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-: Hi, I'm Dan Smith.
I'm a Urologist here at The Polyclinic.
I went into medicine for the same reason
I would hope anyone would go
into medicine for just the desire to help people.
You get to do something different every day.
You're not sitting
behind a desk all the time and you can,
you know, actually see tangible ways
that you're helping people.
I'm originally from the Seattle area.
I left the area to go to medical school
at the University of Colorado in Denver, Colorado
and then completed a residency in Urology
at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis.
As a Urologist, I see patients 18 and up
with issues of the genital urinary tract.
So that means anything from the kidneys,
ureter, bladder on out of the body.
I think my approach to patient care is to,
for a lot of things,
let the patient drive a lot of their care.
Some things are straightforward,
like if someone has a big ureteral stone
that needs to be treated,
but a lot of things in urology are subjective
and what may be very bothersome to one person
not so bothersome to someone else.
So really, taking in someone's values
of what's important to them
and how they wanna proceed down the road
to potentially observation medication surgery.
Just trying to really understand the entire patient
before really making any sort of decision.
Outside of work
I like to spend time with my family,
my wife, dog, cat, two toddlers.
I do a lot of running.
We like to get up to the mountains or out to the islands
just spend time enjoying the outdoors.
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