Monday, June 19, 2023

Journeys to Parenthood

From the June 16, 2023 issue of the Transformational Times - Father's Day




Journeys to Parenthood  

 

 

Adina Kalet, MD, MPH 

 

 

As another holiday celebrating parents approaches, Dr. Kalet shares her very personal, circuitous, and challenging journey toward parenthood. Statistics suggest the challenges she and her husband faced are shared by many other physicians 

 

 

I always assumed I would have at least two children. My husband and I wanted a family and cherish our close sibling relationships. At 32, after completing residency and fellowship, and having started my first clinical job, I got pregnant easily. The pregnancy was uneventful, even fun at times, although I eventually needed a Caesarean section after 30 hours of labor for “failure to progress.Even though our first child had neonatal jaundice and needed to stay in the hospital for a few days, we all went home happy and healthy.   

 

When Zachai turned two, we were eager to have a second child. After an unsuccessful year trying the usual way, we sought the advice of a reproductive endocrinologist. Except for feeling a bit insulted when he called me “elderly” (I did know that advancing age was the most common cause of infertility, but didn’t think 34 was all that old), we were eager to get going. Time was of the essence. Thus began the five most challenging years of my life 

 

We started with a series of increasingly invasive tests. After a few cycles of medication, I had two major surgeries and one life-threatening complication. Still no pregnancy. With each “failure,” there was a swift, pressured decision to escalate the technical interventions. Because of the remarkable scientific advances, the options of Artificial Reproductive Technologies (ART) were rapidly expanding; but success rates were poorly established and thought to be highly dependent on the skill of the physicians. Deciding which team was the best made a research project out of choosing where to get fertility care.  

 

I was getting increasingly desperate. I had full-time clinical and teaching schedules and was raising a toddler. It never occurred to me to take either time off work for these treatments (it would not have been supported) or ask anyone in leadership for special arrangements. For one week of every cycle of in vitro fertilization (IVF), I needed to have daily intravaginal ultrasounds. This meant rising at 4 a.m., getting to the physician’s office, and then going to work. One Saturday morning, after another negative pregnancy test, I accidentally turned our car the wrong way on a busy avenue. Luckily, the other 6 a.m. drivers were alert, and I quickly turned the car around.  I was exhausted and heartsick. I pulled over to the curb and cried. 


 

Seeking more options 

 

In that moment, I realized that while becoming pregnant again was unlikely, having a second child in our lives was not. That week, I attended the first in a series of workshops on adoption and joined a support group for people with “secondary infertility.” 

 

A month later, in what was to be our final cycle of IVF, the physician told us that I had an “inhospitable uterine environment” (really, he said it exactly that way!) and further attempts would be futile. He said our only option of having another biological child would be gestational surrogacy 

 

I wasn't excited about surrogacy, but we explored it. A short while later, we had a conference call with a Surrogacy Agency in Colorado (gestational surrogacy was not legal in some states), where we discussed the procedural, legal, financial, and ethical challenges of having our embryos (which were in deep freeze in New Jersey) transferred to a wonderful Florida woman willing to carry this pregnancy as a surrogate.  

 

Soon, though, I made a very different phone call.    

 

A lawyer who specialized in international adoptions listened to my story carefully. She asked me nothing about body size, menstrual cycles, uterine environment, or sex life. She said nothing about lab tests, operating rooms, or anesthesia risk. She empathized with my sense of failure, sadness, and disappointment. After hearing that my husband and I had a combined age much less than 100 years, were employed and in good health, and were already raising a child, she reassured me that if we wanted another child—and were willing to complete reams of paperwork, be fingerprinted three different places, and welcome a social worker for an extensive home visit—we most likely would have a child as soon as the New Year.   

 

Three weeks later, we received a fuzzy faxed photograph of a beautiful newborn. It was the week before the Jewish New Year (I had thought she meant January 1!). We quickly arranged a trip abroad to meet the baby, but we needed to leave her in family foster care as the slow, rigorous legal adoption process proceeded. We were receiving weekly updates about our to be child, preparing our now 6-year-old for life as a big brother, and anxiously awaiting the call.  

 

We brought her home in January and the rest, as they say, “is history.  

   

 

Physicians have more trouble getting pregnant than the general population  

 

One in four American physicians seek infertility treatment. The well-documented, progressive decline in fertility with aging occurs a decade earlier in women than men, making the choices and timing of childbearing for women physicians especially important to consider 

While in retrospect, most (56.8%) women physicians have no regrets regarding childbearing, 28.6% say they would have attempted pregnancy earlier, 17.1% would have chosen a different career, and 7.0% would have chosen to cryopreserve their eggs (Stentz, et. al. 2016). Available  options are likely to become less invasive and more effective as the biology of ART evolves,  changing the decisions people make.  

 

Physicians who had babies during medical school and residency perceived less workplace support (68.2%) than those who had their first pregnancies following training (88.6%). Nearly half of physicians who eventually faced infertility were surprised, as I was (Stentz, et. al. 2016). 

 

Infertility, pregnancy complications, and miscarriages are associated with high rates of burnout (Casilla-Lennon M, et. al. 2021). 

