About Doctor V
Dr. Rachel Vreeman
I am a pediatrician and HIV researcher who specializes in figuring out how to improve care for HIV-infected children in poor places. Global child health is my passion and vocation. I am an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine and I co-direct the pediatric research program for AMPATH, a large HIV care and research program in western Kenya. I divide my time between Kenya and the US. My particular area of interest is how to best help families with the challenge of having children take HIV medicines every day for the rest of their lives.
I am also the co-author of Don’t Swallow Your Gum: Myths, Half-Truths, and Outright Lies About Your Body and Health, Don’t Cross Your Eyes… They’ll Get Stuck That Way!, and our new book all about sex myths — Don’t Put THAT in THERE! And 69 Other Sex Myths Debunked. Our books are published by Macmillan (St.Martin’s Press). My myth-busting work allows me to do all sorts of fun things, like appear on Good Morning America, CBS Evening News, and CNN. Our books have made appearances in The New York Times, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, the other Times across the ocean, Newsweek, Glamour, Real Simple, Cosmopolitan, Playboy, and many other international publications. If you’re nice to me, I’ll tell you my stories about the British Prime Minister’s personal comments on our book and what it’s like to talk about penis sizes on the radio.
I’m descended from a long line of Dutch people, on which you can blame my independence, my fair skin, and my deep love of pickled herring. When I’m not living out of a suitcase, I love my little red house in an American urban neighborhood and my home at the Equator where I get to share a place with bugs, slugs, rats, and the best expatriate Rockband team known to sub-Saharan Africa. I am a voracious reader, who occasionally relinquishes my bookworm ways to explore new cities, play the piano, blog, ride my bicycle, take photographs, do yoga, and laugh with the people I love.
