New Doctors, Fresh Take on Care
What kind of keynote speaker do graduating medical students--after four years poring over textbooks and struggling through grueling hospital work--choose for commencement? A Nobel Prize-winning medic? A cutting-edge brain surgeon? Hillary Clinton?
Not if they’re at UC Irvine. There, graduating students chose an expert in spirituality.
On a glorious Saturday afternoon, the medical school’s graduating Class of ’99 heard the traditional congratulatory speech from a doctor once considered a maverick: Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, a medical professor and best-selling author who emphasizes the importance of healing the mind and spirit, as well as the body.
The students’ choice of Remen as keynote speaker is a testament to how Remen’s ideas are gaining currency in the medical community.
“When you treat patients, you’re not just treating the disease,” said Aileen Marie Sadsad Adriano, co-president of the graduating class. “You’re treating a whole being. You have to address their whole needs.”
A decade ago, Remen’s view that physicians should give weight to a patient’s spiritual and emotional needs might have been dismissed as New Age nonsense by some, by others as nothing more than the fundamentals of a good bedside manner. But the perceived state of today’s health care industry has given Remen’s views fresh meaning.
As managed care has converted treatment into a type of medicine by conveyor belt--with doctors running from patient to patient, and patients bounced from physician to physician--the once-tight bonds formed between the two have eroded, said Robert Burger, assistant professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at UC Irvine’s College of Medicine.
“The problem is that medical care is becoming depersonalized because of the business side,” Burger said before Saturday’s commencement address. “We have to form a stronger bond with our patients.”
It is the mission to strengthen those bonds, the relationship between doctors and patients, that concerns Remen. And her views clearly strike a chord outside the medical profession.
Her recent book, “Kitchen Table Wisdom,” is a bestseller, offering readers a collection of anecdotal stories about healing culled from her own life and the experiences of her family, friends and fellow physicians.
At 61, Remen is a professor at UC San Francisco’s department of family and community medicine. She also is a co-founder and director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program in Northern California.
One of the reasons for her popularity, among readers and Saturday’s graduates, is that Remen speaks as a patient as well as a doctor.
Since 15, she has suffered Crohn’s disease, a degenerative intestinal disorder that has forced her to undergo a battery of operations.
During her speech Saturday, Remen focused on the importance of learning to “serve” as a physician. Her own experiences as patient and physician, she said, have helped her realize how great the rewards are when doctors concentrate on serving patients rather than just “fixing” an illness.
“I’ve been a patient myself,” she told the students, “and speaking as a patient, your sense of service will make you trustworthy.”
Giving patients time, administering to emotional and spiritual needs, is a lesson that graduating students on Saturday said they have taken to heart.
Doctors need to treat the “whole patient rather than the disease,” said student Steve Patterson, 29. “We’re treating Mr. Jones, we’re not just treating the hypertension, the cancer.”
And, students said, they asked Remen to speak Saturday because they knew she would offer a valuable lesson for the future, a lesson beyond the dense textbooks and frenzied hospital rooms.
“Right now, it’s easy to get caught up in all the promise we have,” said Pamela Edillon, co-president of the graduating class, “but we wanted to make sure that there is a message of humility for us.”
