Making the Rounds with the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV

Making the Rounds

October 12, 2021 Issue 298

Friends & Colleagues,

In today’s newsletter, we turn our attention to the Alpha Omega Alpha (AOA) Medical Honor Society Speaker Series, which is designed to broaden the human perspectives of students, faculty, and administrators. Last week, AOA brought Richard Gunderman, MD, to the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV as a speaker for the recognition ceremony for new honor society inductees and he was kind enough to give three talks at the medical school. Many of you may know Dr. Gunderman as an author of 15 books or from his frequent articles on medicine in The Atlantic magazine. During his talks, he encouraged both students and faculty to read books outside of medical texts, including the works of Albert Camus and Walker Percy, suggesting that one benefit of literary fiction is that it can provide insight into the human spirit and can actually change our behavior. I agree with this sentiment. To quote the great clinician and teacher Dr. William Osler: “The art and science of medicine are not distinct but rather twin berries on one stem.” Several years ago some colleagues and I published a study done at several medical schools showing a clear and strong association between participation in arts and humanities and positive physician qualities, including tolerance of ambiguity, empathy, lack of burnout, and wisdom. Reading engages the brain to allow us to better understand each other. To get a better idea of what Dr. Gunderman had to share, please read on...

Marc J. Kahn, M.D.

Dean, Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV

Medicine By The Numbers

Digestive Diseases

Digestive diseases range from the occasional upset stomach to the more life-threatening colon cancer, and encompass disorders of the gastrointestinal tract, the liver, the gallbladder, and the pancreas.

Twenty million Americans suffer from chronic digestive diseases.

Digestive diseases necessitate 25% of all surgical operations.

Digestive diseases are one of the most prevalent causes of workforce disability.

More Americans are hospitalized with digestive diseases than any other condition.

In the U.S., digestive diseases rank third among illnesses in economic cost.

Fourteen million cases of acute digestive diseases are treated in U.S. annually.

Colorectal cancer is the 2nd leading cause of cancer death among American men and women – responsible for over 51,000 deaths annually.

Source:

gialliance.com

AOA Honor Society Speaker Series Features Talks

On Humanism Being At The Core Of Patient Care

Richard Gunderman, MD, giving his first talk, "Finding Your Ethical & Spiritual Compass in Med School," for the Alpha Omega Alpha (AOA) Medical Honor Society Speaker Series at the Kerkorian School of Medicine.

The work, lives, and influence of 20th-century writers that included Walker Percy and Albert Camus, widely acclaimed for novels that opened unique windows into the human soul and its challenges, became centerpieces of recent talks given through the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV by the Alpha Omega Alpha (AOA) Medical Honor Society Speaker Series.

So did the legacy of the late John Wooden, whose coaching philosophy of knowing that every day you should do everything you can to be the best human being you can be helped lead his teams to 10 UCLA NCAA men’s basketball team championships in 14 years.

In all three distinctive talks delivered at the medical school on Oct. 5 to students, faculty, and administrators by Richard Gunderman, MD, the Indiana University Chancellor’s Professor of Medicine, Liberal Arts and Philanthropy who’s authored 15 books, it was clear that he believes doctors can be more effective in patient care if they value human perspectives coming from outside medical driven data and textbooks.

Dr. Gunderman also believes that once you become a good person, where loving kindness, generosity of spirit and deed and thoughtful consideration of others is central to who you are, you stand a chance of becoming a truly good physician.

Richard Gunderman, MD

Dr. Gary Shen, the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine Assistant Dean for Clinical Education who serves as councilor/adviser to the school’s AOA chapter, said bringing Dr. Gundeman to the school gave "our students a voice from another perspective.”

Dr. Shen, who plans on continuing to bring speakers from a variety of backgrounds to the medical school, noted that while Dr. Gunderman obviously understands that grades, knowledge, and skills are important to medical students during their journey to becoming physicians, he also pointed out that the Indiana University professor believes it is important that students grow as human beings. Dr. Gunderman believes students need to become people who understand that they’re members of a huge human family, that we’re all fragile brothers and sisters wherever we come from. Such an understanding, the doctor believes, helps give birth to physicians who truly believe in mutual respect, compassion, and empathy for their fellow man.

During his remarks that dealt with the current pandemic, Dr. Gunderman said that while he understands the frustration of physicians who care for patients who refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine, he argued that doctors cannot refuse to give such individuals treatment on moral grounds, a position later echoed by Johan C. Bester, MD, the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine Director of Bioethics who attended the lecture.

