for the full interview, go here
Hello, I’m Lynda Huey and this is Meet the Doctors. The show that lets you hear what doctors have to say about their lives, their work, their passions, and what they foresee for the future. Today, we’ll be speaking with Dr. Harold Kraft of LaserMD.
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| Lynda Huey: | This is Lynda Huey with Meet the Doctors. We’re here today in Santa Monica with Dr. Harold Kraft of LaserMD, welcome to the show. |
| Dr. Harold Kraft: | Thank you, Lynda. |
| Lynda Huey: | Yeah, it’s so good to be here with you. I’ve met you a couple of times, and learned a lot about the laser that you use here, but you had an interesting journey getting to a laser. So let’s start with your BioEngineering undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania. |
| Dr. Harold Kraft: | Sure, so I have an engineering degree and actually always wanted to be an engineer, but I ended up going to medical school, and pursuing a medical career. After I got out into the real world, I basically had a dual career most of the past 20 or 30 years, sort of half engineering, half medicine. Sometimes it was more skewed one way or the other. |
| Lynda Huey: | Well, I want to know how you got from engineering into med school. What drew you over there? |
| Dr. Harold Kraft: | Well, I really just wanted to be an engineer, but my mother wanted me to be a doctor. |
| Lynda Huey: | The parental. |
| Dr. Harold Kraft: | She died when I was 16. So I did it to honor her and actually took the one biology course, which was the bare minimum that you could to get into medical school. I figured out a way sort of around all the other requirements. And so when I went to medical school, I’d had the least amount of biology, probably on record ever. |
| Lynda Huey: | Well, I happened to know a doctor who had an art/history undergraduate degree. He might have beat you on that, but then you went to medical school at Georgetown. Tell me about that? I’ve lived in Washington D.C. I know how prestigious Georgetown is. |
| Dr. Harold Kraft: | Well, I’m a native of D.C. So for me it was actually the easiest path was to go to, from my standpoint, the local schools, was the closest school to where I grew up in D.C., and I did my residency there. It was a good place to do residency, but I was completely driven by, it was easy, it was local. They knew me and after residency I couldn’t wait to get out into private practice. I did not have any academic leanings whatsoever, even though they wanted me to stay into research. And then I spent roughly the next 15 years in giving anesthesia, basically by day. And at night, I had a pain practice as well as a software business. |
| Lynda Huey: | Yes. Such an interesting dual career that you were doing both high tech and at the time, which we wouldn’t call it as high tech today as it was then. But you were doing that at the same time that you were doing medicine, but let’s finish up with Georgetown. You spent 20 years doing anesthesia for surgeries, all kinds of surgeries, you were at Georgetown Medical Center, is that correct? |
| Dr. Harold Kraft: | Yes. For about half of that time, I was at a local Level I Trauma Center suburban hospital in Bethesda, and we did everything but hearts and baby. So we did a lot of vascular surgery, a lot of brain surgery, and actually for whatever reason, a lot of plastic surgery. |
| Lynda Huey: | Those were considered traumas? |
| Dr. Harold Kraft: | No, but in addition to trauma. But it was definitely a hospital where you got a wide variety of experience. |
| Lynda Huey: | And so you were the quiet presence in the O.R. providing the anesthesia while, what kinds of doctors were working? The vascular surgeons or did you ever work with orthopedists? |
| Dr. Harold Kraft: | Vascular surgeons, orthopedists, neurosurgeons, general surgeons. |
| Lynda Huey: | Yeah. What were your favorite surgeries to be there and observe? |
| Dr. Harold Kraft: | I liked all the surgeries. It was more about the surgeon, but in general I gravitated by both by interest and because I was very facile with the drugs. I gravitated to the more complex cases. |
| Lynda Huey: | Now, why were you so facile with the drugs? |
| Dr. Harold Kraft: | So that’s sort of harkens back to my anesthesia and even before that, my engineering degree. In anesthesia, there’s a lot of physiology and pharmacology and those were really my favorite and best subjects in medical school. It’s basically all about analytics and I’m extremely analytical. |
| Lynda Huey: | Well, I guess it ties in with the software companies that you started and the technology you were involved in. So how did that segue over it? You were doing that at the same time, that was your night job, you said working with software? |
| Dr. Harold Kraft: | Yes. Anesthesia, once you get good at it, is not that mentally challenging because of my analytic background, like I got good, fairly quickly. And so one of the additional challenge when I started a software, actually two software companies, one after the other. |
| Lynda Huey: | Now, you were the person that kind of created the software, you created the concept and hired the people to do the software for you? |
| Dr. Harold Kraft: | Initially, I did the actual coding, but quickly grew out of that and then hired, just managed the company and did the concepts. |
| Lynda Huey: | What were these two software concepts? |
| Dr. Harold Kraft: | The most recent one was a company that called My Public Info that was basically the forbearer of LifeLock’s Identity Theft System. |
| Lynda Huey: | Okay. Did you have a personal interest in that because someone you knew had been identity thefted? |
| Dr. Harold Kraft: | No. Again, it was more about when I was running one of my software company, somebody came to me with a project that he said nobody could do, which was data mining with some of the U.S. Court Systems at the time. I decided that I could do it. And so we created the system that gave me a lot of experience with data mining, large government databases that then morphed into identity theft protection. |
| Lynda Huey: | Okay, and then the second software company, what was it? |
| Dr. Harold Kraft: | Actually, the first software company was a work for hire, where I did a lot of database. The company did a lot of database work. And the second company was focused strictly on identity theft. Nothing in the medical field. |
| Lynda Huey: | Okay. So after 20 years of being an anesthesiologist in Washington D.C., what made you moved not only to California, but start a whole new career in lasers rather than anesthesia? |
| Dr. Harold Kraft: | So I retired from medicine completely for a while, about 10 years. I went into software, where I focused exclusively. And when I sold the second company that brought me out to California to LA. I was out in LA, sort of finishing up that gig with the second software company. And my wife told me about this fantastic device, which had basically saved her dog’s life. And what’s important to understand is that one of my goals in life after I die, is to come back as one of my wife’s dogs. |
| Lynda Huey: | I get that. |
| Dr. Harold Kraft: | Something about this dog, Harley and how Harley, I’d seen Harley and myself go from not walking. He developed severe arthritis. He was a pug. This pug developed severe arthritis and he’d gone from not walking to walking after the vet lasered him. And I was very skeptical, although I kept in mind that there are very few, there really no great pain treatments, even waste a lot of epidurals and they are not that great. And so my wife told me to look into it, which I looked, which I did, but I was not yet convinced, a very Western medicine trained, analytical approach. And then a friend of hers came down and her back went out. And this was also the friend also turned out to be an old patient of mine, who has back pain, I could never adequately treat. And the vet lasered her back and she got more relief from the laser that I had ever given it. And then I thought that the laser might have some potential, so I really started reading about it. And at that point, I realized that there was tremendous untapped potential, even though I still was not 100 percent sold. And so, at that point, I actually decided to very, very tentatively open a practice. I was the biggest skeptic there was. |
| Lynda Huey: | And you opened a practice, even though you were skeptical? How interesting? |
| Dr. Harold Kraft: | Yes, but I did it very carefully, and I got a month-to-month sublet. And because I just could not bear the thought of hanging a shingle, if there was a therapy that I didn’t believe in. Fortunately, just about when the time that I got the laser, I happened to have hip pain myself. That was so bad that I was almost about to go see a physician, which for me takes a lot. |