Dr. Orin Lawrence Bigman, MD

About Me

I was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, my family moving to Miami when I was 4. For a couple years in high school we lived in Los Angeles in order to be near my ailing maternal grandmother. We then moved back to Miami where I finished high school. I attended the University of Florida (UF) in Gainesville and majored in microbiology, graduating with honors and being elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1976. I was accepted to medical school at Florida, too, finishing up in 1980.

I have to admit that I had not contemplated going into psychiatry before doing my psychiatry rotation as a 3rd year medical student. I was thinking at the time I would pursue pediatrics, so I did my rotation on the adolescent psychiatric inpatient unit at Shands Hospital, the UF teaching hospital. I found to my surprise that I really enjoyed working closely and talking in-depth with my patients, and having the time to get to know them as people and not just diseases. My attending psychiatrist and the nursing …staff gave me very positive feedback, so I guess I have to credit them with my becoming a psychiatrist.

While I still love the almost year-round warm ocean in Florida, I knew I wanted to return to California. I married my wife in April, 1980, graduated from med school in late May, and we packed up a U-Haul and drove cross-country in June, so I could start my residency at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. I finished that up in 1984. For one year, I was half-time faculty at the University of California, Davis, designing and directing the Eating Disorders Program there, and started my private practice the other half of my time. Unfortunately, budget constraints at the time prevented our continuing the Eating Disorders Program, so for the next five years I was in full-time private practice in Sacramento. I enjoyed my practice and my work very much, doing both outpatient and inpatient psychiatry, seeing a real mix of patients and problems. I continued to see patients with eating disorders, and also began to do forensic (legal) psychiatry and a good deal of geriatric psychiatry.

My wife and I have 2 sons, who were born during this time, in 1986 and 1988. Over those years I realized that the nature of private practice was changing dramatically. Despite always being very busy then, I had difficulty getting paid promptly by my patients' insurance companies, which made things tricky for our family. In addition, I did not feel it was appropriate that I would have to get permission from non-physicians at insurance companies to authorize the care my patients needed. Also, since I had gotten used to starting new things every four years or so through school, I started to get antsy to try something new again. I began considering other options in Sacramento, and ultimately made the decision to join Kaiser Permanente. My first day at the Sacramento Medical Center was May 1, 1990. Now more than 14 years later at the time of writing this, I know more strongly than ever that I made the right professional and personal decision for me, my family, and my patients.

From 1992 to 1995, I was Chief of Psychiatry at Kaiser Permanente Sacramento, having to step down after being involved in a serious auto accident. Without a doubt, that event helped me to understand truly what it is like to be a patient and need the help of your doctors. After I recovered, my wife and I started to feel that the schools available to our sons in Sacramento were not what we wanted for them, and felt it would only get more difficult in later grades. So always having loved the Bay Area from our married time B.C. (before children), we started looking at opportunities for me to transfer to another Kaiser Permanente facility in the Bay Area where schools would be better. So I transferred to Kaiser Permanente Walnut Creek as of September, 1996, and over the years since, I again feel this was the right decision for us.

My wife has two degrees, in botany and geography, and has worked as a botanist, aerobics instructor, and an elementary school science teacher over the years. Currently sh