Chapter 06: An Opportunity for Intellectual Challenge at MD Anderson

Chapter 06: An Opportunity for Intellectual Challenge at MD Anderson

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Description

Here Dr. Podoloff tells how he decided to leave private practice in 1985 for a position at MD Anderson. At this time. Nuclear Medicine was splitting off as a separate department. He notes that he took a substantial salary cut, but lists the benefits of working in this new context. He notes that Drs. Marv Chasen and Gerald Dodd served as his mentors.

Next Dr. Podoloff observes that in 1985, the perception was that MD Anderson was a very depressing place where patients went to die. He tells an anecdote about the diversity among the faculty at MD Anderson.

Identifier

PodoloffD_01_20150402_C06

Publication Date

4-2-2015

City

Houston, Texas

Topics Covered

The Interview Subject's Story - Joining MD Anderson/Coming to Texas; MD Anderson History; Diversity at MD Anderson

Transcript

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

Well, there’s more to that story.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Well, tell me.

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

So anyhow, we’re here. And I’m pretty happy at Diagnostic. But I built a department, and now it’s running on automatic pilot. And I’m not really learning anything new. I’m teaching a lot. I actually had an appointment as a clinical professor over at the medical school.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah, I noticed that.

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

Yeah. Because the cardiologist over at the medical school took nuclear cardiology away from the radiologists and I was able at my clinic to have the students come over and I could show them these MUGA scans that I was talking about. And so I always for a couple years—well, it says it in there. I don’t remember when.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Seventy-three to ’75?

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

Right.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Associate professor of—that was San Antonio.

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

That was when I was in San Antonio.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Right. And this was ’76 to ’85.

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

Exactly. In ’86 I came over here. So the whole time I was there I was doing something academic.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Right. And just for the record that was clinical associate professor of nuclear medicine and radiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

Correct.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

OK. And so that was—you weren’t actually like doing full-scale classes. You were instructing when people sent them to you to—

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

I was doing an apprenticeship, which is the way most radiologists teach young radiologists. You sit by somebody and you watch them and you talk to them, and then they let you read. So I took all the cardiac students.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

It seems like a really subtle skill. I mean just looking at the images that you have up there, that would take handholding.

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

That’s why I tell people all the time that’s why it’s a four-year course. Because I’ve had a lot of people over the years say, “Can you teach me how to read X-rays? I’ll come down for a couple weeks.” Well, I can teach you how to look at an X-ray in a couple weeks. But if you want to learn how to read one I’ll have to send you through a residency.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Right. Now how would you compare the skill of doing that with say a pathologist’s eye? When I interview pathologists they say that you have an eye or you don’t. And it’s really hard to develop it if you don’t have it. Is there something similar in this work?

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

Yeah. I mean first of all you have to be drawn to it. You have to like structure and form. And you don’t necessarily—although it’s changing now. But early on form and function were two different things. So the anatomists did the form and the function was done by the physiologists. That’s again a reason why if you’re both an internist and a radiologist you have both form and function training. The original training of radiologists was totally anatomic. Just like the original training of pathologists was totally. And either you like that or you don’t. You’re either facile at it—they can teach you how to look for things. But they can’t teach you to find them. You have to have that particular eye-brain map.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

I mean I always find it fascinating when I talk to people through these interviews what enables them to do what they do. It can be a very subtle gift. It doesn’t show. But when you get them talking about it, it’s a pretty—

