The Columbia Office of Preprofessional Advising, CU AMSA, and the Charles Drew Premedical Society are pleased to welcome Dr. Louis Kuchnir, who will give a talk on

“The Joy of Clinical Medicine”

Friday, February 14, 2014, 1-2pm

401 Lerner Hall

Pizza will be provided.

Please register for this event here, or on our website:http://www.studentaffairs.columbia.edu/preprofessional/health/events.php

Back when doctors were among the wealthiest Americans, they could have retired early, but instead they tended to work until their own health failed.  Lately, clinical medicine is cast as an unrewarding profession.  Observers point to how “jackpot justice” is causing a malpractice crisis while cost-savings programs developed by managed care bureaucracies are blamed for destabilizing the doctor-patient relationship.  I’ll try to inspire those of you interested in becoming clinicians by explaining how the rewards of medical practice are so enormous that they outweigh the indignities that dominate the headlines.  In the end, modern doctors are still blessed with the same rewards as our predecessors, while technology expands our potential even beyond their dreams.

Dr. Kuchnir is the President of the Massachusetts Academy of Dermatology and sees patients at Kuchnir Dermatology & Dermatologic Surgery in the suburbs of west of Boston.  KDDS is consists of eight physician dermatologists, two nurse practioners and patient care providers and nineteen “patient care coordinators” — half of whom are future physicians spending a “gap year” as dermatology patient care coordinators.  He went to college at MIT, earned a PhD from Harvard in physical chemistry, and attended medical school at Washington University in St. Louis.  He completed residency at UMass where he is on faculty and takes professional interest in the philosophy of undergraduate premedical education.