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Medicine for the Greater Good
Growing up in the east side of Baltimore City, from Rosedale to Dundalk to Highlandtown, the communities there were my extended family. My childhood teachers and soccer coaches were from those communities. And some of my best friends, who still answer my calls today, are from there.
Naturally then, becoming a physician-in-training at Johns Hopkins, working at the hospital that mainly served these communities, I was excited. I would get to finally give back to the community that helped me achieve my own successes. And yet, seeing people that I grew up with, unable to truly see them achieve the health they deserved… it angered me. To help the community I grew up with, I felt I needed to do more than what the confines of a hospital building would let me do.
In 2013, I began an initiative titled "Medicine for the Greater Good" (MGG) at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. MGG is grounded in two objectives. First, MGG educates physicians-in-training on the non-biological factors that impact the heath outcomes of our patients and result in health disparities. Heath disparity gaps have widened over the last two decades in common diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and lung diseases (e.g. asthma and COPD). Many of our biological solutions, such as medications, have their influence attenuated by variables such as poverty, education, and access. If future physicians are not held accountable to understand these factors, we will fail the promise of medicine rooted in helping our patients achieve their best potential health.
The second objective of MGG is building partnerships with the local community. Analogous to a doctor being bedside with a patient to understand the impact of a disease, MGG places these physicians "bedside" in the community to better understand the socioeconomic influences on health outcomes. We have partnered with over 20 local congregations, several public housing units, and half a dozen local Baltimore City schools. Through these partnerships, we have implemented novel health initiatives aiming to engage and empower the community around common health issues and concerns. These initiatives vary, from building health ministries at local congregations to launching smoking cessation strategies at public housing units.
To date, over 5000 Baltimore City persons have been influenced by our work and we continue to collaborate with our City's most vulnerable populations.
For me, MGG represents a significant intervention that reaffirms medicine as a public trust. Training our future doctors on social determinants of health and securing neighborhood buy-in for hospital-community partnerships is, in my belief, the future of medicine and will close the health gaps between the haves and have-nots.
Furthermore, MGG allows me to give back to the communities I was raised in. The values that I learned through my childhood experiences, which were reaffirmed through my time at Calvert Hall, have made their way into the doctor I am today and the way I practice medicine. That to me is medicine for the greater good.
