GLOBAL HEALTH AGING

Name: Dr. Sarab Sodhi
Job: Emergency Physician, Bioethicist, Ultrasonographer Country: United States and India
Age: 31

A currently practicing Emergency Physician and Ultrasound Faculty Member at Cooper University Hospital, Dr. Sarab Sodhi trained in medicine and bioethics at Temple University School of Medicine, after an undergraduate biochemistry and philosophy degree at Albright College. He did his residency and fellowship training at Cooper Hospital, where he stayed on as faculty, with a concurrent appointment as the director of Cooper Medical School of Rowan University’s Undergraduate Ultrasound Program – a program that he is developing currently. His passions are medical education, evidence-based medicine, undergraduate medical education, ultrasound, and bioethics. Outside of medicine, he spends his time with his wife, son, dog, and cat. Connect with him on Twitter, LinkedIn, and on his website.

On his career as a physician and educator:

“I’m an emergency physician at a busy, academic, level 1 trauma center, and teaching hospital. I’m also a core ultrasound faculty, which means I spend a lot of time teaching fancy ultrasound skills to my residents and medical students. The other major hat I wear is as the director of undergraduate ultrasound for the medical school. As the director, I am designing a four-year integrated point of care ultrasound curriculum to ensure that I give students the tools they need when they have completed medical school. The goal is to help patients quicker, more accurately, and with more cost-effective care.”

On how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted his work:

“COVID has led to a few changes in my work life. Like most other places in the country, we convinced everyone to stay home from the emergency department – a little too well. It means we’re seeing complications of diseases we rarely see (like cardiogenic shock from heart attacks that usually are treated rather rapidly, but as patients stay home and minimize symptoms, these once rare disease complications are becoming challenging). Shifts in full PPE are different – far more uncomfortable when wearing a head covering, eye protection, an N95, and sometimes a face shield over a lot. Many of my colleagues sport nose bandaids to prevent a breakdown from the masks as well. My medical school job has led to an increase in my meetings from home, trying to figure out when is safe for students to return, what’s the best way of restarting, etc., not to mention trying to redesign a curriculum for various approaches.”

On how he finds time for self-care:

“It has been challenging. My wife’s been working from home as well as going into the hospital (she’s an Endocrine NP) and, we have a 9-month-old baby. Juggling keeping a house moving, our dog fed and walked, our child fed and watched, and both of our work schedules have been trying- more so than before. Luckily, our daycare remained open with excellent precautions, or we’d have been completely insane. That said, I make time every day for a 30-40 minute walk with the dog and a workout on my rather bougie Peleton. We’ve also been doing masked visits with the grandparents to ensure they get to see the child when we’ve had a stretch of non-clinical time.”

On why narrative medicine important for the public:

“Physicians are often held up as caricatures of who we are – whether it’s as beyond reproach, starched white coat wearing, paragons of virtue, or as shills of big pharma and big vaccine, with the companies slipping money into our pockets. The truth is somewhere between these two vast extremes, and I believe narrative medicine and explaining the sometimes broken healers that try the best we absolutely can within our own messy lives may help give context to our patients.”

On how he combines bioethics and medicine:

“I started a bioethics degree to become a bioethicist, ivory-towered, including writing theses or debating the thorny ethical issues. Luckily, the degree I started with is a degree in urban bioethics – a distinction that focuses more so on the challenges of the social determinants of health, the obstructions to us providing our patients the best care, etc. It has led me to have a more forceful voice with our elected leaders in the swaths of letters I send them. While it helps me handle the tougher questions with some more comfort than many of my colleagues, it also tempers the decisive nature that my profession demands. The biggest skill I developed from that training is that I’ve become better at asking patients “Why” before I label them as non-compliant or non-adherent, and just sitting and listening.

I believe narrative medicine and explaining the sometimes broken healers that try the best we absolutely can within our own messy lives may help give context to our patients.

Dr. Sarab Sodhi, MD, MAUB