Dr. Louie enjoys describing John Outterbridge—a Los Angeles sculptor, painter, and arts administrator, who has benefited from current therapies that allow him to be fully functional—to newly diagnosed patients with rheumatoid arthritis who are worried about their condition. “Patients can identify with people who have to fight and keep going and, through the Arthritis Foundation, can learn how to access the best medical care of their generation,” says Dr. Louie. One of his many of medicine lectures, “Artists With Rheumatoid Arthritis—Then and Now,” has been given to physician and lay audiences across the country, often supported by the Arthritis Foundation. The lecture portrays the evolution of treatments available to Renoir, Dufy, and Outterbridge, who lived in different time periods.
Dr. Louie served on the Arthritis Foundation’s national board of directors from 2004 to 2010, after serving on the board of the foundation’s Southern California chapter. Currently, he enjoys facilitating the foundation’s international outreach efforts to southeast Asia, where rheumatology groups want to start their own foundations modeled after the Arthritis Foundation.
He completed his medical degree at Washington University School of Medicine, an internship in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., and residencies in medicine at Johns Hopkins and the UCLA School of Medicine. He completed a fellowship in rheumatology and immunology at UCLA School of Medicine, and a sabbatical at the National Institutes of Health studying cytokine functions from monocytes.
Dr. Louie was chief of the rheumatology division at the Los Angeles County Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, Calif., and a faculty member in the UCLA School of Medicine for 30 years. As medical affairs director at Amgen Inc. in Thousand Oaks, Calif., from 2002 to 2007, he facilitated translational and clinical studies of etanercept, one of the first biologic therapies for inflammatory arthritis.
Today he is professor emeritus of medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine, providing patient care and consults at the UCLA Center for the Health Science and West Los Angeles Veterans Administration Medical Center, and collaborating with investigators at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, and other medical centers.
Dr. Louie’s long relationship with the Arthritis Foundation began in the 1970s, when the foundation was intent on encouraging promising young physicians to choose rheumatology as a specialty, and funded many fellowships at UCLA, including Dr. Louie’s. He says that volunteering to support the foundation’s mission is one way he can give back.
