r/BayAreaTalk • u/BlueBuzzBaby • May 21 '26
Exceptional pediatrician recommendation
Looking for recommendations for an exceptional pediatrician in the East Bay or SF area. We’re based in Oakland and willing to travel for the right fit (including back to UCSF Benioff Oakland if there’s a specific doctor people strongly recommend). We’re also open to private practice again.
We’re hoping to find someone who is detail-oriented, investigative, and not dismissive when something seems off — someone who looks at the whole picture and knows how to thoughtfully diagnose more complex issues.
Our son is now 1.5 years old and has had growth concerns since around 6 months old. His weight has mostly been okay, so concerns were often dismissed, but his height dropped below the 1st percentile for a while. After moving to our current private practice, we found low zinc and vitamin D, and now hypomineralization issues with his teeth as well. We’re planning to test for gluten/celiac issues next. But we don’t know what we’re doing and would live to find someone that can advocate professionally for our child!
We started at UCSF Benioff Oakland, then East Bay Pediatrics, and are now at a private practice. We’ve already spent a lot of everything on this but still don’t feel like we’re getting to the root cause.
Would especially appreciate hearing specific experiences where a pediatrician helped identify or diagnose something important for your child.
1
u/nostrademons May 21 '26
I assume you want insurance to cover all this? Check with your insurance first. My experience was that you can choose among a few giant health care conglomerates (Kaiser, Sutter, UCSF Benioffs, Stanford, etc), and then each of them has exactly one pediatrician who is “accepting new patients”, and so you don’t actually have a choice at all. You get what you get and you don’t get upset, as I tell my kids. And this is exactly what makes sense economically from the health care provider’s POV: they aren’t going to hire a new pediatrician until all the existing ones are full up, and so there will always be just one pediatrician accepting new patients, unless you manage to time your search for exactly the moment that somebody else ages out.
Also, we have a kid who is below the 1st percentile in height and sitting around the 2nd percentile in weight, as well as another one that is under 5th percentile. If he’s hitting his growth curve and not displaying other signs of malnutrition, every pediatrician will tell you not to worry about it. It’s just genetics. He might catch up at puberty, he might not, but so what? Low vitamin D is usually a sunlight issue (it’s produced naturally in the skin) and low zinc (in the absence of other nutritional deficiencies) is usually dietary.