Elizabeth Kwo, currently a resident at CHA Somerville Primary Care, is one of the best doctors I've had the pleasure of working with.
It's always super frustrating when a doctor listens to your first 5 words, comes up with a conclusion (no matter how correct it may be), and then spends the rest of the session and your words reinforcing their opinion of that conclusion. It's a basic failure of the scientific method. You don't skew and cherrypick the data to follow your initial conclusion, like in middle school science class. You look at all the data first, and then come up with possible conclusions.
Dr. Kwo passes this acid test with five stars. Not only was she kind and attentive while listening to my descriptions, she also made me privy to her thought process and helped me rule out any serious concerns by patiently explaining each and every single one.
As if this is not stellar enough, today I phoned the primary care office with an urgent question while feeling very sick and had to resort to leave a message at the front desk for her. Getting an appointment would have taken too long. Just an hour later she called me back, and answered my questions on the phone for a whole 15 minutes! When I thanked her, she casually replied "Oh sure, there's no way we were going to let you go through that by yourself". I think that sums it up nicely.
Primary care, like teaching, is one of those things where being a good academic is very necessary but not sufficient by itself. You also need a healthy dose of understanding, empathy, care and compassion. Dr Kwo has both, with a healthy dose of common sense too. I don't know if she plans to keep doing primary care after her residency, but I sure hope she does for my own selfish purposes :) read more