Leave it to a nervy gal who grew up in Fort Wayne to tell Mel Gibson where to go.

Yep, there was Dr. Nancy Snyderman on NBC’s “Today” show last week saying the actor – allegedly caught on tape using threatening, foul-mouthed language to his ex-girlfriend, mother of one of his children – needed to hie himself to a psychiatrist.

“(A)nd I mean in the next couple of hours,” Snyderman told correspondent Meredith Vieira.

Surprising? Not so much from someone who, given the chance to do a sit-down with President Obama about health care legislation, couldn’t resist nagging him about whether he’d quit smoking yet.

“I asked, ‘How’s that going?’ And he said, ‘Just fine, thank you,’ ” Snyderman said in a telephone interview from her home in Princeton, N.J.

“He wasn’t going to be put on the spot. He was a good sport. He knew (the question) was coming … I’ve interviewed him three times.”

Snyderman, NBC’s chief medical editor, has thrived on a combination of guts and brains ever since, while still a medical resident, she was tapped by a local TV crew in a Pittsburgh operating room after a tonsillectomy.

The chief surgeon wouldn’t talk on camera about whether the operation was being performed too often, but Snyderman would.

“Yes, I literally was discovered in the OR,” said Snyderman, an ear, nose and throat surgeon.

The brief appearance led to her becoming a medical source “five or six” times on the local news, she said. Then, when she moved to Arkansas, she offered her services as a physician medical reporter to local TV affiliates. Ultimately she was a guest on an ABC show hosted by Joan Lunden.

“ABC News saw a diamond in the rough and hired me,” Snyderman said.

The South Side High School graduate, who was born in St. Louis, says she didn’t think the job would last. But then came an explosion in TV medical reporting, and Snyderman found herself in the ranks of television’s celebrity doctor/journalists, even working with ABC’s Dr. Tim Johnson, whom she grew up admiring.

She has interviewed every living president and reported from Kosovo, Mogadishu, Bosnia, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan and, recently, Haiti.

And controversy – or at least lively debate – has often followed.

Snyderman left ABC after she did a radio ad endorsing the safety of Tylenol while the pain reliever was caught in a tampering scare – a move she now considers a mistake. When she recently hosted her own show on MSNBC, critics said she didn’t have the interviewing chops to handle big issues or big guests. “Dr. Nancy” was soon canceled.

When on her trip to Haiti after January’s earthquake, critics pounced on her for being seen on camera treating victims. Not ethnical for a journalist to get personally involved in a story, they said.

Snyderman, 58, downplays the on-screen interactions, saying she was acting out of a doctor’s humanitarian instincts.

Although she’d been to Haiti before, “I was literally taken aback by the carnage, and literally a nun grabbed my arm and asked could I help,” she said.

“I said, ‘I’m a doctor,’ and she took me to a courtyard where there were people who were injured or dying. I literally forgot my crew was with me.

“There was a lot of controversy about it, and the funny thing was, we didn’t know about it. The only communication I could get was back to my newsroom.

“Then (Washington Post’s media writer) Howard Kurtz called, and that was the first I heard of anything brewing. Then I got a call from the L.A. Times, and then all of a sudden it became a very intense debate about physicians crossing the line.”

But Snyderman said she doesn’t mind being caught in the cross hairs.

“I said, and I still believe, that I thought the debate was an important and necessary one,” she said. “If you use TV to say, ‘Hey, look at me,’ I think that’s wrong. If you tell stories – that’s proper.

“I thought, if I tell the stories I’m living, I could truly help people, and get the word out about the conditions.”

Indeed, Snyderman said, she worried more in Haiti that she was making snap medical decisions than crossing into some journalistic no-person’s land.

“I worried that while I was making very fast decisions in the field about who would live and who would die … battlefield rationing at its core … that I was altering the course of people’s lives that I might never see again, and could my decisions affect their lives (and make them worse). If I amputated (a woman’s limb), would she end up being a prostitute, and is she better off dying?

“I don’t have answers to those questions. Those were the moral questions that haunted me.”

Within hours of her statements about Gibson, online critics complained she was diagnosing long-distance. Others, concerned about women falling victim to domestic violence, took her to task for casting aspersions on Gibson’s ex-girlfriend’s character by suggesting his tirade may have been provoked.

The daughter and granddaughter of physicians, Snyderman says she wanted to be a doctor ever since her father took her to the hospital on rounds on Sunday mornings before church – letting her sit in the break room with a favorite snack because children weren’t allowed on the patient floors.

She graduated from Indiana University and the University of Nebraska’s medical school. She currently does not have a private practice, but staffs a medical residency clinic one day a week at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where she also teaches part time.

She lives in Princeton, N.J., with her husband, Doug. The couple have three children.

Television has become her niche.

“The motivation in the first place was that it’s fun to explain things to people,” she said, seeing being a reporter as an extension of her medical skills.

“I found, whether on the set or in the office, it’s taking complex things and talking plain about them,” she said.

Lately, Snyderman has been appearing on NBC’s “Dateline” and has been discussing the possibility of doing more international medical reporting.

She said there are plenty of compelling stories about the world’s medical haves and have-nots that she’d like to bring to the American audience. And besides, she’d get to travel.

“I’m really a gypsy at heart. … I love new cultures. I love new people,” she said. “The M.D. gives me credibility. It opens up a lot of doors for me.”

rsalter@jg.net