P. Davis Smith is the University’s authority on all things medical. He has worked in the Davison Health Center since 2001 and was appointed Medical Director in 2003. He sat down with the Argus to discuss his work in Eastern medicine, ice cream, and how to avoid the infamous norovirus.
The Argus: Could you tell us about your background?
Davis Smith: I went to Brown University, which I sometimes call Rhode Island Wesleyan, and graduated in 1990. I designed my own major there, which was a combination of plant biology, religious studies, and medical anthropology. I wrote my thesis on Tibetan medicine.
I did study abroad programs in India, Tibet, and Nepal. I was in Nepal for about three months, and in Tibet I spent a couple of weeks with a doctor, collecting herbs and seeing patients with him. Fantastic experience.
After I graduated college, I spent four months in Tibet. There was an amazing teacher there, a high lama from Dharmasala. He asked me what I was going to do with my life and I thought, I’m going study with this doctor to be a practitioner!
He said, that’s great, do you speak Tibetan? I said no, I don’t. He asked, have you studied medicine? After having this conversation a couple of times, I realized that Tibetan is way too hard for me to learn. So I went to medical school instead.
A: How did you decide to do medical work in a student environment?
DS: That was easy. I really love to teach. The way I practice medicine is to teach. I mean, I do teach medical students and other doctors. But in each patient visit that I do, if I really explain what your cold is and why you’re having your symptoms, and what you can do about them, and what works, and what the signs are that it’s turning into a bacterial infection—you could use that information for sixty years. As a teacher, it’s incredibly exciting that you could give somebody such a tool.
I have many friends who are doctors, but in general I don’t find them to be the most interesting people, whereas college professors are very interesting. So the idea of working in an environment that’s medical but not just a hospital with doctors is really appealing to me.
A: Eastern medicine practitioners tend to prescribe lifestyle and diet changes. What types of treatments do you suggest?
DS: If you look at research projects into herbal medicine, the Western scientific mind is always trying to isolate the “active compound.” And they have: aspirin comes from willowbark, etc. In Eastern medicine, there’s a lot more to it. There are many active compounds in herbal medicine, and there’s also the cosmology that goes with the worldview. It fits together with the religious construction in the society. It’s more than just the chemical changing a function of a protein.
Western medicine hasn’t embraced very much of that, for two reasons. One, because we’re stupid. [laughs] But also because it’s a hard thing to quantify. There are so many variables. Your lifestyle should be more supportive of your human process. I try to incorporate some of that stuff. For example, if someone has a bad cold, I encourage moderate exercise because running around gives you endorphins, makes you breathe deeper so you can clear your sinuses, and you pump up your immune system to fight off bacteria. As far as the diet, I advise eating and drinking steamy stuff for people who have colds.
A: I heard a rumor that eating ice cream slowly can help a sore throat.
DS: Well, if you put an ice pack on a sore muscle, it feels better right? Cold helps inflammation. Maybe the milk protein coats the raw skin and protects against the acidity of saliva.
A: That sounds hopeful. Anyway, to bring it back to the college dorm room: what are some basic health tips for students?
DS: I never like to pass up on an opportunity to talk about sleep. The more I read, the more I hear, the more time I spend encouraging people to sleep more. In the college age group, most people need ten plus hours of sleep a night to function optimally. The brain also wants most to go to sleep and wake up at the same time everyday.
The benefits are astonishing: your concentration is better, your memory is better, so you don’t have to read the same thing as many times to let it sink in. Higher thought comes more readily so that you can do the same amount of work in a lot less time. The benefits for athletic performance are tremendous, too—people learn skills much more rapidly. The immune system works better with more sleep. Emotion is much more balanced, so anxiety and depression are more controlled with even-mindedness.
Another one has to do with respiratory hygiene. People really should cough into their elbow or into a Kleenex and wash their hands after. There’s a great MythBusters episode on sneezing: they do this dinner party two different ways. One of the characters has a simulated cold, and has a tube connected to his face that contains a clear liquid that shines in ultraviolet light. So the first time he hosts the dinner party, he’s sneezing openly. At the end they shine the light, and everybody is coated in the liquid. The second time, he’s careful about how he sneezes and has other people pass the food around, and this time when they shine the light there’s little exposure of the liquid to other people.
In terms of cleanliness, having dirty laundry and dishes around is gross. Having lots of dust irritates the respiratory system, which makes it an easier target for viruses to attack.
A: What’s the most important message from the norovirus emails that you want students to remember?
DS: Most important thing: wash your hands with soap. The second thing is don’t touch other people’s food. Stay away from communal food.
A: What does your role as a medical director entail?
DS: Joyce Walters is our director; she’s the supervisor for the Davison Health Center, for CAPS [Counseling and Psychological Service], and for WesWell. I’m the medical director, so I’m the supervisor for the other clinicians. Along with my colleagues, I set the agenda for how we approach certain things. Are we going to provide a service or not? What medicines are we going to keep? What’s the expectation about how we approach a problem? Are we up to date with the latest guidelines? And of course other administrative things that are less glamorous.
A: What should students know about coming to the health center?
DS: A college health center is an interesting thing. We have two MDs, a physician’s assistant, and a nurse practitioner. Our PA and NA both have twenty years of experience; Dr. Daponte and I have ten plus years of experience. So you have highly qualified, experienced providers, and yet many of the students have a doctor at home. So to many students, we’re a facility of convenience. It’s strange because I think of us as every student’s doctor, but not every student thinks of us as his or her doctor. Although, it does make sense in a way because they didn’t choose us, they chose Wesleyan.
We always have a doctor on call. What we want people to do is to call—if they’re sick or concerned or have any questions, just call. If it’s a true emergency, they can call whenever. We have an appointment-based system, but almost anybody, and certainly people with urgent conditions, can be accommodated the same day.
We can do gynecological exams, physicals to work at summer camp, travel consults—we handle everything from broken bones to complications from wisdom tooth extraction (which happens surprisingly often), sexual infections, and wart freezing.
We like to believe that we’re a typical doctor’s office, but in fact we function more like an urgent care center. We ask students to use us as their primary care doctors, and those are some of the most rewarding relationships because we get to know them over time.