Miami 2012: 97th American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA) Meeting

The best times are those that are totally unexpected.  And nothing could have been more unexpected than day 1 of the 97th Annual AMWA meeting.  More than 300 attendees enjoying a riveting program that held the interest of a most diverse group of women physicians, from surgeons to psychiatrists, from first year medical students to retired pathologists.  This all started with the four women in the picture 97 years ago.

The program began with a history of the organization, delivered by past president Eliza Chin, MD, and is detailed in a previous post.  Setting the stage of our legacy and our destiny was inspirational.

My roles?  Here goes.

Co-chair of the Gender Equity Task Force.  I needed to present our quandary to the BOD.  We were awarded a grant, but the funding was inadequate.  What can we do?  As we flew back and forth between meetings and strategy sessions out of the box ideas grew and might save the day.

Judge for the student and resident poster session.  We had 50 poster submissions!  All four of those I judged were absolutely fantastic.  The work was substantive, the questions asked important, and the poise of the presenters undeniable.  Fun and informative and, believe it or not, all four were within my clinical experiences from esophageal myotomies to the width of cleft palates and its effect on speech development.

Participant in the scientific session.  Seven one hour sessions.  Not a clunker among them.  Here are some highlights:

• Marcia Shew, MD on Human papilloma virus vaccine–safety, effectiveness, and myth busting (such as having a vaccine against a possibly deadly sexually transmitted virus will result in greater sexual activity in young women.)
• Lila Nachtigall, MD on the swinging pendulum on the safety and effectiveness of Hormone Replacement Therapy in women.   She tore apart the now 10 year old recommendations from the Women’s Health Initiative with an depth and persuasive counterargument.  So much so that I am going to revisit this therapy for myself.  I hesitate to give you even the headlines b/c I might not give the whole story correctly.
• Carolyn Meltzer, MD chair of radiology at Emory University shared with us incredibly exciting advances in imaging.   The highlight of the conference was a 3-D mammogram that rotated, eliminating shadows and really pinpointed the lesion.  Giving us a taste for her own interest in photography was a special treat.  Check out her website–you won’t be disappointed.
• Randolph Nesse, MD kept us awake and glued to our seats at 3 pm after a very short break.  (This was a marathon day.) “Medicine without Evolution is like Engineering Without Physics” took us way out of the box about our beliefs about how our body works.  He convinced us that certain “illnesses” are have evolved to keep us healthy.  Very counter-intuitive and another one I cannot do justice with any further detail.

The highlight was our special guest evening talk by NY Times best seller author, Rachel Naomi Remen, MD from UCSF (Dana’s medical school in San Francisco).  She echoed my beliefs that we must change the way we see ourselves (and value ourselves–my addition), so we might see what we might become.  And she does this using stories, beautiful stories.  She told us, “Being a doctor is a cosmology, it’s a world view.”  She went on to talk about how the present approach to medical care is about fixing a broken body, a broken world–the embodiment of the male principle.  She challenged us to do what women do–evoke the hidden, make it real and believe in the things you cannot always see.  My take on it:  evidence based medicine can only take the healer so far if she wants to care for and care about people who are suffering and in need of help.

And then I tumbled into bed.  My racing mind and burning thoughts for once extinguished by deeply satisfied fatigue.