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ALUMNI SYMPOSIUM Making Medicine New AgainWhen the opening speaker took the podium at the June 8 HMS Alumni Day Symposium, many in the audience must have wondered what language he was speaking.
Charles Hatem shared with alumni his thoughts on balancing a medical career with personal needs. Photo by Steve Gilbert "Eraritjaritjaka ... eraritjaritjaka," Charles Hatem, HMS '66, the Harvard Medical Alumni Association president began. "I have eraritjaritjaka." Hatem, associate professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and director of medical education at Mount Auburn Hospital, explained that the Australian aboriginal expression, meaning "filled with desire for something that is lost," was evoked by Belgian physician Joris Nauwelaers in a December 2000 Lancet essay lamenting the disappearance of the time-honored skills and practices of general medicine. In keeping with the symposium theme, "strategies for physician renewal," speakers offered diagnoses and remedies for other forms of eraritjaritjaka that commonly afflict doctors. What the Doctor OrderedHatem warned that compulsivity and perfectionism, fed by society's and physicians' own expectations that "we ought to bat a thousand," often thwart the ability to feel joy. Physicians risk professional hypocrisy, he added, in failing to heed their advice to reduce stress and live balanced lives. His prescriptions: a sense of humor as a tool for perspective; strong support from loved ones, friends, and colleagues; clear and deeply held values; collegiality; and awareness of personal needs.Robert Fletcher, HMS '66, HMS professor of ambulatory care and prevention at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, spoke to the frustration of trying to keep up with an unceasing torrent of medical data. "The information needed to practice medicine used to fit into an ordinary brain like mine," Fletcher said. "Now, the options are so rich and varied that it's impossible to commit them to memory." But instead of pining for simpler times, he urged physicians to actively embrace the electronic information revolution. What were largely "promises" just a few years ago—instantly accessible sources of timely, trustworthy, and well-organized medical knowledge—are now reality, he said. A Balancing ActMichael Lacombe, HMS '68, a physician–writer in Harrison, Maine and director of cardiology at Maine General Medical Center in Augusta, shared a story called "He Works Only Part Time," in which a physician who has "lost his job, his wife, and his literary agent" finds salvation in balancing his once all-consuming medical career with doses of reading and writing. "Stay in shape: this means more than diet and exercise. You need a diet of poetry and literature," he said.In the symposium's final talk, HMS dean Joseph Martin updated alumni on the School's role in the national discourse regarding conflicts of interest in biomedical research and the relationships between academia and industry. "The benefit of these relationships is that they facilitate what we are all here to do in the end, to find treatments for the ills that afflict humankind," Martin said. "The unfortunate part is that real or perceived conflict of interest, personal or institutional gain, personal enrichment and fame, may contaminate the search for and discovery of Veritas." —Tom Reynolds |
