Pediatrics
Francine Kaufman
Childrens Hospital Los Angeles
It’s summer and that means it’s time for Dr. Francine Kaufman to go to camp.
Kaufman, director of the Comprehensive Childhood Diabetes Center at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, also is one of the medical directors at Camp Chinook, a camp at Big Bear for juvenile diabetics.
“For a brief period of time for these kids (while at camp), having diabetes is the norm,” Kaufman said. “It’s amazing to hear how much this disease really has an impact on their lives. From the outside, they look like every other kid green hair, nose rings, whatever but they always have this cloud hanging over their heads, this fragility that other teens just don’t have.”
Besides her post as director, Kaufman is the division head of endocrinology at the hospital and an associate professor of pediatrics at USC.
Kaufman, 48, chose pediatrics as a student in medical school at the University of Chicago. After about 10 minutes in the operating room, she decided surgery was not the direction she wanted to go. “Too much death,” she says.
Treating juvenile diabetics gives her the logical challenges she wants. She has been with Childrens Hospital since serving her internship there in 1976.
“Everybody you save is a triumph,” she says. “For example, today I diagnosed a 14-month-old. She can’t tell you when she doesn’t feel well and she doesn’t understand why she’s being poked with needles all day long and why she has to eat when she isn’t hungry. But in the long term, I get to watch my patients grow up. I’ve been to law school graduations and medical school graduations of my patients.”
In addition, Kaufman served as a technical advisor for the ABC sitcom “Home Improvement.” She consulted on the script of an episode in which doctors discovered a thyroid nodule on one of the boys on the show.
This year, Kaufman patented the Extend Bar, a “medical food” that uses cornstarch to trigger gradual and consistent absorption of glucose in diabetics. The snack bar can prevent low blood sugar for up to nine hours, Kaufman discovered.
Kaufman met her husband, Dr. Neal Kaufman a noted pediatrician at Cedars-Sinai during an anti-war rally at Northwestern University. They have two children and reside in West Los Angeles.
Ann Donahue
