It was early one Tuesday morning, I was doing my normal rounds at the hospital. I walked into a patient’s room, to find a 70 year old man whose chart indicated he was suffering from heart failure.  He hadn’t yet brushed hair, or his teeth, and had not eaten anything. The nurse had just handed him a cup of roughly 14 pills. He looked up at me and asked…. “am I going to have to take these pills the rest of my life? What if I decide to stop?”. As the rounding physician, I shared with him my honest assessment of the situation in front of me - his only other option at this point was hospice. The look of crushing disappointment in his eyes was obvious. I couldn’t shake this feeling all day, all week, all month. I thought… “this is wrong. Patient deserve more”. In our Western healthcare system, patients are prescribed one pill to counteract the side effects of another pill, and then another. I knew if I could get him into better baseline health, he could get off some or even all of these pills… but I could not help or educate him in the lifestyle changes required in my limited role at the hospital.

At that moment something became very clear to me.

I did not get into medicine to simply treat disease.

My mother has told me that as a child, I was always the first to offer a tissue to someone who was crying, or had sneezed. Taking care of those around me has been part of my soul for as long as I can remember. Growing up in Ghana, the only time the people in my community saw a doctor was when they were already very ill, many were literally on their deathbed. Most of the outcomes from these visits were not good, so It wasn’t until a formative experience in my 20s that I learned the true impact a doctor could make. 

I spent a week during the summer 2003 in Kingston, Jamaica helping to renovate an orphanage as part of a mission trip with my church. One of the days we were there, a doctor came in to check on the children. All the kids ran to hug him. They lit up as he bent down to meet their gaze, and they were embraced by his outstretched arms. Caring for them, making them feel seen, heard, thought of. You could see in their eyes, they felt hope. The impact he delivered went well beyond medicine. It was then I realized my true calling to pursue medicine.

My path to becoming a physician was long and winding. After receiving my undergraduate degree in biochemistry, I attended Tufts Masters in Medical Science, and after earning a masters in public health, and I chose to work for a public health organization that supports female domestic violence survivors. I found 1:1 clinical work with women to be very rewarding, and then decided to attend medical school, then residency, and onto an internship, before finally becoming an attending. After so much schooling, I was thrilled to begin my work as a doctor. However, as the years passed in the corporate healthcare system, I began to realize how unfulfilling my career was becoming.

I did not become a doctor so I could treat disease…

… I became a doctor so I could prevent it. 

Our entire healthcare system is based on sickness. It misses the point entirely. Wellness is not merely the absence of disease. If you follow the current American model of healthcare, you will likely end up on pills for everything, and you still feel unwell. The system is not focused on preventive measures. Your cholesterol is too high? Take this Statin. There will likely be no discussion about WHY your blood pressure is too high, or how to treat it without medicine. Mainstream blood work testing does not look for early markers of diseases. They only measure “sick” and “not sick”. There are no markers of wellness. Once I became aware of this, I could no longer keep treating preventable diseases over and over.