Get to Know OB/GYN, Dr. Larissa Bennis, M.D. [Dr. Larissa Bennis]

My name is Larissa Bennis. I was born and raised in Milbank, South Dakota. After I graduated from high school there, I did my undergraduate at Augustana College in Sioux Falls. I then did my medical school education at USD in Vermilion. I did my OB/GYN residency down at KU School of Medicine in Wichita, Kansas, and I am now an obstetrician and gynecologist here with the Avera Medical Group in Brookings.

What Do You Enjoy About Obstetrics And Gynecology?

It's kind of got everything. It's a very nice mix of clinic. You get to see patients and clinic. You get to see young females. You get to see older patients. We do endometrial biopsies, we do colposcopies, we do leaps. We do all of the fun stuff in the ORs, we do hysterectomies, we do tubal ligations, we do ablations, we do all of this other stuff. We deliver babies. It's the best of all the worlds.

What Advice Would You Give Medical Students?

We always would kind of tell the medical students that OB is a good time to decide what you want to do, because if you really just like the clinic stuff, then you should probably just stick with internal medicine or family practice, or something like that. If you just wanna be in the OR all the time, then maybe you need to look at doing like surgery or something else where you get to do procedures. If, when you deliver the baby, you don't want to give it to the mom, and you want to play with the kid all the times, maybe you should go into pedes. It actually ends up, it's just a very nice mix of everything.