“I love delivering babies. It's still a miraculous thing to me. I still get a feeling of 'wow.'”
Vanessa E. Junor, D.O., Chair, OB/GYN at Lakeside
Dr. Vanessa Junor's passion for women's health began as a little girl in British Guyana, when she would accompany her grandmother, a nurse-midwife on her rounds. Dr. Junor says, “I would go with my grandmother to her job, so I was exposed at an early age to labor and delivery. ” She also acquired the patients' perspective early on in life: sick with a heart murmur as a child, she frequented the hospital many times until her condition resolved at age nine. “ I became very attached to my pediatrician and thought maybe I wanted to become one,” she says. But whether it was in OB/GYN or in pediatrics, she knew early on she wanted to be in medicine.
Dr. Junor's family came to the United States when she was 12 and settled on Long Island. She went to SUNY Oswego for her undergraduate degree in biology, then returned to Long Island and received her medical degree from the NY College of Osteopathic Medicine with a specialty in OB/GYN.
Dr. Junor says of her osteopathic training, “There are two medical schools of thought in the US—allopathic and osteopathic. The core teaching is the same but the principle of osteopathy is you treat the person as a whole .” How does it help her patients in particular? “OB/GYN is one area where osteopathy comes in very handy,” she says. “You gain a true understanding of neurophysiology and manual manipulation. There are osteopathic manipulative techniques that can be done to alleviate their pain.”
What does she like to do when she's not taking care of patients? She gets together with friends from medical school. “We live all over, so we pick a city and we all meet there. We've gone to Washington, D.C. and Jamaica. This year we're going to Martha's Vineyard. We're all doctors and everyone's so busy. This is how we stay connected.”
The one thing she wants everyone to know about her? “I really care about women's health,” Dr.Junor says. “ I want to do my best to help women take better care of themselves.”