The ACR Honors Contributions to Rheumatology

Background: Dr. Pincus makes no bones about it: he loves data. He’s been collecting and analyzing rheumatology data for more than 50 years, and he says he’ll “never get tired of it.” Born into a medical family in New York City, Dr. Pincus earned his medical degree at Harvard and trained at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston before embarking on a cross-country career in research. He spent a number of years in basic research before turning his focus to rheumatology. He has served on faculties at Cornell, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and Vanderbilt before settling at NYU. Although he doesn’t see patients anymore, Dr. Pincus hopes this award brings attention to his life’s work: the importance of patient questionnaires for every patient at every visit. Those checklists, he says, “have pragmatic advantages” like improving patient–doctor communication and saving practitioners’ time, but also provide “scientific advantages, because, in a way, they’re the most important information for clinical decisions.”

Q: What is the key takeaway from your years of research?

A: Every rheumatologist should use a patient questionnaire at every visit, which about 20% now do. Rheumatologists—including me—have been trying for 50 years to find magic-bullet lab tests like cholesterol, glucose, or hemoglobin A1-C that are going to tell them what to do exactly with a patient, but it doesn’t work that way in rheumatology. The patient questionnaire, in a way, is a scientific patient history. It doesn’t eliminate talking to the patient; in fact, it makes talking to the patient much more informative.

Q: What advice do you have for the next generation of researchers?

A: They should open their minds to what I would call “bio-psycho-social medicine.” … I think rheumatology has to start paying attention to these things, or we’re just going to keep spinning wheels spending fortunes on patients.

Q: What does this award mean to you?

A: It’s always nice to be recognized, but I would be much happier if some of the things that I’ve been advocating for many years were implemented more by the rheumatology community.

ACR Distinguished Service

Eileen Moynihan, MD
Solo practitioner, Woodbury, N.J.

Background: The only potential pitfall Dr. Moynihan sees in winning the ACR award for outstanding and sustained service to the ACR is that she feels it’s more of a lifetime achievement award. “I kind of think it should come at the end of your career,” she says with a laugh. “I didn’t realize I was done yet.”