Treating Kids With Arthritis Closer to Home
With support from an Arthritis Foundation fellowship, Amanda Moyer, MD, has become Oklahoma’s only full-time pediatric rheumatologist.
By Linda Rath | Oct. 6, 2025
When she was 17, Amanda Moyer faced a hard choice. A few years earlier, she had been diagnosed with a severe type of systemic lupus erythematosus (lupus, SLE) — an autoimmune rheumatic disease that can cause anything from arthritis to kidney failure to seizures.
She spent much of her teenage years in and out of hospitals. She and her parents drove thousands of miles from their home in Oklahoma to Denver — one of the only cities in five nearby states that had pediatric rheumatologists.
Amanda got the best medical care and strong support from her family and community, but she still got sicker. The only option left was a stem cell transplant, a risky, experimental procedure.
“It was the hardest decision I had to make in my life; it was scary,” she says. “At the same time, I couldn’t imagine continuing to live my life the way I had been.”
A stem cell transplant won’t cure lupus, but it sometimes can stop the immune system from attacking healthy tissue. For Amanda, it allowed lupus drugs to finally start working.
By then, Amanda’s sights were on medical school.
“I thought always I would complete an internal medicine residency and then specialize in adult rheumatology. I thought I liked children too much to be able to treat them,” she explains. “It wasn’t until my pediatrics rotation in medical school that I realized the idea of never treating another kid again made me very sad. And that I could indeed treat kids.”
After her four-year residency in pediatrics and internal medicine (called “med-peds”) in Oklahoma, she completed an adult-pediatric rheumatology fellowship at Stanford University.
How a Stanford Fellowship Helps Kids in Oklahoma
Through a donation to the Arthritis Foundation, Harry Saal and family support Stanford’s pediatric rheumatology fellowship program in honor of his late daughter, Jessica.
The U.S. has a shortage of pediatric rheumatologists, and many children with rheumatic diseases — like Amanda — have to travel hundreds of miles to see a doctor. Or a rheumatologist who treats mostly adults, without specific training to treat children, treats them. Currently, 13 states have zero or only one pediatric rheumatologist.
The Arthritis Foundation is trying to grow the number of pediatric rheumatologists. One way we’re doing that is through fellowships like the one that partly funded Dr. Moyer’s studies. A pediatric rheumatologist who works in another state has been caring remotely for children in Oklahoma. But Dr. Moyer is the only full-time pediatric rheumatologist in the state — the first one in a number of years.
When she was 17, Amanda Moyer faced a hard choice. A few years earlier, she had been diagnosed with a severe type of systemic lupus erythematosus (lupus, SLE) — an autoimmune rheumatic disease that can cause anything from arthritis to kidney failure to seizures. She spent much of her teenage years in and out of hospitals. She and her parents drove thousands of miles from their home in Oklahoma to Denver — one of the only cities in five nearby states that had pediatric rheumatologists.
Amanda got the best medical care and strong support from her family and community, but she still got sicker. The only option left was a stem cell transplant, a risky, experimental procedure.
“It was the hardest decision I had to make in my life; it was scary,” she says. “At the same time, I couldn’t imagine continuing to live my life the way I had been.”
A stem cell transplant won’t cure lupus, but it sometimes can stop the immune system from attacking healthy tissue. For Amanda, it allowed lupus drugs to finally start working.
By then, Amanda’s sights were on medical school.
“I thought always I would complete an internal medicine residency and then specialize in adult rheumatology. I thought I liked children too much to be able to treat them,” she explains. “It wasn’t until my pediatrics rotation in medical school that I realized the idea of never treating another kid again made me very sad. And that I could indeed treat kids.”
After her four-year residency in pediatrics and internal medicine (called “med-peds”) in Oklahoma, she completed an adult-pediatric rheumatology fellowship at Stanford University.
How a Stanford Fellowship Helps Kids in Oklahoma
Through a donation to the Arthritis Foundation, Harry Saal and family support Stanford’s pediatric rheumatology fellowship program in honor of his late daughter, Jessica.
