Dr. Edwin Bashaw McClelland, MD
Family Practitioner
3733 San Jose Avenue #5 Merced CA, 95348About
Edwin B. McClelland, MD, is a family practitioner who diagnoses and treats patients as locum tenens physician throughout the state of California. He is a Covid-19 survivor and is planning to start a telehealth-based concierge practice taking care of COVID-19 patients. Dr. McClelland is also conducting ongoing research with BioResearch Laboratories in Preston, WA, into the bacterial pathogenesis of cancers. His impressive professional journey that spans forty-eight years, including twenty-three years as a Registered Professional Engineer, and twenty-five years as a physician. Prior to his current endeavors, he served in family practices in Yreka, Susanville, Madera, and Atwater, CA (2013 – 2020), and has had short assignments at small clinics in Red Bluff in January of 2021, San Diego/Mira Mesa, and Blythe/Brawley/Calexico, and Gridley, CA (2020 – 2021). He speaks basic medical Spanish and French.
Dr. Edwin Bashaw McClelland, MD's Videos
Education and Training
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston medical degree 1995
Provider Details
Dr. Edwin Bashaw McClelland, MD's Expert Contributions
Can you take Metoprolol and ibuprofen together?
The standard of care is to monitor BP more frequently if a patient needing Ibuprofen is already on practically ANY blood pressure medicine. It's not just a problem with metoprolol. READ MORE
Can tonsillectomy be done under local anesthesia?
Even if I were able to find an ENT doctor who would be willing to do a tonsillectomy on me with only local anesthesia, I would not go that route. Total anesthesia gives the surgeon 100% control over your airway so you can't wind up with your own blood in your lungs. Heck, I don't think the operation would be much fun for an awake patient. READ MORE
The palms of my hand severe?
A dermatologist would have no trouble making the diagnosis. (To me, it looks like a variant of dyshidrotic eczema.) READ MORE
Fever and cough symptoms?
I apologize for this slightly delayed response to your blog question. I am super busy with my “day job.” I am even forced to limit responses to questions that I suspect, in all humility, that I am especially qualified to answer. My main medical interest during this “Year of the Plague” has been COVID 19. *** Your symptoms with cough and fever and low O2 could be from the flu. Did the walk-in doc do a flu test? Your symptoms could also be framing a readily treatable bacterial sinusitis with a bad bronchitis. If I had strongly suspected that--especially if I had heard wheezing in your lungs--I would have given you a Z-pack. It's not a great sinus antibiotic, but it is more protective of your lungs than most antibiotics are. (Zithromax also has some anti-viral properties that most docs probably don't know about.) However, I am guessing that your doctor didn't hear wheezing, or pneumonia crackles, since you didn't mention that he or she also prescribed an inhaler For now, I am not able to second guess your walk-in provider. I cannot rule out a bacterial (or even fungal) component of your illness, and it is distinctly possible that it is what we doctors call a URI, i.e., a so-called Upper Respiratory Infection with a complicating feature of bronchitis headed toward becoming a Lower Respiratory Infection (again, a good reason for trying Z-pack). A blog post obviously does not facilitate a more specific determination of what is going on in your case. It does occur to me, however, that your problem might be only viral. (By a convention of medical terminology, by the way, the term URI is reserved for presumably virus-only infections.) URIs are usually self-resolving, but in some cases they are stubbornly slow to resolve. The “Standard of Care” is for the provider who can’t make a bacterial diagnosis is to give you general advice and to suggest mainly over-the-counter meds and essentially just to urge you to wait and see how things unfold in your case. You will either improve or you won’t improve. You might actually get worse, of course. Doctors often just make educated guesses. They try one med or another based on shrewd guesswork. An in-person follow-up visit with a regular provider, if it becomes necessary, would ordinarily be the key to your provider’s management of your case according to the Standard of Care. *** Now, if you have you do have a URI--again, only viral--the possibilities get kind of gnarly--because COVID 19 itself starts as a URI. What I am ultimately saying is that, based on the limited info that you have given me, you have to consider the possibilty that you do have a COVID 19 infection with a false negative test thus far. I have seen this happen. I appreciate the fact that your blog inquiry suggests that you are inclined to believe that it’s not COVID-19, and you are probably correct about that. However, following are some medical facts that we ought to think about: In the first place, your vaccinated status definitely does not mean that you surely don’t have a COVID 19 infection as the present cause of your fever and cough and low oxygen. You probably already realize that (as seen in the fact that you went to the trouble of taking the home test for COVID 19!). The truth is that the currently available COVID vaccines rank among the least effective vaccines we have ever distributed. (Some of the flu vaccines in recent years have been pretty low in efficacy, but the COVID