Danielle Ofri's Open Salon Blog

Meet Dr. Chan....

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 22:10:26 -0400

"Dr. Chan and Mrs. Geng (not their real names) eased out of their chairs in the waiting room using their matching wooden canes, the kind distributed by the hospital, free of charge. At 89, Dr. Chan was stooped and frail, his body paper-thin. He seemed as though he might topple over from the breeze generated by the opening and closing of the clinic door. A translucent red plastic shopping bag from a Chinatown market dangled, as always, from one wrist. His other hand rested behind the elbow of his wife, not for support, but to assist her. Mrs. Geng was younger by more than 15 years, and far more robust-appearing, but her progressing Alzheimer’s disease and his stalwart chivalrousness made Dr. Chan the caregiver. He even carried her beige vinyl purse for her. Their clothes were worn, almost threadbare, but clean, pressed, and always in layers for warmth.

Despite two decades in this country, Mrs. Geng spoke few words in English; her husband translated back and forth for her. Dr. Chan, who had been a cardiologist in China, spoke heavily accented, formal English in a whispery, halting voice. His utterances surfaced in brief puffs, with gaps in between that seemed to reflect the effort that English required. His voice felt as translucent as the shopping bag he always toted with him. I had to strain just to hear his words, and even more so to extract the meaning from the tangle of his accent. But it was always worth the effort, because without fail I uncovered intelligently-structured diction, with a dry wit to boot. Dr. Chan once told me that his English teacher in China taught only Shakespeare, and his German teacher only Goethe. “Not… very… practical,” he observed, in his studiously parsed syllables....Read more about this very unusual gentleman. Read the full chapter in "Medicine in Translation."

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Danielle Ofri is a writer and practicing internist at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. She is the editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. Her newest book is Medicine in Translation: Journeys with my Patients.

View the YouTube book trailer.

You can follow Danielle on Twitter and Facebook, or visit her homepage.

The Debilitated Muse

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 11:10:24 -0400

"What happens when the poet faces illness? How is the poetry affected by alterations of the body and mind?"

Read Danielle's new article in the Journal of Medical Humanities.

Here's the beginning:
"When I think about the definition of poetry, I have an image of the vast chaotic world being funneled through a narrow filter that is the poet. What comes out on the other side is an economy of observation about that chaos. Whether the critical essence of that filter is the mind of the poet, or the soul of the poet or the spleen of the poet is to some degree irrelevant, since none of these parts can function alone, and the sum total is that living,
breathing body. It takes no great leap of logic to expect that assaults of any sort to that body would alter its output. It is in the details of this truism, however, that one might begin to mine the fascinating and perhaps intrinsic connections between “physicality” and creativity."

Read the full article in the Journal of Medical Humanities.

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View the YouTube book trailer.

You can follow Danielle on Twitter and Facebook, or visit her homepage.

Pet Care vs Human Care

Fri, 8 Oct 2010 14:10:19 -0400

Quality Health Care? Ask Your Veterinarian

By DANIELLE OFRI, M.D. New York Times Well blog September 23, 2010

“…How is that the simplest routine medical matters have been made so complicated by our insurance companies? Why does every encounter require a veritable girding up for battle?

“…There’s a lot we can learn from animals in many facets of life — Lord knows, a nice massage behind the ears could do a lot of us some good — but I am consistently impressed by how much smoother veterinary medicine runs.

read the full article at the New York Times.

View the YouTube book trailer.

You can follow Danielle on Twitter and Facebook, or visit her homepage.

Social Mission of Med Schools

Thu, 7 Oct 2010 07:10:37 -0400

by Danielle Ofri
CNN.com
Sept 16, 2010.

What exactly is the mission of a medical school? Is it to train the best and smartest doctors? Is to tend to our nation’s health? Is it to further medical knowledge?

Go to the website of just about any medical school and you will see roughly the same “three-pillars” message from the dean, or the chairman, or the residency program director. Every medical school stresses their commitment to the triumvirate of education, research, and patient-care.

In a new study, medical schools were rank by a three-pronged metric that measures three areas that are currently lagging in medicine: physicians working in primary care, physicians working in medically underserved regions, and physicians from minority groups.archers looked 60,000 medical students who graduated between 1999-2001 and calculated the percentage of who fell into these three categories. Essentially they added these values together to create a “social mission score.”

Though there wasn’t space to list all 141 American medical schools in the article, they did print the top 20 and the bottom 20. Having been a cut-throat medical student once myself, I immediately scanned the scores. I was crushed to find my institution nestled in the bottom 20 (oh, failure!), though we were in excellent company.

Read the full article on CNN.com.

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View the YouTube book trailer.

You can follow Danielle on Twitter and Facebook, or visit her homepage.

Danielle Ofri's Open Salon Blog

Meet Dr. Chan....

The Debilitated Muse

More on Mammograms....

Mammograms: One doctor, her patients, herself

Pet Care vs Human Care

Social Mission of Med Schools