Meet the Experts Behind StopCancerNow
Dedicated to delivering accurate, compassionate, and timely care for your health and peace of mind.
Meet The Team
Mohan Punja, MD, FACEP, FACMT
Mohan Punja is board certified in Emergency Medicine and Medical Toxicology. He has worked in Emergency Departments in such diverse locations at New York City, eastern North Carolina and downtown Atlanta for over 12 years. His training in Toxicology included a year spent at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the National Center for Environmental Health/ATSDR. This experience opened his eyes to the presence of inflammatory and carcinogenic toxins in our homes and environments.
Punam Punja, PA-C, MMS
Punam Punja is a Physician Associate who has over 14 years of experience caring for patients with liver disease at multiple large institutions in the Atlanta area, both academic and private. In addition, she has spent several years diagnosing and treating patients with gastrointestinal cancers including gastric, liver, pancreatic, gallbladder, and colon.
Who We Are
Working in the Emergency Department, Mohan has unfortunately had to diagnose many patients with cancer. He remembers one young woman who came in with her husband for a week of stomach pain. Expecting to find a treatable problem like appendicitis or diverticulitis, Mohan remembers the shock and the tears as he sat down and told the couple that she had metastatic pancreatic cancer. After absorbing this information, they wondered how to tell their two young children. Mohan had the opportunity to meet this family two more times. The first was during the Covid Pandemic, when she was sent her by her oncology team for a minor issue. She was hardly recognizable, now frail and having lost all her hair, but she was still resilient and optimistic; they remembered each other and hugged. The next time, Mohan was recognized by her husband when he brought another family member to the ED; his wife had passed away less than two years after being diagnosed. The memory of this vibrant couple stuck. What if she could have been diagnosed earlier?
Punam has had many encounters with oncology patients who had minimal or no risk factors for cancer that were found to have aggressive, stage 4 metastatic disease. If cancer is found early, patients could have been offered a curative treatment. Unfortunately, aggressive tumors are often found in younger, asymptomatic patients with no risk factors. Screening is important to find smaller tumors which in many cases can be curative, but may not be offered to patients with no known risk factors.
As parents and wanting to be proactive in their health care, Mohan and Punam tried to get an imaging scan, but could find anybody in the Atlanta area who could easily offer this. They decided to start a service to help people in similar positions as themselves to take charge of their health and offer imaging for people wanting to be more proactive.
