Santa Monica Primary Care

Santa Monica Primary Care Santa Monica Primary Care is an independent, full service Internal Medicine practice located in Santa Monica, CA. Dr. Philip M.

Santa Monica Primary Care is an independent, full service Internal Medicine practice located adjacent to Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California. Bretsky first established the practice in 2008 in Century City, California. Following two years in Century City, he moved to Santa Monica in 2010 and the practice was renamed Santa Monica Primary Care. Our office provides both o

utpatient and inpatient healthcare for patients. Dr. Bretsky is on staff at two local hospitals: Providence Saint John’s Health Center, and Cedars Sinai Medical Center. He also takes care of patients at nearby Skilled Nursing centers such as Berkeley East, Seaport 17, Rehabilitation Centre of Santa Monica and Santa Monica Healthcare. If needed, this enables Dr. Bretsky to maintain continuity of care for patients from the office, to the hospital, to the rehab center, and back home. Our office is staffed with carefully selected and highly trained people who do their best to provide you with a friendly, positive experience in our office. Leading the team is Marian Henry, who brings over 20 years of business and management experience across many fields to deliver a standard of administrative excellence to our office. Santa Monica Primary Care provides a comprehensive range of services that help our patients maintain their overall health. We offer our patients annual wellness exams, acute and chronic illness management, preventive and diagnostic skin procedures, cardiac stress testing, in-office ultrasounds, sports physicals, travel medicine, and vaccines. We believe that patients should be able to center their care around our office, which is why we offer extensive services in-house. This allows our patients more time to spend enjoying their health outside of a doctor’s office and more time with their friends and family.

The traditional end of flu season is April 1st (I usually think of flu season as similar to ski season) and it seems as ...
03/10/2026

The traditional end of flu season is April 1st (I usually think of flu season as similar to ski season) and it seems as if influenza cases are starting to taper off. This season has been milder than 2024/2025 - by comparison last year there were 710,000 hospitalizations and 45,000 deaths from influenza in the United States. This year we have had about 330,000 hospitalizations and 20,000 deaths.

In the clinic, we are now seeing more Influenza B which is a typical seasonal pattern. In early and mid-season, Influenza A predominates but later in the season, Influenza B begins to pick up.

Link: https://www.healthtrackrx.com/top-respiratory-infections/
This was the first year that we prescribed Xofluza more broadly for both acute treatment of Influenza as well as a preventive agent in the instance of a household exposure. Xofluza is given as a one time dose and is equally effective as Tamiflu, which is given twice daily for 5 days as a treatment or once daily for 10 days to prevent influenza. Both of these medications remained effective for Influenza A and B throughout the season, each reducing symptoms in about 24 hours.

/b

Check out "Trojan Connects : Beyond the White Coat MDs Reimagined," a medical panel I was a part of. You can find it on ...
03/05/2026

Check out "Trojan Connects : Beyond the White Coat MDs Reimagined," a medical panel I was a part of. You can find it on my youtube at https://youtu.be/Vl76q5b7_fs

As we discuss in our February 2026 Newsletter, COVID-19 cases in our Santa Monica clinic have increased from their (expe...
02/20/2026

As we discuss in our February 2026 Newsletter, COVID-19 cases in our Santa Monica clinic have increased from their (expected) Fall low rates. However, the burden of illness has not been overwhelming and certainly not to the degree that we saw during the height of the pandemic. For instance in 2022 we had 35 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and this past January we had only 3.

COVID infections display a seasonal distribution with two distinct peaks (Table below) - the largest being in the Winter months (November/December/January) and a second in mid to late summer (July/August). This pattern is why we have a recommendation in the Fall to have the COVID booster in September or October and in the Spring to time the vaccine in April or May for those most susceptible to severe illness (typically those over aged 65 in the Fall and again for those over age 75 or with comorbidities again in the Spring) with COVID infection.

The Los Angeles County Health Department stopped reporting daily incidence and mortality rates for COVID-19 in October 2023 and ended weekly press-release updates in February 2024. The CDC’s COVID Data tracker has been decommissioned and replaced with less precise indicators such as wastewater viral activity levels, hospital admission data and test positivity rates. Similar to our data above, test positivity rates reported by the CDC do show an upswing in January, but below the August 2025 peak of 12%. ED visit rates, hospitalization and mortality rates all show the same pattern (link: https://www.cdc.gov/covid/php/surveillance/index.htm).

For a disease that doesn’t get talked about, it still exacts a toll on the US population - albeit causing far fewer deaths than major causes like heart disease (20-22%), cancer (19-20%) and accidents (6-7%). Nevertheless, we can estimate that were about 540 deaths weekly from COVID-19 in early January.

Address

1301 20th Street, Ste 230
Santa Monica, CA
90404

Opening Hours

Monday 8:30am - 5:30pm
Tuesday 8:30am - 5:30pm
Wednesday 8:30am - 5:30am
Thursday 8:30am - 5:30pm
Friday 8:30am - 5:30pm

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