Professor Harrison Weisinger on Substack → SUBSCRIBE
- Dr Saskia
Dr Saskia Irwin spent close to a decade in intensive care, anaesthetics and aeromedical retrieval. She now practises preventative and longevity medicine, and the reason for the change is simple. She wanted to meet her patients years earlier.
Much of that decision was formed in anaesthetics, in a large regional centre, where she saw an enormous burden of disease driven by obesity, diabetes and kidney failure. By the time those patients reached her, the damage was done. What stayed with her was how much of it had been years in the making, and how much might have gone differently had someone intervened a decade or two before. Dr Saskia believes that is where the real opportunity in medicine sits: in giving people the knowledge, the support and the clinical care they need while they are still well.
Dr Saskia graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Science in 2009 and completed her medical degree at Sydney Medical School in 2013. She trained at St George, St Vincent's and Concord, then took anaesthetics registrar posts at Wagga Wagga Base and Gosford. From 2021 she worked as a Retrieval and Anaesthetics Registrar with the Royal Flying Doctor Service and Dubbo Base Hospital, looking after critically unwell patients across rural and remote New South Wales, often in the air and with only what she had carried on board. Alongside this she spent five years as an Intensive Care Registrar at South East Regional Hospital, and she still practises in intensive care today. She has published on intra-operative cholangiogram and surgical outcomes in laparoscopic cholecystectomy in Surgical Practice, and wrote and presented Surgery Still Not Scrubbing Up For Women at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons Registrar Paper Day in Adelaide.
Dr Saskia now consults from Sydney, where her interests are lifestyle and preventative medicine, longevity, hormonal health, nutrition and women's health. She describes her approach as patient-led and evidence-based. Less is often more, the simplest answer is usually the right one, and she will still look closely enough to be sure nothing rare has been missed. She has no view on what a patient's goals ought to be. Running a marathon, feeling better in the mornings, having the energy to keep up with your children: if it matters to you, she will help you get there.
Dr Saskia grew up in Narrandera, in the Riverina, where her father ran the general practice and the base hospital for more than twenty years. She trained in classical ballet with the Royal Academy of Dance for thirteen years, rowed for the University of Sydney, taught in Ghana and worked in emergency medicine in the Solomon Islands. She now lives in Sydney's eastern suburbs with her three children. She reads, runs, and gets to yoga when time allows, and she is direct with patients about why any of it matters. Good health is what buys you the energy for the life you actually want.
For all media enquiries, please contact press@myperformancedoctor.com
