If you’ve driven through Kansas with the radio on, or watched the state’s public television stations, you may have heard Bal Sharma, MD, dispense psychiatric advice.
Sharma, a 1994 graduate of the Yale Department of Psychiatry residency program, is a frequent guest on radio and TV shows in Kansas, where he maintains a thriving geriatric psychiatry practice that in 2017 saw him log 95,000 miles on his car while visiting patients in some of the state’s most remote locations.
“I enjoy visiting with families of my patients in rural areas, discussing with them about their loved ones in nursing homes and at the same time talking to them about how their crops are growing,” said Sharma, who grew up in a farming family in India.
After leaving Yale, Sharma launched his private medical practice, MD Psychiatry Consultants, with a caseload of patients in six nursing homes. He now travels between 51 nursing homes across the state in addition to working as Medical Director at Freedom Behavioral Hospital in Topeka and at the 12-bed Senior Behavioral Health Unit at Sumner Regional Medical Center in Wellington.
I enjoy visiting with families of my patients in rural areas, discussing with them about their loved ones in nursing homes and at the same time talking to them about how their crops are growing.
Bal Sharma
Besides his media and clinical work, Sharma is active on the lecture circuit. He speaks about the psychiatric challenges to being diagnosed with cancer, with a special focus on breast cancer, for cancer centers and Hospice homes, and gives continuing medical education lectures at healthcare centers and at medical society meetings.
He has also traveled to 19 states in the past two years speaking for pharmaceutical companies.