On Wednesday, July 27,
Timothy Barreiro, D.O. (’97), is the featured lecturer of the
Alumni Research Series sponsored by the offices of Alumni
Affairs and Research. Barreiro is the second speaker in the
series, which began May 4.
Barreiro, Health Disparities
Scholar and assistant professor of medicine at Northeastern Ohio
Universities College of Medicine (NEOUCOM), Division of
Pulmonary and Critical Care, visits OU-COM Tuesday evening to
talk about health disparities to the Prematriculation Program and
Wednesday will lecture third-year students on the importance of a career
in academic
medicine.
“How to get started in an
academic career,” Barreiro’s Wednesday noon lecture, will
examine the need for physician scientists and what to do to get
established — preferably earlier in one’s career, says Barreiro
— in an academic medicine career.
Doctors should pursue academic
careers as clinical educators or clinical scientists, he says.
The first are those who will train residents and help maintain
and improve the quality of medical care. The second are those
who are going to find and cure disease and take patient problems
and examine them in a research setting.
Unfortunately, he says, not
enough doctors are entering academic medicine. According to
Barreiro, only 14 percent of medical school graduates say they
are interesting in academic careers as opposed to 50 percent
interested in entering private practice.
“Of course, we need both,” he
says.
Barreiro says there will be a
growing need for clinical educators and scientists because of
the increase in life expectancy, which will increase the
population. The increase in the older population will most
likely lead to a host of new medical problems and concerns
developing at the same time that there are fewer physicians
trying to solve these problems.
Also, he says, the osteopathic
profession is losing some academic centers. This means the
profession must rely more on physicians within the community to
help train new physicians. But managed care has placed a
tremendous burden on established physicians to see as many
patients as possible, he says, which can be a detriment to
mentoring young physicians.
“Mentoring young physicians is
being lost,” says Barreiro. “Teaching them how to properly do
physical exams, teaching them about health disparities, teaching
them proper skills and diagnostic techniques are being lost.
“Everyone is relying on a
diagnostic test. So bedside teaching and academic mentorship is
being lost. As the aging population grows, there will be more
and more people who have problems, and we won’t have the right
amount of people or won’t have them taught the best that we
could.”
On the path to clinical
scientist/researcher, he says his goal is to keep people from
being “late bloomers.” An interest in pursuing research, he
says, should be cultivated early in one’s medical training. He
really didn’t get hooked until a four-year pulmonary and
critical care medicine fellowship at University of Rochester in New York
School of Medicine and Dentistry.
“I thought to myself, ‘This is
really interesting. How come I’ve never really been exposed like
this to research?’” says Barreiro.
“I want people to get involved
in research earlier in their education and training. It will
also help them move up the ranks faster.”
Tueday evening he will speak to
the 2005 Prematriculation Program participants and a group of
underrepresented minority students being hosting at the Center of
Excellence for Multicultural Medicine (COEMM). “I’m very
interested in talking to the participants of the
Prematriculation Program at the center
because I completed this program before starting OU-COM,” he says.
He will speak to them about
health disparities and minority health, issues in which he is an
expert. As a member of the American College of Osteopathic
Interns, he was part of a group assembled from across the
country that helped to shape American Osteopathic Association
(AOA) policy.
“We recently got our health
disparity proposal approved by the AOA House of Delegates,” he
says. Now as official AOA policy, he says, the way is paved to
be adopted by AOA-sanctioned programs and curriculum. OU-COM,
with the presence of the COEMM, has been way ahead of the curve
in addressing minority health matters, he says.
“OU-COM is above and beyond
most places that I’ve seen. Too many people recognize minority
health disparities as a problem but don’t address it. Or address
it a rather ineffectual way. There are very few medical
facilities that have health disparity programs or centers to
promote minority health. OU-COM deserves much credit.”
In addition to being in the
Prematriculation Program, he was a Summer Scholar, also a COEMM
program, and he was a family medicine
fellow, spending an addition year teaching and researching while
a student. After graduating from OU-COM in 1997, Barreiro
completed a three-year internal medicine residency at Allegheny
General Hospital in Pittsburgh and a four-year
pulmonary and critical care
fellowship. He has been
teaching at NEOUCOM for one year now.
Barreiro will speak from noon
to 1 p.m. in Irvine 194. Lunch will be served. He is the second
of four speakers to lecture this year for the series. The
series, says Sharon Zimmerman, director of alumni
affairs, will provide OU-COM alumni an opportunity to inspire
and mentor students interested in research.
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