Background: Dr. Sherry remembers the exact moment it clicked.
It wasn’t until his third year of residency that he had taken a shine to pediatric rheumatology. His mentor, Deborah Kredich, MD, introduced him to the little-known subspecialty.
“I was sitting in the Duke University library, the ceiling opened up, a bright light shone, and I thought, ‘I would be so happy doing this the rest of my life.’ It was really an epiphany,” he says.
Dr. Sherry went on to a fellowship in pediatric rheumatology at the University of British Columbia, serving under Ross Petty, MD. He worked at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles for two years and then for 18 years in Seattle before settling at the University of Pennsylvania. He has trained more than 40 fellows and teams of healthcare professionals.
He chaired the Pediatric Rheumatology Sub-Board of the American Board of Pediatrics and now serves as medical editor. He’s an active member of the ACR’s Pediatric Section Committee, and is a previous winner of the Clinical Educator Scholar award. He organized the first national pediatric rheumatology OSCE (observed structured clinical evaluation).
Q: What lessons did you learn from your mentor?
A: Embrace the hard stuff. Don’t shy away. We’re always going to have hard cases. They are hard; they take time. Another lesson is that it’s OK to care for your patients. Many of our patients have serious sickness, and they are just kids. You can truly like your patients. You can be real with your patients.
Q: What’s unique about your fellowship training program?
A: We teach our fellows ultrasound. We do a lot of joint injections. We teach injections beyond all of the major joints that need to be injected. I think that’s the wave of the future. You’ve got to be teaching ultrasound these days, and I think we’re one of the few pediatric centers that teach ultrasound. We have two ultrasound machines, and we do ultrasound-guided injections. We do the PROSCE [pediatric rheumatology objective structured clinical examinations], and that’s sort of unique.
Q: What do you foresee as the future of pediatric rheumatology?
A: I think that more and more centers without a pediatric residency program are lacking. Not just for training, but for patient care. Centers that don’t have them are recognizing the need for them. Most pediatric rheumatologists don’t want to be the only physician specialist at a center. It’s hard. I think, in the future, we will have multiple pediatric rheumatologists at every center. And I think, because of that, kids will have better access to care and better outcomes. [Parents] won’t have to drive six hours to see their pediatric rheumatologist.
