Added: Jul 26, 2008
From: LuisLomeliMD
Duration: 8:1
Medicine is an unusually complex field that has challenged me more than anything else in my life. While a medical student at UCLA, I had decided to simply obtain my medical degree and thereafter dedicate my life to a creative world of poetry, music, art, and film and perhaps cause some type of peaceful revolution. While a student, however, there were two patients that inspired me to practice medicine in the manner that I have, on behalf of humanity not money or profit. I am fortunate that I have been able to finance all of my care for the poor through private means via my skills as a physician. I dedicate this work to one of my patients in this video, Daniel-R. On 10-4-97, at age 45, Daniel showed up at my office with his beefy shoulder "crater" with just $30 in his pocket and a gentle smile. When I saw his lesion, I felt certain that it was cancer, which turned out to have originated in his left lung, Adenocarcinoma. I helped Daniel face death in dignified manner pro bono. His original $30 covered him with me until his premature death that was caused by an often lethal habit, cigarette smoking. In the United States alone, 500,000 patients die yearly as a result of smoking. Each of the patients you see in the video has a story that is as alive in me today as it was when I treated them. The patient with the scar over the back of his neck needed emergency care that I managed to secure on his behalf through wit. The patients with a retropharyngeal abscess and epiglottitis I saved as outpatients because they were denied emergency care elsewhere. My acts on behalf of these patients were not heroic, but rather unfortunate events that were forced upon me by a society that chooses to ignore the plight of the uninsured and working poor. How can we be in peace with ourselves when over 47 million Americans lack essential health care access and so many, as a result, are dying prematurely? Luis Lomeli, M.D./Beta (God is the most profound abstract ideal that seems to be beyond human comprehension and insight. It's for me. So I reduce myself to understanding God's design and marvel on nature's profound magic. I look back to history and I imagine how Michael Faraday, an uneducated tradesman, looked to God for unimaginable wisdom. Michael Faraday, became a renowned genius, was the first scientist to suspect the presence of electromagnetic waves and is the father of the modern electric motor. Faraday was a highly religious fellow that wanted to understand God through nature. Einstein's insight into E = MC2 was the product of many renowned scientists that preceded him, including Faraday. Let's look at the amazing speed of light, 670,000,000 miles per hour (sound travels at a mere 700 miles per hour). If light had static mass, it wouldn't be able to travel at nature's celeritas (c) constant, the speed of light. A neutrino travels just below the speed of light and quickly vanishes or changes flavor because it has mass. If one accelerates a proton almost to the speed of light, it becomes up to "430 times bigger." The energy put into accelerating the proton becomes mass. Energy and mass are interchangeable. If light has no mass, why does it bend as it travels from distant stars just tangent to our sun? It is the warping of space, as predicted by Einstein, that makes light bend toward the sun, not gravity. If light had mass, it would not be able to exist. Light has mass-energy. With these profound thoughts I try to envision God's work but so far I've been a dismal failure. Luis Lomeli MD). P.S. There will be at least four more volumes to this radiology series. No divine student of medicine should be denied what are most precious: knowledge and wisdom on behalf of a better humanity through medicine.
Channel: People
Tags: cancer failure faraday god heart hiv light lomeli luis lung m.d. pneumonia religion scoliosis smoking tobacco tuberculosis
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