•Resident & Student News•
 "There's no other profession like ours," FP Regina Benjamin, M.D., tells family medicine residents and medical students at the 2004 National Conference. |
BY SHERI PORTER
Regina Benjamin, M.D., believes passionately in providing health care to the underserved. That's why, in 1990, she founded the Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic on Alabama's Gulf Coast in what she calls "a community of working poor."
That's also why she gave a clear directive to her young audience here during the National Conference of Family Medicine Residents and Medical Students July 28 - 31. "I believe you and I need to be lighthouses, to stand for what we believe in," said Benjamin. One way to provoke change "is to let the world know it's on the wrong course," she said.
Benjamin, a family physician, presented the Stephen J. Jackson, M.D., Memorial Lecture, and she came to the podium with a strong résumé. Benjamin was the first black woman elected to the AMA Board of Trustees and the first woman president of the Alabama Medical Association. She received the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights in 1997 and has been featured in major U.S. news outlets, including The New York Times and World News Tonight With Peter Jennings.
"Health care is not simply (ensuring) the absence of disease," said Benjamin. Physicians can undertake community projects to help their patients. For instance, she said she worked through the Alabama health department to help clean up the water in the bayou by providing containers fishermen could use to dispose of their boat oil. "It was just a simple thing -- putting containers there," said Benjamin, but it made a difference.
Keep tabs on the community's economic condition, she told residents and students, because patients will come in with upset stomachs and high blood pressure -- but "the real problem is they don't have a job. They can't think of their health when they can't put food on the table."
Understand the trust that patients place in you. "There's no other profession like ours," said Benjamin. "A perfect stranger will walk up to you and put her baby's life in your hands simply because she trusts you." A woman will divulge her deepest, darkest secrets -- particularly about domestic violence -- because of that trust. But with that trust comes a tremendous amount of responsibility, Benjamin said.
"We are the leaders in our communities," Benjamin said. "Remember, you never know who's watching you." She recalled an elderly black gentleman who, several years ago, stopped her as he was cleaning a room after an AMA meeting. "I just want you to know that we're proud of you," he said. "I told my granddaughter about you."
Lastly, Benjamin urged audience members to keep their lives in balance. Get enough sleep, eat right and take vacations, she advised. "Put on your own (oxygen) mask before you help others," she said, referencing the message airline passengers hear before takeoff.
Physicians balance many balls, said Benjamin. "Some of those balls are rubber and some are precious crystal. Some balls you can drop and some (like family) you just can't. You have to decide which balls to keep in the air."
To reach writer Sheri Porter, e-mail sporter@aafp.org.
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