On May 23, 2010, Cindy Abbott was standing on top of the world. She had spent the past 51 days climbing Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, and had finally reached the summit. “I was very anxious to get off and get back down,” she says, adding that the summit is about the…
Two years ago, at the age of 102, rheumatologist Ephraim P. Engleman, MD, FACR, FACP, published a memoir, My Century, in which he detailed his personal and professional accomplishments, as well as his secrets to longevity. With his characteristic sense of humor, Dr. Engleman noted that the first secret to a long life is to…
James K. Smith, MD, believes in thinking several moves ahead. Consider your opponent. Gauge your strategy. Be aggressive when you need to be. Those are key aspects of his philosophy in rheumatology—and chess. Initiation Dr. Smith’s love of chess started after he had started his family. “I first got involved in the game through my…
Patient education has always been at the core of the nursing profession. Nurses pride themselves on being great teachers and patient advocates. When self-injectable biologics were first introduced to the market, one of the main goals was to make patients independent and put them in the driver’s seat of their own care. Yet without a…
To practice rheumatology, you’ve got to love a challenge and be prepared to navigate some twists and turns before arriving at the right diagnosis. Rheumatologist and avid kayaker William Truslow, MD, says the same qualities apply to running rivers. “The toughest part is the mental attitude—feeling that I can do this,” says Dr. Truslow, a…
Nancy Baker, ScD, Completes Sabbatical Year at CDC Nancy Baker, ScD, MPH, OTR/L, associate professor in the Department of Occupational Therapy at the University of Pittsburgh, recently completed a yearlong sabbatical as a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), Division of Population Health. Her mentor at the CDC, Kristina Theis, MPH,…
I sometimes find myself mired in sticky clinical circumstances. I am facing a distraught patient who is seeking my opinion about a condition that, according to some, may not truly belong in the rheumatologist’s bailiwick. Case example: hearing loss. The Steroid Test Sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL) and its relative, autoimmune inner ear disease (AIED),…
I am a few weeks post-retirement. Having written thank you notes and completed urgent home projects, I swing in a hammock at our currently fire-threatened cabin north of Winthrop, Wash., and reflect. I feel like a young boy while freely flipping pages of a hand-scribed picture book, The Principles of Uncertainty, by Maira Kalman. She…
On any Thursday from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., you can find Robert H. Shmerling, MD, playing tag, basketball or even roughhousing with a group of children at Second Step, a transitional living program that offers victims of domestic violence in the Boston area a safe place to live and opportunities to go back to…
Nathan Wei, MD, FACP, FACR, admits that he didn’t exactly agree with the amount certain things were encouraged in his family. “Aspects such as academics and music were focused on so much,” he says. “I wanted to break out from that upbringing. I wanted to add in more of what I wanted to do.” And…