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About Me

I didn’t aspire to be a doctor from a young age. I was studying German and English literature in Freiburg, Germany on a junior year abroad. I followed up on a suggestion that one of my Linguistics professors made that I should consider studying Medicine and enquired in the foreign student office if it would be possible to be accepted to Medical School in Germany. Much to my surprise they said, "Yes".

Since then, my life has been continually enriched by my involvement in Medicine. After studying in Germany and Holland and acquiring fluency in Dutch and German, I returned to Massachusetts and did my residency in Family Practice at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Once, during residency, I was managing a birth. As the birth was progressing, I asked the mother to stop pushing and take some deep breaths so that the birth would go more gently. While the nurses tended to the mother and with the image of new life slowly emerging into this world, I glanced briefly out the window. There I saw a body being taken from the morgue into a hearse. I returned to my responsibilities at the birth after that split-second glance out the window into another world. The birth went well, and the room was filled with exuberant joy and the presence of new life. I felt that joy too; it’s the gift you get from being present at a birth. Along with the joy, and in no way diminishing it, was the knowledge that somewhere else someone else was grieving. So being involved in Medicine can remind you, in unexpected ways, of the deep mystery and wonder of life and of the privilege we have as doctors of participating so fully in it.

A friend of mine from residency always reminds me of how privileged we are as doctors to be working in a profession in which we are always given the chance to help people, to alleviate suffering and to enrich the lives of others. He says to me, “Hey, if you do it right, it might be the one thing that gets you into heaven.”

So I am happy to be exercising the privilege of practicing medicine at Kaiser Richmond. I enjoy the full scope of practice in Occupational Medicine and the chance that I get there to treat a wide range of musculoskeletal injuries. I have also enjoyed working in other departments, and I appreciate the diverse array of opportunities that working within the Kaiser system offers.

Once, I was at a lecture by the psychiatrist R.D. Laing. He said that as doctors we have to be careful that we don’t adopt a too mechanistic and functional model of humanity. He said, “If you just see the heart as a pump, then you wind up with a pump for a heart.” So if ever that narrow view takes over my thinking, I will make sure that all those years of studying literature don’t just go to waste, and I will remember Wordsworth’s lines at the end of “Intimations of Immortality”:

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

For it is through that heart that we are able to practice Medicine of the highest quality.

My Credentials

Medical school	University of Essen, Essen, Germany
Internship	University of Massachusetts Medical Center, Worcester, MA
Residency	University of Massachusetts Medical Center, Worcester, MA
Board certification	Family Medicine, American Board of Family Medicine

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