Physicians, Dr. Bester said, must treat all kinds of people who “make regrettable life choices,” including smokers. “Once we have the position of refusing on moral grounds, that’s dangerous,” he said. It could lead, he said, to not caring for someone because of political party affiliation, because a man lives with three women or because those with diabetes eat food or drink beverages that continually put them at more risk of severe illness.

“It’s not the place of the doctor to make a moral judgment about who they treat,” Bester said. “I think of medicine as a profession with a moral goal to attend to patients, to the public we serve.”

Dr. Gunderman, who’s become best known nationally for his frequent articles on medicine for The Atlantic magazine, said Camus’ 1947 novel The Plague, a book about an epidemic in the large Algerian city of Oran, offers lessons to be learned for the COVID pandemic and for our everyday lives. Camus lets us know, he said, that It is not enough to confine the lessons of plagues/pandemics to protocols and supplies -- we must learn in our daily lives to express care and concern for our fellow travelers in life, and try to help them. That’s what Dr. Rieux, the novel’s hero, does. He treats his patients because he sympathizes with their undeserved plight.

“Beneath every diagnosis and treatment plan lies a real human being, and caring for patients requires that sufficient attention be paid to both the biological and psychological aspects of their being.”

Richard Gunderman, MD

Fourth-year medical student Amalie Alver, who attended all three of Dr. Gunderman’s lectures, says his talk regarding the COVID pandemic, where he noted loneliness had affected the emotional well-being of many Americans, reminded her of how important it is to reach out to others. Researchers, she recalled, found out even before the pandemic that loneliness and isolation are as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Dr. Gunderman said he has been heartened to see many Americans reaching out to others during the COVID pandemic. “What he had to say reminded me that I need to take the time to reach out to others,” Alver said. “It really does make a difference in people’s lives.”

Richard Gunderman, MD, and medical student Amalie Alver

According to Dr. Gunderman, the writer Walker Percy, who received his MD in 1941 from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, made it clear in his work -- he won the National Book Award for “The Moviegoer” in 1962 -- that he realized that there was more to “sickness and health, life and death, than what was found in medical textbooks.”

In an article he penned for Pharos, AOA’s peer-reviewed quarterly medical humanities journal, Dr. Gunderman wrote: “Beneath every diagnosis and treatment plan lies a real human being, and caring for patients requires that sufficient attention be paid to both the biological and psychological aspects of their being. While biomedical science has achieved many new anatomical, physiological, and pathologic insights, Percy argued that are many respects in which, ‘We don’t seem to know much more about the psyche than Plato did.’”

Dr. Anne Weisman, the medical school’s director of wellness and integrative medicine, said Dr. Gunderman’s emphasis on physicians looking at a patient holistically is what much of her teaching is about. “Patients are more than just symptoms or a diagnosis. Physicians have to learn the stories of their patients, their biographies, to treat them fully,” she said. “When physicians take the time to know their patients on a deeper level, they provide care in a much deeper way.”

Again and again, Dr. Gunderman suggested to his audiences that reading outside of medical textbooks should be considered by medical students and physicians. Dr. Weisman agreed. Fine writers like Percy and Camus provide valuable insight into the human condition, she said.

First-year medical student Danny Villegas said he agrees with Dr. Gunderman on the value of reading literary fiction. “It helps you grow as a person...his examples show how it helps you relate to other people, which is important for a physician.”

In his last talk at the medical school, Dr. Gunderman suggested that medical students might want to adapt some principles to live by, much as Coach Wooden did. Wooden, often called America’s Greatest Coach, enjoyed telling people that when he graduated from the eighth grade his father shared a 7 point creed to live by that he strove to follow for the rest of his life. Those principles include:

Be true to yourself. To Wooden, success meant not winning basketball games but knowing that in your preparation you did everything you could to be the best you can be.
Help others. In basketball, Wooden prized players who brought out the best in teammates through assists. ( In his talk, Dr. Gunderman noted that good healthcare is a team effort and suggested students help each other in medical school so they can become the best doctors they can be.).
Drink Deeply from good books. As a high school English teacher and beyond, Wooden believed in the power of the written word, arguing that the books we read provide many of the most important ideas with which we lead our lives.

Dr. Shen was impressed with Dr. Gunderman’s reference to Coach Wooden and said his principles could be applicable to physicians.

“In medicine, we always have a to-do list for our patients,” he noted. “Patient A needs this and Patient A needs that…In our busy lives, it isn’t a bad idea to have a framework to live by for our lives, to help us develop as a person.”