Suyu is an alumnus of the 2012-2013 EPIIC “Global and Health” Colloquium. Suyu graduated in 2013 with a BS in Biology from Tufts University, and is currently pursuing a M.D. from New York Medical College.
Suyu was born in Zhengzhou China, and grew up in Sendai Japan, New Haven and Cheshire Connecticut. After he graduated from college, he eventually settled in Crown Heights, Brooklyn to “find himself” before medical school. He had the privileged opportunity to work with individuals facing the hardship of economic and healthcare inequality in NYC. Through this experience Suyu developed a deep passion for listening to the story of different people, and advocating for social justice. “You can learn something from everyone”, being a favorite quote of his. Through his work with Memorial Sloan Kettering, Suyu has developed a passion for taking care of the “whole patient”, understanding that the quality of life is a vital consideration of ethical medicine. As a first-generation immigrant American, and a global citizen, connecting with others, and building community is something that is close Suyu’s heart. Shortly before coming to NYMC, Suyu backpacked, India, Southeast Asia, and Japan. His final destination was his childhood home of Sendai, which he had not visited for 16 years. Using old Kodak photos, he tracked down his childhood friends, and teachers. This touching reunion left an indelible mark on him, teaching him that people are worth all the efforts.
During his time in medical school, he continued to pursue his passion for the intersection of humanism, resilience, public policy and medicine. He founded a narrative medicine and social-connectedness project called Humans of NYMC. Modeled after Humans of New York, Humans of NYMC engages medical school students in free script interviews of peers, whereby the interviewee and interviewer work together to craft a narrative to be shared with the rest of the community. This project empowers students to develop narrative competence, that is the ability to better understand the purpose and the meaning from a story that better allows professionals/individuals to connect with others- a key component of providing humanistic medical care. This project also aims to create open dialogue between people of differing backgrounds. In 2019, this project was selected as one of 5 keynote student innovations to be presented at the annual Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Conference in Phoenix,Arizona.
During medical school, Suyu also pursued his interest in resilience. A topic heavily covered during his EPIIC course. He dove into the literature by Dr. Carol Dweck, Dr. Angela Duckworth, Dr. Trzeciak, Dr. Daniel Kahneman and many others on the metatheory of resilience, positive psychology, neuroplasticity, heuristics, flow, growth mindset, grit, compassion, empathy, antifragility, gratitude, mindfulness, overcoming adversity & trauma, and the science of wellbeing. He founded, and now directs the NYMC Resiliency Curriculum, an entirely student designed, driven, implemented and researched resiliency curriculum. He is currently writing the official curriculum that is training all medical students at NYMC to cultivate their resilience and resiliency in fighting burnout in the medical field to self actualize their journeys as healers. Suyu views resilience as an innate drive present in everyone, that can be fostered and strengthened through cultivating our values, and passion. Resilience thus can drive the development of our resiliency, traits that allows us to not only manage the adversities and challenges that the medical education journey and our profession presents us, but to learn to reintegrate these adversity into our lives as sources of growth. Suyu strongly believes in the growth mindset: that our abilities, lives, and futures are not fixed nor set in stone, but rather can be improved through effort.
https://nymcresiliency.wordpress.com/
What’s being your experience in medical school, and how has it brought back to the passions you cultivated during your time with EPIIC and the IGL?
I was a Longitudinal Integrated Curriculum Scholar as a third year medical student. Students undergo an application process to be selected into this unique learning program across medical schools in the United States. Specifically students engage in a patient-centered learning program, where instead of short block rotations (the traditional format of clinical medical rotation) , they learn the core skills of doctoring by following a panel of patients longitudinally, over substantial time. This experience allowed me to follow a preterm infant through her birth at 27 weeks until when she was discharged at 40 weeks, counsel the mother through the psycho-social challenges of managing the unexpected nature of the birth and helping her be resilient throughout the “wait and see” period; an elderly patient with limited family support suffering from stage III peripheral artery disease; a patient attempting to navigate managing seizures as a result of and rehabilitation from her neurological surgery to remove a meningioma. This patient centered education allowed me to see many wonders of biomedical sciences radically change the lives of those ill; erythropoietin and blood transfusion ameliorate a less than optimal delivery, lamotrigine controlling seizures, phototherapy clearing the newborn of excess bilirubin. Yet, this experience has also highlighted to me the frustrating shortcomings of health care in tackling complex problems that require both compassionate clinical care and a larger policy response.
