A native of southeastern Pennsylvania, Barry L. Friedberg, MD, came to Palo Alto, California in 1975 to complete his formal education with an anesthesia residency at Stanford University, working with cardiac transplant surgical pioneer Norman Shumway, MD. Following his residency and successful completion of his board certification examination, Dr. Friedberg was elected a diplomate of the American Board of Anesthesiology in 1980. He has made Southern California his home since 1980, working at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, CA, until 1991. Always an innovator, before joining Hoag, Dr. Friedberg introduced their anesthesia staff to the Dinamap in l979, an automated blood pressure device that many thought was futuristic (and superfluous) but is now a well-established way of determining patients' blood pressures. Dr. Friedberg was also an early adapter of pulse oximetry in the mid-1980s, and encouraged the hospital to purchase the technology before it was deemed a standard of care.

At Hoag, Dr. Friedberg practiced the subspecialty of cardiac (open heart) anesthesia for five years until turning his professional attention to outpatient surgery for four years at Hoag's James Irvine Surgicenter. Moving from an institutional outpatient setting to the office based one was a natural growth in Dr. Friedberg's career. Since 1992, he has practiced exclusively in the subspecialty of office-based anesthesia for elective cosmetic surgery. Because of the unique challenges in the office based setting, Dr. Friedberg saw a need for education of his hospital based colleagues who might choose a path similar to his own. Accordingly, he founded the Society for Office Anesthesiologists (SOFA) in 1996 that he merged in 1998 with the Society for Office Based Anesthesia (SOBA), another non-profit, international society dedicated to improving patient safety through education.

Dr. Friedberg is the developer of propofol ketamine (PK) technique designed to maximize patient safety by minimizing the degree to which patients need to be medicated to create the illusion of general anesthesia, i.e. "no hear, no feel." Many members of SOBA throughout the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia and England have enthusiastically incorporated PK into their practices to the delight of their patients and surgeons.

Dr. Friedberg has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals on his technique. His original 1993 article has been subsequently cited in twelve peer reviewed journal articles. This is noteworthy because half of all journal articles in print are never referred to in subsequent articles. The 1993 article has also been cited in four textbooks in anesthesia and one in cosmetic surgery.
 
Dr. Friedberg's expertise is often lent to a number of peer-reviewed medical journals for review. Dr. Friedberg is a contributor to the letters to the editor section in several anesthesia and surgery journals as well as electronic discussion groups that include SOBA (www.soba.org) and the Society for Ambulatory Anesthesia (SAMBA: www.sambahq.org) websites. He has also lectured in the United States, Canada, the Dominican Republic, Israel and Venezuela in addition to being a clinical instructor in Anesthesia at the University of Southern California.

"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather we have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."

          -- Aristotle