(Janet Essman Franz, 4/18/2025)
“If we can do one thing to improve health care experiences and relationships, it’s to explicitly tell patients that we believe them,” says Melissa Houser, M.D.’12, clinical assistant professor of family medicine at UVM, in a Spring 2025 Vermont Medicine story.
Houser speaks from experience, both as a family physician and as a person who discovered her own autism at age 37. She also received diagnoses of attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, dyscalculia (difficulty with mathematics), and dyspraxia (difficulty with motor coordination and movement). Such neuro-logically based differences in thinking, learning, and communicating affect at least one in five people, and that number is likely higher because health care providers often miss autism in high-masking autistic people, Houser says.
Realizing that she is autistic helped Houser make sense of lifelong experiences—including in medical school—and inspired the creation of a new model of health care delivery. In November 2021 Houser launched All Brains Belong, a nonprofit medical practice in Montpelier, Vermont, that provides patients with health care, education, and social connections.