One patient that I met, a 26 year old male, had suffered a relapse of his opioid addiction. On his chart, he had a multitude of other mental health disorders, including depression, and anxiety. He’d been in and out of rehab, and suffered social wounds as repercussions of his addiction. A recent study by a group of physicians at University of California Los Angeles found that social pain is processed in some of the same brain areas that process physician pain and is quelled by pain relivers. In a sense, the paper states that stigmatizing treatment of people who use drugs, such as ignoring or rejecting them maybe the equivalent of a shock in the cycle of drug addiction: it’s a powerful social penalty that spurts further drug taking. Discussing this patient with many of my physician mentors and teachers, they lamented that aside from stabilizing his post-overdose symptoms, recommending rehab (again), and offering compassionate support, they had little else to offer. I could see the burnout in their eyes; as providers we learn to numb the pain that result from not being able to alleviate our patients’ suffering. My mentors often tell me that “we need a larger policy response”. Incidentally, a recent scientific literature estimates that over half of practicing physicians and one-third of nurses in the United States suffer from burnout.
In 2013 I traveled to Kosovo as a student researcher, as a part of the Tufts Institute of Global Leadership Program on Global Health and Security. Having grown up in China, Japan, and now living in the United States as an American citizen, I’ve also had a natural curiosity for the diversity of our global communities. This interest blossomed into a scholarly interest in global development, human rights and healthcare during my undergraduate studies. In Kosovo, I was able to study the way in which the nation rebuilt its healthcare infrastructure after decades of conflict in the aftermath of Balkanization. I met and learned of the different ways that multiple institutions and various professionals coordinated to improve primary care, addressing health disparities of ethnic minorities, and design systemic interventions for a crisis of PTSD in a recently post-conflict nation. After graduating from my master’s program, I interned as a health policy researcher at New York University’s School of Population Health, where I had the opportunity to work on a national initiative aimed at improving the cardiovascular health outcomes for underserved populations in the greater New York City Area. Here, I had the opportunity to research different health care delivery and reform models that coordinated efforts between local and federal government, academic institutions and non-profit healthcare organization in an attempt to implement policy and structural changes that has the potential to move the needle on people’s health in a way isolated clinical alone cannot achieve. More importantly, I spent 2 years working one on one with the homeless at a soup kitchen in New York City. This experience taught me how much I loved hearing people’s stories, and making the work (clinical, policy, or academic) about me. To be frank, my time at NYU jaded me a little bit to policy work. Working at Memorial Sloan Kettering really helped realign my passion for the humanism, which set my course for medical school. It’s been great to slowly merge that passion for humanistic medicine, compassion, with the larger policy work that could feel depersonalizing/abstract.
In medical school, I have served on my school’s student government as an elected representative. One of the first thing that I did was perform a qualitative assessment of the needs of our peers (specifically addressing a lack of mental health support amongst my peers). This has led to my founding and directing of the NYMC Resiliency Curriculum. Our resiliency curriculum is based on extensive research into the literature behind resilience, neuroplasticity, the growth mindset, and the spectrum of mental health distress and burnout that exists in a continuum across the medical field: from medical students to residents to physicians. In designing this curriculum, I’ve had the opportunity to further my understanding of burnout, and mental health; along with the opportunity to apply strategic leadership skills in creating partnership with the administrative, different student organizations, peers, and mentors. 3 years after its founding, our program is now an integrated part of our medical school curriculum, trains every single medical school student at our school, and has been recognized nationally for its merits. Most importantly, through my research, I’ve realized that many of the challenges that our patients’ face: for example not being able to receive adequate primary care that not only manages disease but also promote health, are linked to several causes of student, and practitioner burnout: feeling as though their practice does not reflect what they believe medicine should be.
In designing this systematic intervention program, and directing its implementation and growth, I saw my passions for global health, health policy, intersect with my new found interest in the science of compassion and mental health; and most importantly my “ex-tra medicine passions” directly intersect with my career as a future physician. The literature pointed towards the connection between the rising deaths of despair (https://www.npr.org/2020/03/18/817687042/deaths-of-despair-examines-the-steady-erosion-of-u-s-working-class-life those from suicide, drug overdose and alcoholic liver disease) to the lack of resilience in our patients. If we can train our physicians to become more resilient, and teach resilience to our patients, could that bridge be overcome? Can we make evident the incentive for decreasing physician burnout is aligned with health policy changes that would better coordinate patient care, and improved health outcomes? These are some of the questions that I hope to answer in pursuing a career of patient centered innovation: bettering shaping medical care to effectively treat individual illnesses, advancing scientific understanding of disease processes, whilst designing, evaluating and implanting policy changes improve community health outcomes, along with better empowering physicians to heal their patients.
On a more personal note, I hope to continue to follow my passion for travel, and world futbol in the future. I’m trying to improve my Spanish, so that I can backpack Latin America before all my loan obligations become too burdensome. I’m looking forward to catch some of the classic futbol rivalries like the NorthWest Derby, El Classico, Superclasico, Milan Derby, and Der Klasskier in person. I need to go watch Manchester United play at Old Trafford and Lionel Messi play in person before he retires. How is this related to EPIIC? How is it not? Our passions are related to our success. And success to our passions.