Karen Lazarus, MD, MS, MPH

After graduating from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, New York, Dr. Lazarus completed a Family Practice residency at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas.  She worked in Emergency Medicine and Urgent Care for a few years, and then pursued additional education and training in other areas of interest.  Dr. Lazarus completed a master’s degree in Nutrition at the University of Maryland, a post-doctoral fellowship in Clinical Nutrition and an MPH program in Health Behavior at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.  She then returned to John Peter Smith Hospital where her practice focused on nutrition.  She served as the coordinator of patient education for the county hospital district and taught Nutrition and Health Promotion to the Family Practice residents.  Now back in New York, Dr. Lazarus is working in Addiction Medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center.

For the past 20 years, most of Dr. Lazarus’s clinical work has focused on health behavior change.  She has been particularly interested in communication skills, both as a clinician and as a teacher.  In the past few years her greatest passion in her work has been the study and teaching of Nonviolent Communication.  Dr. Lazarus finds this needs-based process of communication to be helpful in bringing about health behavior change.