Las Vegas doctor takes advice to the airwaves

This is the advice Dr. Daliah Wachs gives to a man who calls her radio show, “The Dr. Daliah Show” on KDWN-AM (720), complaining of abdominal pain after doing 200 sit-ups.

“It’s dead center, a 4-inch square area, very tender, it hurts if you touch it,” the man says.

It sounds like an old joke, but there’s a great deal of medical truth in that advice.

“Remember, pain is your body’s defense mechanism. Pain is a sign to get it checked out,” Wachs says, advising the man to go to his doctor, because he might have a hernia or an infection.

The best talk radio should be informative and entertaining, says Jim Dallas, KDWN sound board operator and Wachs’ producer. But when it comes to medical shows, they’re often straight information and not so entertaining.

“What Daliah does is blend that together. She starts out in a fun, informative manner that grabs the listener,” says Dallas, who has worked with her for nearly three years. “By that point, you feel like you’re talking to a friend. It’s a unique blend and it works.”

Wachs has been taking on touchy subjects and making them approachable and understandable to her listening audience since starting her show as a weekly good deed. She turned her hobby into a nightly syndicated radio show that’s produced locally and airs on Sirius XM channel 166, KDWN and other stations nationwide.

Among the topics Wachs, 40, has tackled are cholesterol, male impotence, childhood bed-wetting and what to do if you sit next to someone who has tuberculosis on an airplane. In 2009, she even predicted the Super Bowl winner based on medical facts. The Indianapolis Colts would lose, she said then, because more of the team’s players had groin injuries than on the New Orleans Saints.

It’s all part of what Wachs calls “sassy, stimulating medical talk radio.” She brags about being a class clown and having a knack for making people giggle.

That Wachs is hosting a medical radio show infused with her special brand of humor doesn’t surprise Dr. Bill Pierce, a friend and fellow funnyman. The two did their residency together about 15 years ago and quickly bonded through humor.

“She’s always been a nut,” Pierce says. “She’s got a great sense of humor and she always has something funny to say.”

While the kind of work they do is very serious, there is always humor in medicine, Pierce says.

“It’s kind of coping mechanism,” he notes.

Wachs moved to Las Vegas with her parents in the late 1980s when she was a senior in high school. She graduated from Clark High School.

When she was a little girl, she wanted to be Miss America, a singer or a nurse.

“I love the smell of Band-Aids,” Wachs says. ”I always wanted to be a nurse, I thought that was the coolest profession in the world. Nurses are cool, and I wanted to help others.”

Her mother, who had a feminist bent, asked her why she didn’t want to be a doctor.

“I said, ‘I can’t, doctors are boys,’ ” Wachs remembers.

Eventually, she pushed aside her desire to go into nursing and tried singing. Just before she was to leave on a singing tour across the country, she found out she received a scholarship to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Wachs did the practical thing and went to college.

She was the first member of her family to have the opportunity to go to college, so she took it, becoming a board-certified family medical practitioner. She started her own practice, Integrative Family Medicine. She teaches and lectures at Touro University, the University of Nevada School of Medicine and UNLV.

Still, part of her always regrets not taking the show business path.

After the recession hit, more people than ever were going without health insurance or regular medical care. Wachs decided to do something to address what she saw as a need in the community.

In 2008, she decided to go on air to answer people’s medical questions.

For about $100 a week, Wachs bought some airtime at a local station.

“I thought it would be a great public service,” Wachs says. “I thought I could help people.”

She started with a weekly show but didn’t expect much of an audience. It became more popular than she imagined, so Wachs expanded it to a nightly show. She became syndicated this year.

She spends five to six hours daily on the show, preparing and the broadcasting. During the day, she sees patients in her office. Somewhere during all this, Wachs manages to be a wife to husband Corey, a chiropractor, and mother to sons Brock, 9, and Stone, 11.

“It’s still growing, we never expected this,” Wachs says. “I’ve been here most of my life, and to be able to give back to community, it’s so nice.”

Locally, catch her show Monday through Friday at 11 p.m. and Saturdays at 10 a.m. on KDWN-AM.

Contact reporter Sonya Padgett at
spadgett@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4564.
Follow @StripSonya on Twitter.