Joel See, MD

My father was an internist in a bygone era. He worked alone in the clin­ic and went to the hos­pi­tal every morn­ing to see patients and then spent the rest of the day in the clin­ic. It was a fam­i­ly busi­ness, and my mom was in the office doing every­thing from answer­ing the phone to the billing. I also start­ed work­ing in the office myself for a few years before med­ical school and I am glad that I was able to see how things worked in the real world before get­ting over­whelmed with the sci­ence. The clin­ic was locat­ed in Waukegan, Illi­nois, and the patients were most­ly work­ing class, salt of the earth peo­ple, many com­ing in tired after work­ing long hours or third shifts. My dad did his best to take care of them, to keep them in good health so they could keep work­ing to sup­port their fam­i­lies. As an internist he pre­scribed med­ica­tions but also preached that patients have the pri­ma­ry respon­si­bil­i­ty for man­ag­ing their health in the con­text of their wider lives.I start­ed out in pri­ma­ry care but even­tu­al­ly my career took a dif­fer­ent path, but I proud­ly still tend to treat peo­ple as if I were still work­ing in a small clin­ic. I want to form rela­tion­ships that are mea­sured in years instead of vis­its. Even though I think my dad was a bit dis­ap­point­ed that I did not fol­low exact­ly in his foot­steps. I think he would be proud that I am able to car­ry on his lega­cy. I don’t have all of the solu­tions but I still con­sid­er it a suc­cess to help peo­ple get through life a lit­tle more com­fort­ably. I want to help peo­ple live their best active life, whether it be through dif­fer­ent pain treat­ments, pre­scrip­tions for ther­a­py or rec­om­men­da­tions for weight loss. Often, inac­tiv­i­ty is more to blame than age when peo­ple lose the abil­i­ty to do things on their own. Lack of phys­i­cal activ­i­ty also can lead to more vis­its to the doc­tor, more hos­pi­tal­iza­tions, and more use of med­i­cines for a vari­ety of illnesses.