75% of US hospitals, it is only used 25% of the time primarily because patients do not know they need to ask for one. Do not accept the pushback of ‘we don’t need it.’ The most appropriate response should be, ‘it’s not your needs I am concerned with. I, the patient, have to live with the long-term consequences of your short-term care.’
Preempt the pain: without the pre-incisional ketamine, patients’ brains receive a very strong pain signal during surgery, setting the stage for postop pain management issues.
Emetic drugs abstain: anesthesia providers who continue to give drugs that make people sick to their stomach, postoperative nausea and vomiting will continue to be a problem.
What’s your biggest accomplishment to date?
On a personal level, finding the love of my life, Shelley, my unbelievably amazing wife of the past eight years and being reunited with my daughter, Ingrid, after a 15-year estrangement. On a professional level, seeing a slowly growing acceptance and utilization of my anesthesia concepts.
What’s your favorite thing about working in your industry?
Being able to send my YouTube Goldilocks anesthesia lecture around the globe via LinkedIn contacts and other social media from the comfort of my home office. While sometimes a necessary evil, traveling to give live presentations can be very wearisome, especially like the time I went to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.
