Posts tagged ‘physician’
Meet Our Physician Families
Among the 143 members of the incoming Penn State College of Medicine class are three students who run the risk of eventually having mom or dad as a professor. That’s because the students have at least one (if not two) Penn State Hershey physicians as parents. Meet the students and their parents:
August 16, 2011 at 3:28 pm pennstatemedicine Leave a comment
Looking for the right care for patients
Dan McDougal, M.D., ’71, passed away on May 10, from ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). The story below was written just before his passing.
When he was a young child, the late Dan McDougal, M.D., ’71, was fascinated by the human body. “I was always very good at maintaining things and the most challenging and rewarding thing to maintain is the human body,” explained McDougal.
His passion for medicine led him to the doors of Penn State College of Medicine. While at Penn State, McDougal remembered a defining moment that stuck with him concerning the practice of medicine. The chief of medicine at the time, Graham Jeffries, M.D., told medical students that most mistakes in medicine are not made by not knowing, but by not looking. From that moment, McDougal made “looking” a priority.
To McDougal, “looking” included the search to find the right care for patients and ways to aid other physicians. With this particular insight into medicine, McDougal accepted the medical director position in 1998 with Antietam Health Services, part of the Washington County Health System. There he was a proponent for both physicians and patients. (more…)
The finding — and following — of a killer (T-cell)
To really appreciate this story, we have to start at the end—simply put, there are people alive today because of a discovery made by an oncology fellow in the mid 1980s. And not just alive-these people are doing well, living healthy and full lives, sometimes symptom-free, because one doctor, Thomas P. Loughran Jr., M.D., professor of medicine and director, Penn State Hershey Cancer Institute, noticed something that no one else did.
“He’s a super doctor,” says George Graham of Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, one of Loughran’s patients who was unable to find appropriate treatment for large granular lymphocyte (LGL) leukemia at other facilities.
Loughran came to discovering LGL through what might be considered standard detective work—he reviewed patient labs and blood smears and kept looking. During a rotation at the University of Washington, Loughran saw a patient who was referred to the chief resident with an unknown illness and a history of recurrent fevers and infections. Upon reviewing the patient’s blood smear, Loughran was the first to notice that the patient’s white cells were granular lymphocytes that were larger than they should be. After reviewing the previous five years of records of the hematopathology laboratory directed by Marshall Kadin, M.D., he realized that other patients with similar histories also had the unusual white cell appearance. Loughran and Kadin went on to publish their discovery and subsequent research in the Annals of Internal Medicine. (more…)
