Born into a family of “Doctors” in both name and profession, it was probably inevitable that Lynne Doctor, MD, would become a physician.

A vascular surgeon, Dr. Doctor sees patients at The Vascular Center’s Bethlehem, and Palmerton offices. Vascular surgery covers a range of open surgeries and minimally invasive procedures involving the network of arteries and veins that carry blood to and from the heart.

Dr. Doctor diagnoses and manages her patients’ vascular disease through lifestyle changes, medications and surgery.

“The obvious joke of my last name always presents itself,” she said. She asks her patients to call her Dr. Lynne to avoid the awkwardness of saying Dr. Doctor and the inevitable discussion about her unusual, yet apropos, name.

“But seriously, I have a lot of physicians in my family in many different specialties – all of whom have valued their lives, careers and the opportunity to help people. So, there were a lot of positive role models there.”

Dr. Doctor’s brother is an emergency room physician, and her sister-in-law is an internal medicine physician. One of her grandfathers is an OB/GYN, and the other is a pulmonologist. But it was her mother, Gail Schweitz, MD, who uses her maiden name, who had the most significant influence.

“I had a very strong female role model in my mother, a pediatrician who’s still practicing,” she said. “I watched her balance her family and career and be very successful at it. Anytime we go out in the small town where I grew up, she always runs into patients. And now she takes care of children of her previous patients.”

When Dr. Doctor was a young child in Tenafly, Bergen County, New Jersey, doctors carried pagers while on-call to receive messages about their patients. From the time she could read, her mother would allow her to be the first to look at the pager’s message and suggest a response.

“It would say, ‘five-year-old boy with a fever and sore throat,’ and she’d let me give my diagnosis and treatment plan,” Dr. Doctor said.

While she always knew she wanted to be a doctor, it wasn’t until medical school that she became interested in vascular surgery. She saw a rotation offered for vascular surgery that sparked her interest.

“I had several inspiring mentors during that initial vascular surgery rotation and then went on to work with them more extensively.” The specialty offers a lot of diversity because the vascular system involves the entire body, except the heart and brain.

“I might be operating on somebody’s neck in the morning and operating on somebody’s lower leg in the afternoon. It runs the gamut,” she said. “The blood vessels transport blood throughout the body, almost like the plumbing system. The arteries bring blood everywhere, and the veins bring it back to the heart. If there’s a problem, the vascular surgeons take care of it.

“Vascular disease is very prevalent, which is why it’s sort of strange that nobody knows about vascular surgeons or that they should or could be getting vascular care.”

While vascular disease is treatable, it’s not curable. As a result, Dr. Doctor develops relationships with her patients over many years. She still sees patients today who she first saw after finishing her training eight years ago.

“It’s nice to see them eight years later still walking on legs that I treated or if I operated on their carotid arteries, still stroke-free.”

Sometimes, however, the intervention of a vascular surgeon can be life changing. She recalled a patient in her 20s who had a condition misdiagnosed for many years. She had already had three unsuccessful surgeries.

“The patient was at a point where she thought she would never walk normally and never be able to walk without pain,” she said. “In your early 20s, that’s a tough diagnosis to swallow.”

“I diagnosed her as having a fairly rare condition called popliteal entrapment syndrome, where the muscle was in the wrong place and pushed against the artery,” she continued. “I did two surgeries, one on each leg, and now she’s happy and walking around pain-free. She was very grateful afterward to have her life back.

“It’s gratifying to change someone’s life like that.”