Surgeon’s touch

Dr. Lauren Gebauer has some skin in her game. A practicing dermatologist and Mohs skin cancer surgeon based in Orinda, California, the 39-year-old is last year’s Northern California Golf Association’s Women’s Amateur Player of the Year. Her vocation and avocation have a lot in common.
“Mohs surgery is a technique that removes high-risk skin cancers, and it provides a cure rate of approximately 99 percent,” Gebauer (pronounced guh-BOUGH-er) said. “The Mohs procedure also involves plastic surgery reconstructive techniques to repair the damage left behind from the tumor removal.”
Her work in the operating room and her golf require precise hand-eye coordination, and that challenge first drew her to golf as an athletic 13-year-old growing up in Upper Arlington, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus.

“Find the ball, hit the ball. That really focused my mind,” Gebauer said in recalling her early attraction to the challenge of the game. She added that it was also “the pursuit of skill-based improvement that is so much a part of golf that was perfect fo...