vaccines are especially discouraging.) It turns out that our COVID vaccines don’t even meet the FDA standards set for the required efficacy for any vaccine being deployed. The standard for approving the use of a given vaccine is 50% efficacy against getting the infection during an epidemic wave. The last figures I recall being published for our vaccines’ protection against getting the COVID 19 infection ranged from only 36% to only 42%. The Delta variant appears to be blowing right past the vaccines pretty often. This is why the CDC has even admitted that the vaccines are not meaningfully slowing the spread of the infections. The mantra that the unvaccinated folks are the super-spreaders is more than a little dubious. It turns out that several of the world’s countries having the HIGHEST percentages of ALREADY FULLY VACCINATED citizens have recently been seeing startling INCREASES in the number of new cases per hundred thousand of population. One such country is Ireland—a nation with a much higher vaccination percentage than most of the nations in the world. Ireland’s New Case stats have been pretty awful in recent weeks. What makes Ireland’s situation even weirder is that Ireland has one county that has achieved an astonishing vaccination coverage of 98.8% of adult citizens—the highest of all the counties in Ireland—and yet that very county has recently recorded the highest number of new cases of any county in Ireland. We have been unable to account for this mess, but something is going haywire. Our public health agencies and our media have doubled down on booster shots and started pushing for the vaccination of little kids and are even trying to mandate full vaccination of practically everyone in the U.S.—including even people who clearly do not need it. (Contrary to what we sometimes hear, the natural immunity that a COVID 19 survivor has is both long-lasting and potent in preventing re-infection. Something like 90 studies around the world have shown this. By way of a full, medically open-minded disclosure, I need to be sure to mention an evidently real benefit for our currently available vaccines: It is pretty clear that the person who gets fully vaccinated and then winds up with a breakthrough infection has a dramatically improved prognosis for the course of his disease. (This is nothing for the anti-vaxxers to scoff at even if some of their other concerns about the vaccines need to be honestly addressed.) How can this be so? How can a vaccine be pretty poor in the usual (i.e., standard) matter of vaccine efficacy yet be pretty good in slowing down the disease when it breaks through? I have ideas of my own, but they are beyond the scope of this email. What I mainly want to say is that your home test result could have been a FALSE negative. There is no cause for alarm here, but I want you to realize that the home test might not reveal the presence of a genuinely ongoing COVID 19 infection for the (possible? likely?) reason that you have at least a partial (vaccination-induced) immunity that is currently suppressing the virion count far enough to put that count below the so-called “detection limit” of the home test. I would specifically point out that we do see a fair number of false negatives with the home tests (and with the quicky tests of the same type used in most hospital Emergency Departments). A follow-up PCR is much more sensitive and thus almost certain to reveal the COVID 19 breakthrough infection that the home test missed. One of the sharp hospitalists where I am currently working has pointed that a positive home test is obviously to be believed, whereas a negative test for a patient with COVID 19 symptoms is not necessarily to be trusted. One of our ED doctors has declared that if the array of COVID 19 symptoms are present, then we have to assume we have a COVID 19 case on our hands unless and until a PCR test comes back negative. That’s just good medicine. In short, the point of my unabashedly speculative discussion about the vaccine is that the partial benefits of the vaccine might also screw up the home test. This would tend to make “super-spreaders” out of vaccinated individuals who are pretty sure they just have a “bad cold.” *** Finally, if you are still sick by the time you read this belated response to your original inquiry, you should at least go to a good Family Practice clinic or Urgent Care to see a provider. If you are terribly sick (e.g. badly short of breath), please go straight to an Emergency Department. If you haven't gotten a flu test, you need to get one. If that is negative, you definitely need a PCR test for COVID 19 Good luck and stay safe Edwin McClelland, M.D. READ MORE
I have a cellulitis healing question?
The short answer is yes. READ MORE
Awards
- Selected by America’s Best Doctors for online recognition as one of the Top Doctors in Merced, California Year
- Kuldip Singh Memorial Award for Excellence in Immunology Research (UTMB, 1992) Year
- Tau Beta Pi and Omega Chi Epsilon (engineering honor societies comparable to Phi Beta Kappa in Arts and Sciences) Year
- National Merit Scholarship 1969
- Selected for the NSF’s Summer Science Training Program for High-Ability Secondary School Students, University of Texas 1968
Internships
- Central Texas Medical Foundation1996Internal medicine
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Get to know Family Physician Dr. Edwin Bashaw McClelland, who serves patients throughout the State of California.
