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Commitment to aid fills life of cardiologist
By Rebecca Rosen Lum
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
March 28, 2005
Before work one stingingly frigid November morning, Jeff Ritterman drove out to Point Isabel, and, as the sky lightened to a pallid gray, joined several others to protest what they saw as the inadequate cleanup of a Superfund site.
A month later, he flew to Jordan, where he brought medical supplies and heard testimony about the health effects of the U.S.-Iraqi conflict.
The expression "be here now" seems coined for the Richmond cardiologist. He appears to have infinite curiosity, passion and focus for the issue in front of him, whether an individual patient, his community or large-scale epidemics.
"The first time I met him was when he showed up to a public hearing for the draft environmental impact report for Campus Bay," said Sherry Padgett, who heads Bay Area Residents for Responsible Development. The group monitors the cleanup of the former Stauffer Chemical plant, a Superfund site.
"He sat up front by himself and asked a series of very probing, intelligent questions," she said. "He came up to me afterward and gave me his card, and said, 'Send me everything you've got. I'm not letting go of this.'"
Shyaam Shabaka, founder of the Richmond EcoVillage Farm Learning Center, coaxed Ritterman onto the board of Food First, an Oakland-based think tank focused on food and development policy.
"He's very active in the community -- a doctor doing everything he can to keep people out of the hospital," Shabaka said.
That takes teamwork, Ritterman says.
"We have a lot of things here in Richmond we have to look at if we're interested in the health of the community," Ritterman said. "Pesticides sprayed next to an elementary school -- local concerns that impact on people's health."
He encourages his patients to strap on a pedometer and count their steps, as he does. They can visit his Web site and track his success at meeting his own 5-mile-a-day goal.
"I challenge them. I say, 'Beat me,'" he said, grinning.
He urges his patients to stock up on organic fruits and vegetables every Tuesday at the weekly Farm Stand farmers market, a three-way partnership among Kaiser, Richmond EcoVillage and the county's wellness program, which he helped found.
"Health is not just the absence of disease but a state of physical, mental and spiritual well-being," he says on his Web site.
On a recent afternoon, he took time to show a reporter pictures from his trip -- some quite grim, such as the remains of a child torn apart in a cluster bomb blast. After an interview, he'll head out to a memorial service for a former patient.
The next day, after his clinic hours, he'll speak at Boalt Hall about the health and human rights consequences of the war.
"He's very focused, very calm and extremely smart -- which is probably how he manages to do everything he does and stay so calm," said P.J. Ballard, media officer for Kaiser Permanente.
Flanked by al-Jazeera reporters, Ritterman in January joined parents whose children have died in the terrorist attacks of and conflicts that followed Sept. 11, 2001. They were part of a peace delegation to Amman, Jordan.
The group included a woman whose firefighter son died in the World Trade Center conflagration, a couple whose only son died in combat, the mother of a young man killed when he stepped on a cluster bomb, and more.
"We did a lot of crying," Ritterman said. They transported $500,000 worth of medical supplies in car trunkloads -- to avoid attracting bandits -- and brought $100,000 in cash to buy more.
Once there, he found a cosmopolitan population -- well-schooled, well-traveled and surprisingly open-minded.
"And everybody, everybody smokes," he said. "I thought we'd get that 'You infidels!' stuff, but no."
Nothing prepared him for the testimony of a Jordanian physician who detailed a startling spike in the number of children born without lenses, and in some cases, without eyes at all. The phenomenon has been linked to exposure to depleted uranium.
"I was just sobbing," he said. "Since then, I've done tons of medical research, but before that, I'd never heard of it."
Ritterman's "great affections to the innocent Iraqi peoples ... touch me in the heart," said Mohammed Salman, a doctor who has been following the eye condition anophthalmia. He has documented 13 cases to date.
He was surprised to encounter one upshot of the preconflict sanctions against Iraq: Doctors had not seen medical journals in years.
"Doctors would tell me, 'You've got to understand, we're 10 to 13 years behind.'"
Ritterman also met a father and son with leukemia. The family had moved to Jordan to get medical care but couldn't afford living there. Ritterman sent them his honorarium for a speech at Stanford University.
Since he returned in January, he has been trying to rally interest in the spate of anophthalmias. He has been speaking at medical conferences and universities throughout the country.
"I'm committed to sharing this experience. It's citizen diplomacy."
He has two grown children, Miranda, a Ph.D. candidate focused on epidemiology and public health, and Judah, a psychology project manager, both at UC Berkeley.
He met his partner, Vivian Feyer, a psychologist who also owns a fair trade import business, when he swung by a pal's place for lunch and found her there, house-sitting. The two have been together five years.
She wasn't seeking a romantic commitment; "he was just the most loving person I'd ever met," Feyer said.
"He's taught me a lot -- especially about being in partnership. And it's really not about compromise. It's about wanting each other to be happy."
"When we realize we're starting to fight, we shift immediately. We have a commitment not to invest in someone winning and someone losing, but in the success of the relationship," she said.
Both juggle full schedules, but increasingly work and travel together. Feyer shot all the photos of the trip to Amman.
For Ritterman, Tuesday is a community meeting at the Martin Luther King Community Center. Wednesday, he joins a weekly drumming circle. There are all-day clinics, speaking engagements, hospital rounds.
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