Dr. Schwartz Recalls Her Path To Medical School
Dr. Schwartz began college as an engineering student before decided to enroll in medical school. She has studied radiation oncology, Chinese medicine, complementary medicine, and more. Dr. Schwartz is the Director of Integrative Medicine at the Roy and Patricia Disney Family Cancer Center at Providence Medical Center.
More Videos from The Roy & Patricia Disney Family Cancer Center at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center Expert 7 videos in this series
Dr. Schwartz:
So, my mom is a nurse and my older brother had just gotten accepted into medical school and so it really opened the door to let me look into medical school and I thought, “You know, this probably would meet more of my personality and skills in dealing with people than being an engineer.”
I did internal medicine first. When I went into internal medicine, I wanted to be able to treat anyone who walked through the front door. And really, internal medicine teaches you that. And most of my internal medicine residency training was done on an impatient basis so I saw a lot of cancer patients. We were a tertiary care facility who had a huge referral base for leukemia especially so we had an entire service dedicated to leukemia.
I spent several months as part of my internal medicine training taking care of cancer patients and I really came to find out that I wanted to be able to care for these patients long term. And I missed them after I was off my rotation.
But I didn’t want to get into chemotherapy so one of the medical oncology fellows suggested that I look into radiation oncology. It’s a pretty small specialty and I never even thought about it, but as soon as I spent time down in the radiation oncology department, it was a perfect fit for me; just the right mix of taking care of cancer patients and enabling me to use some of my more technical skills that I really enjoyed.
So from radiation oncology, I found that my patients were really using a lot of complementary therapies and that I really needed to learn more about them in order to give them really an educated view on what was helpful and what was not because I knew it wasn’t all bad for you. There were some helpful things out there and so I decided to take some time off from my radiation oncology profession and study Chinese medicine. So I got a Masters in Chinese medicine and from there, I started practicing radiation oncology again.
And Andrew Weil has a fellowship in integrated medicine down at the University of Arizona, so then I signed onto that and completed that after a couple years as working as a radiation oncologist and so really, I built up my skill set in order to be able to explain to patients things that really would help them during their treatment and the things they should avoid.
About Dr. Lisa Schwartz, M.D.:
Lisa Marie Schwartz, MD, is the Medical Director of Integrative Medicine for The Roy and Patricia Disney Family Cancer Center at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center. She received her medical education at the Medical University of South Carolina. She completed residencies in both internal medicine and radiation oncology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. After practicing radiation oncology for a number of years, Dr. Schwartz was motivated by her patients’ use of complementary medicine to learn more about it. She completed a master’s degree in Traditional Oriental Medicine at Emperor’s College and associate fellowship in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona under Dr. Andrew Weil. She is nationally board certified in radiation oncology, internal medicine, acupuncture, and Chinese medicine.
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