Member Spotlight | Continued on page 18 of Hawaii, Manoa. I was there from 2002 to 2004. I was then accepted into the Masters of Scientists Training Program (MSTP) at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois. This is a combined MD/PhD program. However, I decided to leave the PhD part of the program after three years (with a second master’s) and graduated with an MS in Pathology and an MD in 2011. I then matched into Family Medicine at the University of Utah and was in residency there from 2011 to 2014. I joined the faculty at the University of Utah Department of Family Medicine after residency and have been faculty here since 2014. Choosing Family Medicine The University of Chicago is a very intense medical school. It is a quaternary care hospital and as such many of the inpatient facilities are filled with people who have come from very far away (internationally) to receive care. Thus, people who I saw in the hospital during medical school were often very, very sick. I think this experience really turned me off from internal medicine (going into medical school, I thought I would go into infectious disease). It just seemed like people were so sick, all we were doing was avoiding the inevitable, but that none of these people really had much of a chance at living, rather we were just giving them a few extra months or years. And then when I went on my family medicine rotation, which was out in the community, I realized that patient care didn’t always look like that. Outpatient providers could have longitudinal relationships with patients who had a stable chronic disease but most of them weren’t “the sickest of the sick.” It seemed like this would be a much more rewarding career, because it gave you the opportunity to intervene when people were still healthy and where you had the chance to prevent some of the bad things by encouraging mammograms and weight loss and stopping smoking before the breast cancer, diabetes, and lung cancer killed them. For the most part, my experience in family medicine has borne this out — what I like most about my job is seeing patients over and over again and developing longitudinal relationships with them. These relationships mean so much to me because the thing is my patients have gotten sick and some have died but knowing them as I do makes the interactions I have with them more meaningful for me (and I hope for them) and it feels like I can be an ally for them in their journey and not just a bystander. The Rewards of Teaching Residents An aspect of my job I find the most meaningful is interacting with the residents. I feel like I have a very symbiotic relationship with them — they teach me, and I teach them, and we all joke about being indoors when the weather is glorious on Friday afternoons. First and foremost, I aspire to be an educator. And what my undergraduate professor Dr. Madison taught me is that a good educator is really just a good storyteller. If you can get people interested in the tale you are weaving, you can sneak in all kinds of healthful and useful information (kind of liking sneaking kale into meatloaf ). Dr. Madison wasn’t the first educator I had who was a storyteller, but he was probably the best and I don’t think (educationally) I’ve ever been more enthralled than I was sitting in his classroom — and that really made me want to have the same effect on people, to captivate and enthrall them. I don’t think I am nearly as successful as he was, but it ’s good to have aspirations. Why did you choose to practice in your area of focus? What are some of the rewarding aspects of this type of care? I guess my focus would be considered LGBTQ medicine, specifically HIV Prevention and gender-affirming hormone therapy for folks who identify as transgender. Sometimes I don’t feel like I “chose” this specialty, but more that it just fell into my lap. There was a need for these services in my community and I filled it. The most rewarding part of what I do is developing long-term relationships with patients — those are the interactions that mean the most to me. To some extent, I function as a “specialist” in that I do gender-affirming hormone therapy management for folks seeking these services, but I am not their primary care physician. Although this is also very rewarding and serves a role that my community needs, I feel like I get the most reward from seeing my transgender and LGBTQ patients for whom I am their primary care provider. These are individuals who I’ve been taking care of for years, and there is a real comfort from knowing them longitudinally and feeling like I am doing something that helps them beyond just offering PrEP or hormone therapy. To some extent, I feel drawn to provide care for the LGBTQ community because they have historically been disenfranchised from receiving compassionate, evidencebased care, and it feels good to be able to provide care to someone who maybe has not had good experiences with the “medical-industrial complex” and to help change their An aspect of my job I find the most meaningful is interacting with the residents. I feel like I have a very symbiotic relationship with them — they teach me, and I teach them, and we all joke about being indoors when the weather is glorious on Friday afternoons. 17 |
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