Remedies frontman Thomas McIlraith – Dr. Thomas Baird McIlraith by day – belts out a tune during a recent band rehearsal.
By day, Dr. Thomas Baird McIlraith is cleverly disguised as a capable, no-nonsense physician.
He has the obligatory white coat, the studious rectangular glasses, the neatly trimmed goatee with just a touch of gray to suggest hard-won wisdom, even the stethoscope casually draped over one shoulder.
Little would his patients know that McIlraith, chair of hospital medicine for Mercy Medical Group in Sacramento, occasionally likes to ditch the buttoned-down persona, don a black T-shirt and jeans, strap on an electric guitar and, you know, rawk.
McIlraith, 43, is the lead singer and driving force behind the Remedies, a good-time R&B bar band that will appear Thursday night at Harlow's in midtown Sacramento. They play original compositions and covers, tackling everything from the Foo Fighters to Wilson Pickett.
Stalking behind McIlraith at gigs for the past year has been Dr. David Pai, a Mercy-affiliated nephrologist, who lays down some wicked bass lines in between calling in dialysis orders and checking people's CK (creatine kinase) levels. The two nonmedical band members, guitarist and vocalist Walt Simmons and drummer Greg Marquis, work for the state Department of Conservation.
"So we've got two docs and two DOCs," McIlraith says. "I really like this band. No one has any pretenses about giving up our day jobs. But we work really hard on the music. We get together as friends and have a great time."
Doctors have private lives and all kinds of outside interests, just like the rest of us. But it seems as if physicians in the Sacramento area have a particular affinity for rocking out.
Four Sutter doctors and a Kaiser nurse form the Spiders, a cover band that has played at a Sacramento River Cats baseball game, among other gigs. The Folsom group Have Mercy, composed mostly of medical professionals, has been together since the mid-1990s.
What's behind this melding of medicine and music?
Simple stress relief, says Pai, 36. He started playing bass in alt-rock garage bands while in medical training in Boston. Nothing like thrashing a little Pearl Jam to slough off the day's worries.
"It's not medicine," Pai says. "When you hang out after work, you usually hang out with people you work with, especially in residency, and all you talk about is work – this patient or that patient. It's kind of nice to be in a different environment.
"I don't necessarily think there's a direct connection between music and (medicine). I know a lot of great physicians who aren't musically inclined."
But McIlraith, whose string of bands over the years has included medically themed names such as the Arrhythmias and Doctor Mac and the Attendings, says the two activities complement each other intellectually.
"I personally found that when I was most overcommitted musically in med school, I got my best grades," he says. "I was always worried with the band because I thought I'd fail, but it was the opposite."
Music has long been a part of McIlraith's life. As a teen, he played the piano and trombone, and dabbled in classical music but found it "too regimented." Instead, he enrolled in the regimentation of medical school at the University of Wisconsin.
"I bought a guitar then and just started messing around with it," McIlraith says. "Whenever I was studying, I'd leave my guitar sitting out. I definitely made very slow progress early on, but then again, I wasn't very ambitious."
He was ambitious enough to help form the Arrhythmias with two other Wisconsin medical students. The group became so popular among med students that it once swelled to 15 members.
"It became a perpetual thing," McIlraith says. "Once we graduated, we handed it off to the next group. I don't know if it's still together."
According to a University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health news release, the Arrhythmias are still rocking. As is McIlraith. The Remedies, he said, weren't named as a nod to his medical background. (Pai didn't join the group, which had loosely formed in 2007, until late 2008.)
"It came about in the Davis open-mike scene, very loosey-goosey," says McIlraith, a Davis resident. "The idea of the Remedies as a name was more music serving as therapy. But if we'd been called the Laxatives, I don't think we would've had the draw the Remedies do."
A Remedies show would be a good place to fall ill, if you must – the crowd usually is saturated with Mercy medical staff members supporting their colleagues. It's a built-in audience, which is good because McIlraith and Pai have no illusions of rock stardom.
Asked if they'd rather be the surgeon general of the United States or a rock star filling arenas, the doctors agreed.
"I don't know that I'd want to be either," McIlraith says. "I actually like my life the way it is now."
Pai: "Honestly, being a physician is the best job in the world. It's really a privilege to do what we do. … In terms of being a rock star? I don't know. I'd like to see some stability in my life."
The Remedies are
Walt Simmons, left,McIlraith,
Dr. David Pai and Greg Marquis.
They play Harlow's on Thursday.
McIlraith and Pai at at Methodist Hospital, Sacramento.
