About Doctor Key West

Who writes this

The same lessons walk through my door on a schedule you could set a calendar by. March brings the spring break sunburns, blistered by Tuesday and regretted for a decade. June brings the year's first heat exhaustion, usually somebody who biked to the beach at noon because the breeze felt kind. July and August bring the full heat parade: the cramping legs, the pounding heads, the visitors astonished that water was not optional. January brings the man o' war weeks, when the east wind lines the tide mark with purple floats and my waiting room with striped welts, and it brings the Half Marathon, which supplies a reliable crop of knees that trained on good intentions. After enough seasons of this, a doctor either starts writing it down or starts repeating himself, and I talk plenty as it is.

I am Jason Pirozzolo, DO, dually board certified in sports medicine and family medicine, and I practice in Key West, which means my textbook has salt damage. Family medicine taught me to explain things to actual humans; sports medicine taught me what heat, water, and enthusiasm do to a body that has plans for the weekend. This column is where I put the explanations I already give across the exam table every week: written once, carefully, with named sources, and in the same voice I use in the room. If you want the curriculum vitae version, my professional sites, drjasonpirozzolo.com and jasonpirozzolo.com, keep the formal record. This page keeps the honest one.

Why a column and not a clinic page

Because the internet already has enough clinic pages, and none of them will tell you the truth about a hangover. This site teaches. It does not treat anyone, it does not book appointments, and it does not keep a directory of doctors, and that is deliberate. A column can say the research is mixed, can retire a beloved myth gently, and can tell you that the right treatment for most of what the island does to people is shade, water, and patience. A clinic page has to sell something. This one only has to be right, and when it cannot be certain, it has to say so out loud.

The persona is not a mask, either. Doctor Key West is me, writing under the name the column earned, about the one square mile of medicine I know better than anyone should: what this specific island, with its specific sun and specific bars and specific jellyfish, does to the people on it. If you want a doctor, this site will cheerfully tell you it is the wrong tool. If you want to understand why the afternoon felt like a sauna with a cover charge, pull up a chair.

The practice behind it, disclosed plainly

By day I practice non-surgical orthopedics at Key West Concierge Orthopedics, here in Key West. When a column touches my day job, bones, joints, and the things people do to themselves on paddleboards, I say so right in the text rather than hoping you notice the fine print. Beyond that single relationship, this site earns nothing from anything it recommends: no affiliate links, no sponsored sunscreen, no commission from the hat sellers on Front Street, however deserving.

The editorial rules

Every column carries a dated byline and a reviewed and updated line, so you know when I wrote it and when I last checked it against the evidence. Every statistic on this site carries a named, dated source on the page itself, not buried in a bibliography. When the evidence is mixed, the column says mixed, even when a cleaner answer would read better; you will find that honesty policy stress-tested in the barometer and the sunscreen columns. Corrections are made in place, with a dated note at the foot of the corrected column, because quietly rewriting history is for politicians.

Two more rules, since we are being thorough. Nothing on this site is written to frighten you into a waiting room; the worry boxes exist precisely so the rest of each column can relax. And no number appears here that I could not defend across the exam table: if I cannot verify a statistic, it gets cut, not rounded. The formal boundaries of all of this live in the medical disclaimer, which I actually wrote to be read.

What I will and will not answer

The mailbag at Ask Doctor Key West takes general questions about island health, and the good ones become columns: how the heat index works, whether the tap water is fine, what to do about the thing that stung you at Smathers. What it cannot take is personal medical advice. I will not diagnose your knee through a form, and I would not trust a doctor who did. And an emergency should never be typed into a website at all: that is what the phone, your own physician, and 911 are for, in roughly that order of politeness and exactly the reverse order of urgency.

How questions get chosen is unglamorous: I pick the ones I have already answered three times that month in person, because the island votes with its injuries. Send yours anyway. The strange ones are my favorites, and more than one column on this site started life as a question I initially laughed at and then could not stop thinking about on the drive home.