 

Understanding of—and attitudes aboutadoption and alternative ways to create a family are also rapidly evolving (more on that at another time). Involuntary childlessness is more common among physicians compared to the general population and may be preventable if we are willing to acknowledge and meaningfully address the problem. As women make up a significant proportion of all physicians, this issue impacts the health of the profession and the public.   

 

 

Like all women, physicians need support during this difficult experience 

 

In a recent article in our premier peer reviewed journal, Academic Medicine, three physicians with personal and professional experience with infertility made three relatively modest and achievable calls for change 

 

  1. Increase education and awareness about fertility. 


    Research has shown that nonfertility specialist physicians do not truly understand how rapidly fertility declines with age and overestimate the effectiveness and underestimate the cost of fertility treatments.  


    Addressing these knowledge gaps and providing individualized counseling is a simple strategy to help our future colleagues make the best choices for themselves. 

    After nearly 40 years as a physician and 30 years as a parent, I have very few regrets about the choices I have made. I would not trade the wisdom I have gained from having faced very hard things. I would not have made different choices. But if I had known more and had a trusted mentor to turn to for help in navigating the hard times, it would have saved me a great deal of personal suffering. 


    Combining a medical career with parenthood is challenging! Explicit and balanced

    discussion of these issues during medical education only seems right.  

     

    Provide insurance coverage for and access to fertility assessment and management. 


    As I have discussed in my Mother’s Day Director’s Corner, insurance coverage for fertility treatments is not ubiquitous. Infertility treatments are very costly financially, physically, psychologically, and spiritually. Even with two incomes, my husband and I needed to borrow money to pay for the care we pursued.  


    Offer support for trainees and physicians undergoing fertility treatments. 


    I sought group therapy and needed care for anxiety and insomnia from a psychiatrist. I asked for and received the support of my faith community. I was on my own to work all this out. As institutional leaders and educators, we have an opportunity to improve the long-term resiliency and well-being of our physician workforce through increased awareness, empathy and understanding 


    We can reduce the concern many have about being stigmatized by peers and leadership for taking time away from work to attend to personal needs by making it possible to schedule fertility-related care as part of routine health maintenance.  

     


Working with young physicians to ensure they can flourish in the profession in the long haul is fundamental to our work as medical educators. Helping others build healthy families is core to that mission. 


Given that prime childbearing years overlap with the most intense decade of a physician’s education and training, our systems must be structured so that every physician parent and medical family—no matter how that is definedcan thrive.   

Like many others before and since, we took a circuitous route to parenthood of our two wonderful children. I hope our story helps others talk more about these issues. As colleagues and friends—and as institution leaders—we must be mindful that becoming a family is one of the most important, frightening, and wonderful transitions life offers. 



For further reading: 

  • Stentz NC, Griffith KA, Perkins E, Jones RD, Jagsi R. Fertility and Childbearing Among American Female Physicians. J Womens Health (Larchmt). 2016 Oct;25(10):1059-1065. doi: 10.1089/jwh.2015.5638. Epub 2016 Jun 27. PMID: 27347614. 
  • Marshall, Ariela L. MD; Arora, Vineet M. MD, MAPP; Salles, Arghavan MD, PhD.Physician Fertility: A Call to Action. Academic Medicine 95(5):p 679-681, May 2020. | DOI: 10.1097/ACM.0000000000003079 
  • Casilla-Lennon M, Hanchuk S, Zheng S, Kim DD, Press B, Nguyen JV, Grimshaw A, Leapman MS, Cavallo JA. Pregnancy in physicians: A scoping review. Am J Surg. 2022 Jan;223(1):36-46. doi: 10.1016/j.amjsurg.2021.07.011. Epub 2021 Jul 21. PMID: 34315575; PMCID: PMC8688196. 


Two resources I found extraordinarily helpful in my journey:  

  • RESOLVE: A Blog of the National Infertility Association, Kitchen Table Conversations: The Impact of Infertility & Women Physicians. (link here) 
  • National Council for Adoption blog: Adoption Medicine: Improving the Health and Wellbeing of Adopted Children. (link here) 


 

Adina Kalet, MD, MPH, is the Director of the Robert D. and Patricia E. Kern Institute for the Transformation of Medical Education and holder of the Stephen and Shelagh Roell Endowed Chair at the Medical College of Wisconsin. 

 

Thursday, June 15, 2023

Pediatricians Offer Reflections on Parenting

From the June 16, 2023 issue of the Transformational Times - Father's Day
 



Pediatricians Offer Reflections on Parenting






Parents often seek more from pediatricians than medical advice. Reassurance, practical wisdom, and empowerment are important, too. TT Copy Editor Karen Herzog asked MCW faculty members Heather Toth, MD and Stephen Malcom, MD for their best parenting advice, and culled a few gems from two famous pediatrician-authors, including one bit of wisdom for pediatricians…




Heather Toth, MD, FACP, FAAP, SFHM, Program Director of the Internal Medicine-Pediatrics Residency Program at MCW, Professor and Hospitalist in the Departments of Medicine and Pediatrics, and Vice-Chief of Pediatric Hospital Medicine.