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

You have to like it. So anyhow, I was getting bored. And it’s now 1984. So I’ve been there nine years. But I was making a real good living. Making a lot more money than anybody over here was making, because that was the golden age of radiology. So I’m walking around in the southwest part of town one day, and I went to the Jewish community center to pick my son up. And I look up and I see this mane of white hair. And I recognized the guy immediately as Marv Chasen. He was my intern at Wilford Hall. And so we took up a friendship. They were relatively new in town. He couldn’t find a job in San Antonio. So he came to MD Anderson. And Marv and me and my wife and his wife palled around a lot. And our kids were about the same age. They’re still friendly. And Marv started to talk to me about—he noticed that I was bored. And how would I like to come over to MD Anderson? I’m not crazy about that. Well, go talk to Gerry Dodd. Well, what happened was the exact same thing that happened at Diagnostic Clinic eleven years earlier. Nuclear medicine was part of the Department of Internal Medicine at MD Anderson. A guy named Tom Haynie, who was the head of medicine, was running it. It had nothing to do with radiology. And Gerry Dodd, the head of radiology, was getting needled by all his friends as to why he didn’t have a nuclear medicine department. Well, he asked Tom Haynie to join him. And Tom said, “Well, I’m the department chair.” And Jerry said, “Well, I’ll make you department chair. We’ll develop a department of nuclear medicine.” It’s a section everywhere else in the world but at MD Anderson it’s a department. And that was the reason for that, to get Tom to come over. Well, Gerry wanted a radiologist in the nuclear medicine department, because all he had was internists. They didn’t smell like him, they didn’t think like him. So we started to talk, Jerry and I. And after about a year of negotiations I agreed to come over here, at a huge salary cut. And I got kids that are going off to college. I mean I literally lost half my income by coming over here.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Wow.

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

So I sent my wife back to work. Didn’t send her. She willingly went back to work.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

What does she do?

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

She’s an RN.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

OK. (laughter) Now to take that, I mean obviously taking a job at MD Anderson meant a number of compromises. So what was the appeal?

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

Intellectual appeal. I was an unfulfilled author. I was an unfulfilled scientist. There’s a lot of things that I wanted to do that I couldn’t do in private practice. Or I couldn’t do them easily.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

You said you were an unfulfilled author. Meaning?

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

I like to write papers.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Papers. Right. So what did they feel you brought? I mean why were you such a catch at that point?

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

Again it had to do with the internal medicine radiology background and the merging of those two disciplines. It was very appealing to Tom the internist. And it was very appealing to Jerry the radiologist. Not for monetary reasons, but for intellectual and scientific reasons. And Tom became my mentor. And literally every success that I’ve had at MD Anderson over the past twenty years I owe to those two guys, because they were marvelous mentors.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Wow. How did they mentor you? What was that like?

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

Well, I used to meet with Tom almost every Saturday and we’d just talk about work at first and then other things. We got to know each other very well. If I had a problem, if I had something to negotiate within the institution, he’d been there since 1966. And I had a similar but less intense relationship with Jerry because Jerry doesn’t emote very well, whereas Tom did. So again as I say that’s God’s working again.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

What was your impression of MD Anderson when you arrived?

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

Well, it was colored by my impression of it before I got here.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

And what was that?

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

You send a patient over there and you never heard from them again. It was the place where people went to die. It was a depressing horrible place. Who the hell wants to work there? And in the 1970s that was a pretty pervasive impression of MD Anderson in the community, because people were flocking to Methodist with their cancers, because they didn’t want to go to MD Anderson. It was a death sentence. I don’t know if you were watching The Emperor of All Maladies. But in the 1970s cancer was a death sentence. So I came with a very—well, I’ll see what this place really is like. I’ll learn something. And I was welcomed. It became pretty quickly evident to me that I had some really smart people around me. And I remember this conversation because it taught me something. I said to Tom one day, I said, “There’s an awful lot of foreigners on your staff.” Because almost everybody in private practice was a white American. And Tom said, “That’s part of the strength of MD Anderson, that diversity.” And it was an eye-opening way to look at things for me. And it continues to be that way. Now my medical school, when I went to medical school in Brooklyn at Downstate, in my class we had two women, both pretty ugly as I remember, and we had one black kid from somewhere, I don’t remember where, African American. Everybody else was either Jewish or Italian. I went back there last year for my fiftieth anniversary. They have 163 students in the freshman class and they speak twenty-seven languages.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Wow. The world has definitely changed, it really has.

Donald A. Podoloff, MD:

Yeah, in a really good way.

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Chapter 06: An Opportunity for Intellectual Challenge at MD Anderson

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