1KHO 860: There Is No Expertise That Supersedes a Parent Who Knows Their Child | Dr. Siobahn Dunnavant, Advocates for Healthy Kids

**Ginny Yurich** (0:00)
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Welcome to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich, I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and it is truly an honor for me to have an opportunity to talk to this wonderful woman who is doing so much for parents. It's an opportunity for you to get to listen to her. We're going to be talking about this incredible platform where parents can go to increase the empowerment they have as parents to learn more. Dr. Siobhan Dunnavant.

**Siobhan Dunnavant** (1:27)
Thank you, Ginny. I'm so glad to be here. You're perfect.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:30)
I'm so glad you're here. Siobhan, this is such an opportunity for parents because this is a day and age where it's very tricky. There's a lot of swirling information and we can easily doubt ourselves and we can easily be swayed. What you're doing as a Senior Advisor at Advocates for Healthy Kids, board certified OBGYN in Virginia with over 25 years of experience in women's and maternal health is critically important. People are going to find information at healthykidsalliance.com. We're going to be talking about all the types of things that you offer there. But I think sometimes there's experiences that we have with a doctor or someone who's in a position of authority, who does not like to have questions asked.
So it's intriguing for me to listen to you and to get a chance to talk with you and to see you as a doctor, Dr. Dunnavant, the ZOBGIN, working for 25 years, who is encouraging question asking, who's encouraging listening to your gut, trusting your gut as a parent. So how did you become that type of a doctor, as opposed to the one that's a little bit more authoritarian?

**Siobhan Dunnavant** (2:36)
Well, I started my career as a nurse.
I'm a mom of four kids, so I had many needs of collaboration. But I truly believe in the idea of you have to choose kind of your philosophy as a physician, and I believe it's patient centered. And so, you know, the idea, there's nothing I tell my patients, there's nothing somebody can say to me that will make me worry more than don't worry, honey.
I need to know why, like I need to test your hypothesis. I need to make sure what you say makes sense to me because that's how I feel in my gut. That's true. And I might need to analyze it a little bit and do a little research on it. So I just assume my patients were the same way. And I find out day after day, my patients come in and they, they're most alive. It is just anxiety, a lot of a lot of problems and issues they have because nobody respected them enough to explain anything to them. They just told them what to do.
And, you know, I think that I have faith in the intelligence of my patients. And I don't think there's anything so difficult about medical science that if you understand it, you can't break it down and share that ownership with the patient so that they can feel like they have control over what's going on in their body. That's really healthy, you know, to feel like you are empowered to understand what's happening and then you know how to fix it. But if you don't understand and somebody just gives you a list of to-do's and they don't make sense, it's not very effective or good medicine and in many cases it makes people worry more and sicker because they're worried sick.