Dr. McClelland is a locum tenens physician in the field of family medicine spanning California. From July 4th of 2021, he has been serving a three-month family practice assignment in Gridley.
Prior to his current endeavours, he served in family practices in Yreka, Susanville, Madera, and Atwater from August of 2013 to December of 2020. He then completed short assignments at small clinics in Red Bluff in January of 2021, in San Diego/Mira Mesa from March 29th to April 23th 2021, and in Blythe/Brawley/Calexico from May to June of 2021. The six-year family practice stint in Atwater included a heavy emphasis in minor emergency care for walk-in patients at the Atwater facility’s busy Urgent Care Clinic.
After graduating with his Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1973, Dr. McClelland had a distinguished career as a Registered Professional Engineer. While he was updating his nine-page consulting resume in 1990, he decided to switch careers. He wanted to apply his disciplined technical background to the practice of medicine. He soon went on to earn his medical degree from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston in 1995. He next completed an Internship in Internal Medicine at Central Texas Medical Foundation, Brackenridge Hospital, in 1996. At the age of 45, then, he embarked on an a broadly practical career involving Urgent Care, Family Medicine and Integrative Medicine.
Dr. McClelland has served as a contract physician at Partners Urgent Care in San Diego, California (2011 through November of 2012); the owner/physician of San Diego Immunotherapy (February of 2004 to August of 2013); a physician at Livingston Foundation Medical Center in San Diego (September of 2003 to February of 2004); a physician at Austin Minor Emergency Clinic (January of 2001 to 2002); a physician at ProMed – all Austin locations (November of 1998 to September of 2003); a physician at St. David’s MediCentres (all locations), Austin, Texas (December of 1997 through October of 1998); and a locum Tenens physician at rural public clinics in Central Texas and two family practices in Austin (October of 1997 to December of 1997).
His industrial roles included the technical manager of Austin Operations at Dames & Moore (1989-1991), providing direction of engineering programs and expert services to environmental attorneys (U.S. and international); a senior consulting engineer at Espey, Huston & Associates (1981-1989), providing environmental engineering assessments of health effects of toxic releases, expert services in cases involving environmental law, and processing design and safety assessments; and as a process engineer/production supervisor at E.I. DuPont Company in Orange, Texas (1973-1981), involved in engineering design and process start-up (placing extremely heavy emphasis upon safety).
With special training in emergency medicine, Dr. McClelland holds certifications in Advanced Cardiac Life Support through the American Heart Association and in Advanced Trauma Life Support through the American College of Surgeons.
Currently, he is conducting ongoing research with BioResearch Laboratories (Preston, Washington) into the bacterial pathogenesis of cancers.
Family medicine is a medical specialty devoted to comprehensive health care for people of all ages. The specialist is called a family physician or family doctor. A family physician is often the first person a patient sees when seeking healthcare services. They examine and treat patients with a wide range of conditions and refer those with serious ailments to a specialist or appropriate facility.
Among Dr. McClelland’s professional and scholastic honors include: Selected by America’s Best Doctors for online recognition as one of the Top Doctors in Merced, California; Kuldip Singh Memorial Award for Excellence in Immunology Research (UTMB, 1992); Tau Beta Pi and Omega Chi Epsilon (engineering honor societies comparable to Phi Beta Kappa in Arts and Sciences); National Merit Scholarship, 1969; and Selected for the NSF’s Summer Science Training Program for High-Ability Secondary School Students, University of Texas, 1968 (original microbiology research).
On a more personal note, Dr. McClelland speaks very basic medical Spanish and even basic French. (He is also now studying ancient Greek in his spare time.)
On an especially important personal level, Dr. McClelland “is a COVID-19 survivor from March 2021 with a strong IgG antibody titer.” He is currently planning to start a Telehealth-based concierge practice taking care of COVID-19 patients. Dr. McClelland has spent several hundred hours studying the pathology and treatment of COVID 19, and coupled with his personal experience of the infection, he has successfully used this knowledge and experience to treat a sizeable number of COVID 19 victims.
Additional Information
Prior to enrolling in medical school, Dr. McClelland acquired a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1973 and enjoyed a remarkable career as a Registered Professional Engineer for seventeen years.
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