Dr. Rhonda Low reinvests passion in her profession

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      Dr. Rhonda Low may no longer be on a nightly TV newscast, but the Vancouver family doctor says her 15 years in front of the camera made her a better health-care provider. And she continues to pursue community journalism, saying the more informed that people are about their own health the better the decisions they can make about their own care.

      Low spent 15 years as the health expert for CTV News, appearing on air five nights a week with stories she produced herself on top of seeing patients in her full-time practice. Her contract was terminated suddenly last year—something she didn’t see coming—but she says her experience as a reporter gave her invaluable skills that she uses daily.

      “One worst thing about doctors is that you can end up getting mired in jargon,” Low says in an interview over a large latte at a Hornby Street café. “You’re so used to writing reports that you end up talking to your patients in the same way, and words you fall into using might be construed as a little bit derogatory.”

      A doctor might say her patient’s X-ray results are “unremarkable”, for instance. That’s a good thing, but people might not quite see it that way. Then there are abbreviations for symptoms such as “shortness of breath on exertion”. “That becomes SOB,” Low says. “People think, ‘What? There’s no SOB in here!’

      “But doing journalism helps you drill it down to plainspeak,” the Vancouver native adds. “You avoid all that jargon. And if you can’t get it out in 10 seconds, boy, you’re taking too long.”

      Low says she was shocked when she was escorted out of the newsroom about a year and a half ago, around the time other staffing shakeups were taking place at the station. She had her segment ready to go and had already had her makeup done for that evening’s broadcast when she was called into someone’s office and told to get her coat.

      “I still have people asking me, ‘What did you talk about last night?’ ” she says. "Apparently, sports replaced the health segment." 

      She now writes a monthly health column for a local magazine and does other freelance journalism, motivated in part by helping people learn.

      “Education is a really big deal to me,” says Low, who helped pioneer a course called In-terviewing Skills (Bedside Manners) for UBC’s first-year med-school curriculum. “If you can help someone learn something, then it’s empowerment. And if you can empower folks about their health, they can make appropriate choices. You can give them the options, then they know where they want to go and what’s best for them. But if you don’t give them basic information, how can they make the right choices? That can cause a lot of anxiety, too: fear of the unknown.”

      Low, who worked at a private family practice for many years, first in Mount Pleasant, then at City Square, is just as enthusiastic about education for doctors themselves. A graduate of UBC’s medical school, she’s the secretary and an executive-committee member of the largest annual medical-update course for primary-care physicians in Canada. Held out of St. Paul’s Hospital, the five-day refresher has about 60 speakers who give 10-minute presentations on everything from cardiovascular conditions to skin disorders. It draws 1,500 physicians from across the country and the United States.

      “I’m really interested in continuing education for doctors,” says Low, who is a clinical associate professor at UBC. “If you don’t keep up, you become complacent, then you get in a rut. And when you get in a rut, you become dangerous. That cascade can happen. It’s up to you to keep the magic alive.

      “What drives people to get into medical school in the first place is not only the desire to give back, to help, but also academic interest,” she notes. “The field keeps changing, so you always have to keep up. If you’re the type of person who doesn’t want to keep up, then this isn’t the profession for you. You’ll be obsolete very quickly.”

      The chance to help others was one reason Low pursued medicine.

      “My parents would always say, ‘Your life has to be one-third, one-third, one-third. One, make sure you can support yourself; we don’t care what you do but be able to make a living. Two, make sure you love what you’re doing. And three, make sure you’re giving back.’

      “I think I was that annoying kid in the school yard who would run after my friends with a Band-Aid just waiting for them to get injured so I could help them,” she says. “I also had a really good family doctor when I was a kid. The experience was always really interesting, and he was always reassuring, not frightening. Plus, my grandfather, who came to Canada in the late 1800s, was an unofficial herbalist. At home, we were raised on Chinese medicine, and I always wanted to know how that worked. With all those factors, it was a no-brainer to move forward into a health-care-type field. I have a continual interest in unpeeling the layers, where you can keep learning and where you can keep being of service.”

      Low, who left her family practice a couple of years ago because of an exorbitant rent raise, now works at Copeman Healthcare Centre. The private medical facility has a team of practitioners, including registered dietitians, kinesiologists, psychologists, licensed nurse practitioners, and physiotherapists. The centre’s main program, called LifePlus, costs $4,200 a year.

      “The focus at Copeman is preventive medicine,” Low says. “The first visit is an hour, and each visit after that is half an hour at least.…It is really neat for me to…be able to offer that kind of service, to really get to know patients. I like it for the incredible academic challenge and for all the personal interaction. You get to spend time with patients, get to learn about them. It’s very individualized.

      “I love being a doctor,” she adds. “I love making a difference in someone’s life. Even if it’s bad news, to be able to say it compassionately and say, ‘How can we turn this into the best situation possible given what we’ve got?’ Or it could be something as simple as saying, ‘So, when are you quitting smoking?’ Not ‘Would you like to?’ but ‘I’m here when you’re ready.’ ”

      Follow Gail Johnson on Twitter at @gailjohnsonwork.

      Comments

      1 Comments

      Wolfganganzen

      Sep 17, 2014 at 3:03pm

      CTV made a mistake. This wasn't the first or last one.