The U.S. has a shortage of pediatric rheumatologists, and many children with rheumatic diseases — like Amanda — have to travel hundreds of miles to see a doctor. Or a rheumatologist who treats mostly adults, without specific training to treat children, treats them. Currently, 13 states have zero or only one pediatric rheumatologist.
The Arthritis Foundation is trying to grow the number of pediatric rheumatologists. One way we’re doing that is through fellowships like the one that partly funded Dr. Moyer’s studies. A pediatric rheumatologist who works in another state has been caring remotely for children in Oklahoma. But Dr. Moyer is the only full-time pediatric rheumatologist in the state — the first one in a number of years.
Jessica Saal’s Legacy: Expanding Care
Inspired by their late daughter, the Saal family supports rheumatology fellowships for future generations.
Dr. Moyer has much bigger plans: She wants to build and grow a Division of Pediatric Rheumatology at Oklahoma University (OU) Health and start a fellowship program to help train future pediatric rheumatologists. She also plans to research childhood autoimmune diseases to understand them better as well as to treat the children in Oklahoma who have them.
“First and foremost, we have to put in place what we need to keep kids in Oklahoma so they can access the health care they need in their home state,” she says. That includes a large number of high-risk Native American children, with a backlog of patients.
She plans for the program to include an infusion center, social worker, nurses, coordinators and at least two other full-time pediatric rheumatologists. But bringing more pediatric rheumatologists to Oklahoma may be hard.
“There’s a huge shortage of rheumatologists in general, and it’s even worse for pediatric rheumatology,” she explains. “People aren’t going into pediatric rheumatology for a variety of reasons — one of which is a lack of exposure to the specialty.”
She hopes Oklahoma City’s great restaurants, low cost of living, booming tech industry and championship basketball team will help attract aspiring specialists. Plus, OU’s highly ranked Children’s Hospital has all the subspecialities needed for children with chronic diseases, Dr. Moyer adds.
Still, seeing patients is her greatest reward. “I like patients. I like talking to them. I like talking to their families and being involved and making a difference in their lives. What really gets me up and going and wanting to do this is helping the patients. Especially teenage girls with lupus, because that’s what I was,” she says.
Dr. Moyer says her early experiences have made her more caring and careful doctor.
“When you’ve been through those things, you can understand the fear of a new diagnosis and the potential side effects of certain drugs, or what it’s like to gain 25% of your body weight on steroids. So I definitely can connect to people and hopefully reassure them. Every patient and family is different, but I don’t hesitate to share my story if I think it will help,” she says.
“First and foremost, we have to put in place what we need to keep kids in Oklahoma so they can access the health care they need in their home state,” she says. That includes a large number of high-risk Native American children, with a backlog of patients.
She plans for the program to include an infusion center, social worker, nurses, coordinators and at least two other full-time pediatric rheumatologists. But bringing more pediatric rheumatologists to Oklahoma may be hard. “There’s a huge shortage of rheumatologists in general, and it’s even worse for pediatric rheumatology,” she explains. “People aren’t going into pediatric rheumatology for a variety of reasons — one of which is a lack of exposure to the specialty.”
She hopes Oklahoma City’s great restaurants, low cost of living, booming tech industry and championship basketball team will help attract aspiring specialists. Plus, OU’s highly ranked Children’s Hospital has all the subspecialities needed for children with chronic diseases, Dr. Moyer adds.
Still, seeing patients is her greatest reward. “I like patients. I like talking to them. I like talking to their families and being involved and making a difference in their lives. What really gets me up and going and wanting to do this is helping the patients. Especially teenage girls with lupus, because that’s what I was,” she says.
Dr. Moyer says her early experiences have made her more caring and careful doctor.
“When you’ve been through those things, you can understand the fear of a new diagnosis and the potential side effects of certain drugs, or what it’s like to gain 25% of your body weight on steroids. So I definitely can connect to people and hopefully reassure them. Every patient and family is different, but I don’t hesitate to share my story if I think it will help,” she says.
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