This advice was shared by our first-grade teacher and has stuck with me even now that my kids are teenagers: 
"Know your children’s friends’ parents and stay close with them." As we know, it "takes a village" to raise children and embrace all of them with love!



Steve Malcom, MD, FAAP, FACP, Associate Program Director of the Internal Medicine & Pediatrics Residency Program and Adjunct Associate Professor of Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at MCW. 

The piece of advice I share with my families in clinic the most is regarding children ages 1 to 3½. In this age range, the child loves you unconditionally as a parent, but they don’t care about you as a human being:

They don’t care about your health, house, relationship, career, the amount of sleep you get or if you are having a good or a bad day. They want what they want and that’s it.

Very important to remember with this age group is to never hit and try not to yell.  Just set boundaries, utilize timeouts, walk away from the tantrums, and praise all the good moments of sharing and kindness.

At 3 ½ years of age, something magical happens and their empathy grows a little bit each day.
 



Benjamin Spock, MD (1903-1998), pediatrician and author:

Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do.
The child supplies the power, but the parents have to do the steering.




T. Berry Brazelton, MD (1918-2018), pediatrician, author, and developer of the Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale

Parents don’t make mistakes because they don’t care, but because they care so deeply.

Every time you give a parent a sense of success or of empowerment, you’re offering it to the baby indirectly. Because every time a parent looks at that baby and says, "Oh, you’re so wonderful," that baby just bursts with feeling good about themselves.






Monday, June 12, 2023

The Evolving Landscape of Conferences

From the June 9, 2023 issue of the Transformational Times


This is the Kern MedEd Blog's 300th published post!



The
Evolving Landscape of Conferences 

 

By Tavinder Ark, BSc, MSc, PhD 

 


A data scientist returns to an annual conference after a 10-year absence, and notices dramatic shifts in the diversity of medical professionals and disciplines represented, and another shift that warrants reflection... 

 

 

I attended the Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM) conference for the first time in 10+ years. I was immediately struck by the multidisciplinary nature of the event, reflective of the increasing complexity of healthcare itself. It was amazing to see the breadth of topics addressed, from how to change gun control based on the cost of caring for survivors to the care of incarcerated patients to online coaches for students. 

 

As a data scientist, my knowledge of data and statistical insights are critical to inform healthcare strategies and improve patient outcomes. The opportunity to learn about the real-life problems with which the medical field is grappling is always one more reason these conferences are worthwhile. It is important for data scientists to understand the context of the physicians’ world and the role that patient-centered care plays. By understanding the emphasis on individual patient needs, preferences, and values, data scientists can develop research questions, capture data, and analyze data with a more applicable model and reference. 

 


How conferences are changing


Initially, it was slightly intimidating to be surrounded by a sea of medical professionals. But it didn't take long to appreciate the convergence of disciplines. The diversity of professionals was a clear testament to the evolving nature of medicine, one that increasingly recognizes the importance of data analysis and evidence-based research. 

 

However, the changes were not only evident in the composition of attendees. Over time, I've noticed that the nature of conferences has significantly evolved. Traditionally, conferences were forums for collaboration, fostering relationships and cross-pollination of ideas. They were less about personal gain and more about the collective progress of the field. 

 

Regrettably, the trend seems to have shifted toward individualistic promotion. Presentations have become a platform for showcasing one's research, often overshadowing the invaluable aspect of collaboration. In some ways, it feels like we're losing part of the essence that makes conferences so enlightening and beneficial. 

 


Moments of collaboration and conversation


But it's not all gloom. One of the biggest highlights of the SGIM conference for me was the opportunity to present my research in medical education. The interface between data science and medicine has never been more exciting or necessary. Sharing my findings and receiving feedback from a broader medical community was both humbling and insightful. 

 

Moreover, despite the trend of individual promotion, there were moments of genuine collaboration. Networking events provided the chance to meet fellow researchers, fostering connections that would extend beyond the conference. Additionally, the poster presentations became a platform for productive discussions, reinforcing that the spirit of collaboration is still alive, albeit interspersed with instances of individualistic pursuits. 

 

Looking at the bright side, this shift may be interpreted as a reflection of the growing competitiveness and fast-paced evolution in healthcare. More than ever, medical professionals and researchers must keep abreast of the latest developments and prove their competency. 

 

With that all said, the SGIM conference was a valuable experience, despite the evident evolution in its nature. For all its pros and cons, it reminded me that in the face of changing dynamics, it's up to us -- the attendees -- to preserve the spirit of collaboration and harness the power of shared knowledge for the betterment of healthcare. 



Why collaboration remains important

 

Even as we strive to gain recognition for our work, let's not forget that the true essence of these conferences lies in the cross-fertilization of ideas, the collective growth of our understanding, and our shared commitment to improving patient care. The beauty of knowledge lies in its shared growth. And the SGIM conference, with all its evolution, remains a valuable platform to contribute towards that goal. 

 


Tavinder K. Ark, BSc, MSc, PhD, is a faculty member and the Director of the Kern Institutes Data Science Lab at MCW.