By GEORGE BEAUREGARD
From 2018 to 2022, I served as a physician executive in a large health system on Long Island. During that period, I became acquainted with the Provost and Executive VP of the New York Institute of Technology. One of the university’s divisions is the New York College of Osteopathic Medicine (NYCOM), one of the largest osteopathic medical schools in the country. I saw an opportunity to provide medical students with a high-level introduction to “population health”—something not typically offered in medical school curricula and something they would certainly be dealing with in some shape or form upon completing their residencies and fellowships. With the support of the Provost and the medical school Dean, I designed an elective course for fourth-year students at NYCOM called ‘Population Health 101’, a four-week rotation through my Population Health Management division. The course was very popular amongst the students, and my staff enjoyed having students shadow them.
More recently, an opportunity arose for me to return to NYIT and present at a NYCOM’s ‘Clinical Practice Reflections’ session, a bi-monthly assembly where patients share their experiences with health care systems with students. The CPR is not an academic lecture. Its goal is to share the nuances of real patient experiences and their perspectives in their interactions with the health care system. In doing so, NYCOM hopes to highlight the importance of a caring, empathetic physician and aspects of health care delivery that are often overlooked.
After arriving, making my way to the lecture hall, and getting familiarized with how the technology worked, I watched the medical students filing in from the rear doors of the large auditorium.
Some were wearing the short white coats that serve as the indicator of their rank in the hierarchy of medicine. Many greeted their classmates with smiles and warm embraces, suggesting that they hadn’t seen each other for a while. They looked young, energetic, relaxed, and happy.
As someone who is some forty-plus years removed from his medical school days, I felt like I needed to make a connection with this audience at the start. So, my opening remarks were along the lines of the shared experience that is the first couple of years of medical school. Like mine was back in the mid-eighties, their lives are defined by volume. The volume of information. The volume of coffee. And the volume of sheer anxiety about whether they can completely memorize the entire Krebs cycle, the origin and insertion of every muscle in the human body, the Bundle of His, Purkinje Fibers, the Renin-Angiotensin System, the optic chiasm, the corpus callosum, the Loop of Henle, and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. Section members in the beautiful biological symphony that is the human body.
I pointed out that they were learning the vocabulary of medicine. And the vocabulary of survival. The how.
That opening seemed to resonate with the 600-plus students, as many of them were nodding their heads in a manner that suggested “Yep. This guy had to know this stuff, too.”
And then, I told them that I was also going to talk about the who. I started with my story of being adopted at eighteen months old and not having any knowledge about my biological parents. And then about my adoptive parents, who never finished high school. About my adoptive father, who worked for the iconic car manufacturing company General Motors for 32 years, and wanted me to do the same. But science was already hardwired in and coursing through my brain, leading to my enrollment in medical school at 28. About my first two children being born while I was in medical school.
That, at age 49, with four children and a bustling medical practice, and feeling that life was good, I was diagnosed with an advanced stage cancer that’s typically seen in septuagenarians. My wife and four children were in the sidecar of a journey that coursed through the badlands of systemic chemotherapy, major surgery, and the aftermath. When it was done, I warily donned the mantle of survivorship. And thought that the Emperor of All Maladies was done with us.
Not so. He revisited our family in 2017 when my then 29-year old son was diagnosed with stage 4 CRC. The transition to a personal story that now included a person close in age to them seemed to heighten their already rapt attention. The room became completely silent; a quiet tension drifted through the filled auditorium. The students were shifting more in their seats, as if trying to find a more comfortable position.
I spoke about the shocking discovery of Patrick’s cancer and his subsequent journey. I struggled to get through talking about how his life ended. That part of the story brought tears to people’s eyes.
I also spoke about Patrick’s medical oncologist. A doctor whose bedside manner contained presence, a calm authority, expertise, compassion, and empathy. When she met Patrick, she didn’t look at her Apple watch or her laptop; she looked at him. She offered a partnership—and hope. She made us feel that while the news was bad, we were not alone in the dark. She was going to walk that path with him and us.
I told them that I saw the positive power of their profession on that day. But I had also seen others doing the opposite.
I implored them to be like her.
I told them while they are all intelligent, being present is what makes doctors healers.
That the laptop isn’t the patient, the person sitting on the exam table or in the bed is. Look them in the eye. Listen first.
That they will be the narrators of someone’s worst day.
That they should choose what they say carefully and how they say it, as the words used will forever be etched, rather, seared, into their patients’ minds.
That each patient is part of a tribe that’s hoping—praying—that you’ll be more than “just good” at your job.
That illness and diseases don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re contextual.
That technology cannot substitute for the physician-patient relationship.
I told them that I envied them, for their careers in medicine will include having amazing tools never before used and yet to be imagined. Most notably, the promise of discoveries, AI, precision, and personalized medicine. And, in other ways, I didn’t envy them, for gone are the days when patients completely trusted medical professionals and passively accepted whatever advice they were given. Many of the people they’ll be caring for can easily access information that isn’t always accurate, and they’ll need to help them evaluate the reliability of the source, educate, clarify, and encourage critical thinking.
I closed by saying: “Society hands doctors a level of near-miraculous trust that isn’t bestowed on other professions. They assume you are good, that you care, and that you’ll do your best. Live up to that trust by being more than intelligent—be observant, humble, and above all, be present. Treat the disease if you can, but treat the person, always, as they are the ones who have to live with the aftermath of being treated. That is a heavy, scary, beautiful privilege. Try to live up to it. I’m confident that you will.”
Following a Q & A, many students approached me. Some looked a bit nervous. They asked thoughtful questions. Many of them broke out in tears as we spoke, as their lives had been impacted by cancer as well. Surprisingly, some were familiar with the motto ‘Pray, Hope, and Don’t Worry’ that was displayed on a couple of slides that served as the backdrop for my talk. The motto, coined by the Italian monk and saint Padre Pio, was adopted by my son for inspiration along his treatment journey. One student said that she evokes it every time she takes an exam.
They asked me about what it was like to be the physician father of a child with cancer, to which I replied: I was always his father first; the physician advisor role was second.
They asked me about how I dealt with my anger at God about what was happening. I told them that, near the end of Patrick’s life, a nun brought an almost preternaturally powerful sense of love and support to him and our family—and showed me how to view tragedy and grief through a different lens and restored the little faith I had left. Absent that, the anger likely would have consumed me.
They thanked me for my willingness to share my stories and my candor.
I thanked them for being present.
There are moments when you simply know you’ve left a mark on others. This was one of them—yet, in truth, it was I who came away most changed.
I will admit that forty years in the trenches of American healthcare—first navigating its multiplicity of clinical care demands, and now its verticalization, burgeoning bureaucracies, and relentless corporatization—has left me with a layer of professional scar tissue. I have become cynical.
But watching those students, with their damp eyes, compassion, empathy, and some with ‘Pray, Hope, and Don’t Worry’ talismans, I felt some of that cynicism dissolve. Their empathy wasn’t just a trait; it was the antidote to the very system that threatens to hollow us out. I walked out of that auditorium less worried about the future of the profession.
They are the narrators now, and the story is in good hands.
George Beauregard, DO is an Internal Medicine physician & the author of Reservations for Nine: A Doctor’s Family Confronts Cancer. This came from his Substack
