Commencement 2008: The future of biomedicine

Mandar Muzumdar arrived almost three years ago at a relief camp in Misissippi to find people who had desperate medical problems after Hurricane Katrina had left them homeless. That experience changed him.

His trip to the camp came in October 2005, two months after Katrina hit, when he took a week off from his third year of medical school at Stanford to help out at the refugees in Waveland, Miss. He found people with serious respiratory problems after inhaling mold in their homes after 30-foot waters had receded from floods. Others had "extremely dangerous" medical conditions, he said, such as very high blood pressure or high blood sugar levels - and they had gone without medication.

"It showed me how disparate health care is," said Muzumdar, a Harvard graduate. "It is even worse in the face of natural disaster."

That experience also led him to recognize what he called "the power of the primary care doctor," because he saw that a generalist could more immediately evaluate and treat disaster refugees than doctors who were specialists. That had such an impact on him that he changed his plans to pursue a career in radiation oncology, a field that he now thinks would be too specialized without enough general medical training. Instead, he will pursue training in medical oncology, which encompasses training in general internal medicine (a primary care field)

He'll start a residency in internal medicine this fall at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston. After that, he still plans to pursue additional training in medical oncology. He chose oncology in memory of his father, who died from cancer when Muzumdar was only 2 years old. But he also likes the idea that training in primary care first would enable him to help should any other natural disaster strike.

"My general medicine training would give me the power to do something," he said.