Dr. Elsa Otero-Salazar is a Board Certified pediatrician with over 16 years of experience who is comfortable seeing pediatric patients of all ages. She believes families and their doctors should work as a unit to ensure each child’s physical, developmental , and emotional wellbeing. As the mother of 2 boys, 11 and 14, she understands all the challenges families go through with the ins and outs of daily life, from the newborn period, the toddler years, the preschool and elementary school years, the tween and now teenage years, and how hard it can be to manage issues inherent with each stage, which can be magnified when there are other additional physical or emotional diagnoses involved. She is a great advocate of early intervention, having lived through the challenges of developmental/speech delays, therapies, and IEP’s with her own child, but knows there is always a light at the end of the tunnel and that children can thrive with early diagnosis and appropriate interventions, as her son has.
Dr. Otero was born and raised in South America, where she attended an American school in Bogota, Colombia. She is completely fluent in both English and Spanish, and is learning ASL. She attended medical school at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota. She did a year of clinical research in pediatric endocrinology at Harbor UCLA, then completed her pediatric residency at White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles, where she was Chief Resident. She has experience in both outpatient pediatrics, as well as inpatient pediatrics. For many years she worked part time as a hospitalist seeing both pediatric ward and newborn nursery patients at White Memorial Medical Center, then transitioned to only newborn nursery until recently.
In her free time, Dr. Otero enjoys trying her hand in all kinds of arts and crafts, from wreath making to creating all kinds of projects with her Cricut and likes trying new crafts. She has been very active in her sons’ schools, serving in multiple committees, and is currently the President of the PTA in her youngest’s elementary school. She also likes photography, especially the amazing Southern California sunsets, gardening, (she has a pandemic herb garden, veggies, and multiple fruit trees at home), dancing, reading, as well as traveling and watching movies and series with her husband and 2 boys.