Hooked on Rheum with Howard Blumstein, MD
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
I did not really think about rheumatology until the first or second year of medical school, when we had a very brief course on it. However, it wasn’t until my fourth year of medical training that I seriously considered rheumatology as a specialty. It was then that I worked with my first mentor, Alan Baer, MD, who was in Buffalo at the time, but now runs the center for Sjögren’s syndrome at Johns Hopkins. This was my first real foray into rheumatology, resulting in an overwhelming feeling that I was drawn to it.
One thing that appealed to me was the tempo of the field. In most cases, you had ample time to make further decisions. You had to look at and analyze a considerable amount of data and then make thoughtful decision.
Another thing that appealed to me was that it was a field that few people knew about, really. A typical internist generally knows a good amount about cardiology or gastrointestinal disorders, but rheumatology evades most people. There is this impression that there are a lot of acronyms and blood tests, but much of it is a mystery. You needed expertise in these specific areas to be a rheumatologist.
I continued my medical training at the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. My internal medicine program director, Nayan Kothari, MD, happened to be a rheumatologist. He did a board review every morning at 6 a.m., where he would go through questions from the internal medicine prep course. I found that when there were rheumatology questions, I liked the material. I never got bored with it, it was always easy for me to answer the questions, and I always enjoyed learning more about the field.
There is one other component to my path to rheumatology. My grandmother played a very large role in raising me, and she had rheumatoid arthritis. She used to talk about her rheumatologist, a Dr. Moskowitz, saying that he saved her life. He treated her with gold, but, more importantly, he kept her moving and stayed on top of her disease. I didn’t necessarily become a rheumatologist because of her, but I thought of her frequently during my training and I still think about her today.
You never really know how things are going to work out when you choose your specialty. It’s like marriage: You take that leap of faith and hope for the best. However, I have never regretted my decision to choose rheumatology.
Howard Blumstein ,MD
Rheumatology Associates of Long Island
Clinical assistant professor of medicine
Stony Brook University Hospital
Member, Medical Policy Committee
United Rheumatology