Politically active doctor wants to cure more than patients

Sam Morris

Dr. Leonard Kreisler has worked for the Nevada Test Site and University Medical Center and run for Clark County Commission. He’s also self-published books in an effort to demystify aspects of health care.

By Brian Eckhouse (contact)

Thursday, April 30, 2009 | 2 a.m.

In Peekskill, N.Y., Dr. Leonard Kreisler was a general practitioner who answered the office phone himself and visited patients in their homes — the Norman Rockwell sketch of the humble, small-town doctor.

Kreisler busted out of that caricature when, seeking a lifestyle change, he happened upon a job at the Nevada Test Site, as medical director for the primary contractor there. He had a short, concurrent stint as University Medical Center’s chief of staff and ran twice — unsuccessfully — for the Clark County Commission.

The Brooklyn native stayed at the test site nearly 18 years until he challenged the findings of a government audit at a time that he wasn’t getting along with the Energy Department, which oversaw the site. He quit in 1991.

That theme — challenging authority — continued in the ensuing 18 years. In letters to editorial pages,

Kreisler criticized politicians who, he believed, studied problems but didn’t solve them, especially involving health care issues. In 1992 he railed against government behavior that allowed the State Industrial Insurance System to approach bankruptcy. Six years later he questioned the county’s logic of “subsidizing” a private ambulance company when the county fire department does the same work capably.

His avocation: to demystify medicine and health care. The issue is so dear to him he pays to print his own books.

This month he was hawking his second self-published book, “Roll the Dice, Pick a Doc and Hope for the Best,” at a meeting of the Lake Mead chapter of the Health Physics Society. The book, selling for $15, attempts to navigate the reader through the increasingly “stretched and fragmented” medical infrastructure. He sold 12.

At the same event, he sold 10 copies of his first book, “Death By Any Means,” in which he hoped to boost awareness of natural and man-made threats.

Kreisler spent $25,000 on the biodefenses book, recouped about $4,000 and has 100 unsold copies boxed away. He wrote a few unpublished “vanity” novels, and has begun a follow-up to “Roll the Dice.”

This is a man who intended a life as a family physician, but there was a hint of the unlikely, indiscriminate path to come: During his three-year Army stint through 1960, he pondered a medical career with that branch until he suggested that his commissioned officer get a psychiatric evaluation.

“Doing that was unheard of, but after I left, they recommended him for Walter Reed” Army Medical Center, he says. “I was vindicated.”

Politicians — the people he’s trying to reach, and the targets of his criticism — mostly ignore him.

Their silence frustrates him fleetingly, until it dawns on him that there’s another chapter to write.