Daniel Solomon, MD, is a pediatric general surgeon whose patients range from premature infants to adults, with conditions that are diagnosed and treated in childhood, or that may need care into adulthood.
He takes “the psychological approach” when treating children. “There are plenty of times when we might tell an adult: ‘Just sit still for a second; this is going to burn as we inject a local anesthetic,’” Dr. Solomon says. “Children don't understand that what we’re doing is in their best interest. That's why we include our pediatric anesthesiologists as frequently as possible so that we don’t cause lifelong anxiety about visiting a doctor.”
Dr. Solomon has extensive experience with such pediatric conditions as appendicitis and hernias. He also treats young patients for such complex issues as esophageal atresia and airway problems, as well as a multitude of oncologic conditions. Most of his surgeries are minimally invasive, and he often consults with other specialists and draws upon resources throughout Yale School of Medicine.
He successfully treated a patient who had an esophageal atresia with tracheoesophageal fistula, an exceptionally rare problem in which areas around the esophagus don’t connect properly. After speaking with the child’s mother, he discovered that multiple people in the patient’s family had had the same disorder. “We have a program at Yale that seeks to identify these rare conditions that occur at a high frequency within families and provide the ability to sequence their genes in order to identify the culprit gene,” says Dr. Solomon, who is an assistant professor of surgery (pediatrics) at Yale School of Medicine. “Within three weeks, we wrote a grant proposal to sequence their genes and identify the genetic abnormality causing this problem.”
Dr. Solomon serves Fairfield County, and performs surgery at Bridgeport and Greenwich hospitals, and in the Trumbull Park Avenue Medical Center, all of which are part of Yale New Haven Health.
