Meet Jennifer Earle Miller, M.D.

I'm Dr. Jennifer Miller and I'm a physiatrist or a physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist here at Shriners Children's New England. A physiatrist is a unique medical specialty because unlike a cardiologist who has a particular organ that they're concerned about, we have more of a philosophy of looking at how we can help a person be as mobile and as high functioning as possible with whatever cards they were dealt. And so that means we are experts at muscles, nerves, bones, brain, spinal cord, but we really look at the whole person and do whatever we can medically to help remove barriers to functioning as optimally as possible.

So many of the children we see at Shriners Children's New England have very complex medical histories. They might have an orthopedic need where they need an eventual surgery or they need someone surveying their skeleton to see if they'll need the surgery down the line.

So I see patients with amputations or limb differences, and I'm part of the prosthetic prescription process and also help with the other symptoms related to being an amputee. I see patients with cerebral palsy and genetic conditions that may affect muscle tone, so children who have spasticity or high muscle tone or children who have hypotonia or low muscle tone. I'll also evaluate children who have unusual gait patterns from all different causes.

Collaboration has always been very important to me as a provider, but this used to look like emails and phone tag, and now here I'm able to walk down the hall and talk to the orthotist in real time about the brace that a child needs. I could pop upstairs and talk to their physical therapist while they're still here in the building. And that real-time collaboration is just so much more accessible and serves my patients so much better.

So education is really important to me. I've worked in a medical school educating future doctors for the last 10 years. Originally, I taught neuroscience and now I teach our disability curriculum, so I'm focused on helping future doctors be more nuanced and more thoughtful in the way they approach patients with disability. That passion for education goes into each of my patient visits as well. I like to make sure that any person who's come and seen me, any parent, leaves knowing something that they didn't know before the appointment.

I like to make sure visits are fun and I like to make sure I know my patients and am asking things that matter to them. I'm a mom myself, so we can talk about Bluey for the whole appointment if that's their favorite thing. But each time they come back, I take those nuggets of information I know from our last visit and make sure we return to them so that they feel known and they feel seen.

I've always been a very curious person. I've always loved learning. I read really early in life, and so I'm always seeking out answers and having those curiosities met in such exciting ways with colleagues around that I can ask those questions to or patients that teach me new things every day, it just makes my work so fulfilling.

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