Panel Discussion at CIST Forum Spotlights Mentoring in Medicine

EPISODE #9
Uploaded:  November 20, 2008
Running Time:  6:27

SCHMALFELDT: From the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, this is CLINICAL CENTER RADIO.

The recent Sixth Annual Clinical Investigator Student Trainee Forum, known by its initials as the CIST Forum, highlighted the importance of mentoring in a medical student’s career.  One of the forum’s panel discussions centered on just such a mentor/mentee relationship.  In 2007, two medical students traveled to the tiny village of Tugela Ferry, South Africa.  They were taking a year out from medical school.  What they got was the kind of education no classroom can provide.  Palav Babaria is a medical student at Yale and a former Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Clinical Research Fellow.

BABARIA: This was my first time living in a community that I didn’t have some sort of affiliation with – either that I’ve grown up there or had family there or something.  And I was amazed by how open and warm and welcoming the community was to take me as an American stranger and really make me feel like I belonged there.  It was phenomenal.

SCHMALFELDT: Palav and her colleague, Harvard Medical School student Michelle Scott, were not in South Africa for the sight seeing.  They were there to assist in a clinical study looking at new and better ways to treat multiple drug resistant and extensively drug resistant tuberculosis, which – along with AIDS – were ravaging the tiny community.  Michelle, also a former Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Clinical Research Fellow, described the challenging working conditions.

SCOTT: We lived on the hospital grounds, so we were among people who were very, very ill and it was a concentrated population of people who were very ill.  And I think that was the hardest thing for me to see, and it was the hardest thing to walk by these patients on a daily basis and see how sick they were because – at a baseline, even at their healthiest state – they were much sicker than most patients, most people we would see here.

SCHMALFELDT: While in South Africa, the students lived next to Michelle’s mentor, Dr. Neel Gandhi – Assistant Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology and Population Health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University.  One of the most important lessons, Michelle said, was determining that fine line between independence and wanting someone to watch your every step.

SCOTT: I think we went back and forth a lot between having too much freedom and wanting someone to tell us what to do.  But the weekly conference calls were very helpful in touching base with our mentors to discuss with them the issues that we were facing.  I think being together was also very helpful because there were times when I was like, “I need to get out of here!  I can’t do this any more!”  And there were times when Palav was like, “I can’t do this any more, either!”  And luckily, it didn’t happen at the same time, so that, you know the other person could support the other one through it.

SCHMALFELDT: Dr. Gandhi spends three months out of the year living in South Africa.  He remained in close contact with the students via telephone and the Internet when not actually in the country.  Like a proud older brother, he described the effect this year in South Africa working at the Tugela Ferry Hospital had on the students.

GANDHI: It’s hard to describe the growth.  In many ways, the experience they had is one that can’t help but change who you are.  They were extraordinarily talented to begin with.  But what they experienced and what they were able to accomplish, I think, really made them into professionals.  They’re not students any more.  They’re actually professionals who have the knowledge, confidence and maturity now to really pursue a career in research.

SCHMALFELDT: Palav’s mentor was Dr. Gerald H. Friedland –Director of the Yale AIDS Program at the Yale New Haven Hospital and Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology and Public Health at the Yale School of Medicine.  He was the lead investigator for the Tugela Ferry study, and he had high praise for the two students.

FRIEDLAND: They’re absolutely extraordinary human beings.  They’re going to be absolutely phenomenal physicians and clinical researchers if they choose to do that.  I think this experience has moved them along on that path.  They’ve been critically important to our work.  As a mentor, actually, that has given me great joy and pride.  I think this is a wonderful opportunity.  I wish I had it when I was a medical student many, many decades ago!

SCHMALFELDT: Neither student regretted taking time away from the classroom.   For her part, Palav called it a worthwhile experience.

BABARIA: I certainly have never regretted any of the years I’ve taken out, and I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else who has ever regretted taking a year to do something like this.  So I would definitely encourage them to do so.  And it might also change what they decide to do in the future and really shape, sort of, what their future career might look like.

SCHMALFELDT: Michelle echoed Palav’s sentiments and added some context.

SCOTT: My advice would be to not think of it as delaying your career, but as just another step in it.  I think a lot of people are concerned about, you know, “I’m in medical school, it takes so long to get through that process, then to continue on with the training, and it’s such a long path, you know, if I take a year off I’m just delaying it.”  But really, it’s just another step in your career, and I think that’s just an important thing to keep in mind.

SCHMALFELDT: Dr. Gandhi said the experience highlighted the importance of mentoring in the medical community.

GANDHI: Absolutely.  As Dr. Friedland mentioned in the session, our profession and our careers are related to mentorship.  There is an apprenticeship built into all of medicine.  And just as I have been mentored very well, a part of keeping the tradition and the profession going is mentoring others.

SCHMALFELDT: The panel discussion was part of the sixth annual CIST Forum, hosted once again by Drs. John Gallin and Frederick Ognibene from the NIH Clinical Center.  350 medical and dental students from nearly 80 academic medical centers from around the country took part in the two day forum, November 6th and 7th.  For more information about the CIST program at NIH and the clinical research being done every day at the NIH Clinical Center, log on to  http://clinicalcenter.nih.gov.  From America's Clinical Research Hospital, this has been Episode One of CLINICAL CENTER RADIO.  In Bethesda, Maryland, I'm Bill Schmalfeldt at the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. 

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