Human Rights Medicine: A Conversation with Dr. Coleen Kivlahan

Paul has a frank and sobering conversation with Dr. Coleen Kivlahan, Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine, who is a local and global expert and leader in Refugee, Immigrant, Asylum and Human Rights Medicine. Her name may sound familiar as she was a previous guest on Hippie Docs 2.0, talking about her own experience as a patient with Covid-19.  In this episode, Dr. Kivlahan describes her work in Sierra Leone, Guatemala, the DRC, Syria, and in the US, bringing large scale and personal atrocities to light and justice.  Mass graves and the body tell the stories, and doctors — using forensics— serve as a powerful force in an attempt to answer the twin questions of "how?" and "why?" did these things happen? Dr. Kivlahan also talks about her role as an educator and leader of UCSF's Human Rights Clinic, which painstakingly documents both physical and psychological wounds in immigrant asylum-seekers.  At the same time, the medical students, faculty, and staff working there perform the equally important work of emotionally supporting these immigrants, many of whom suffered unimaginable trauma in their home countries.   She is partially inspired to do this work by her early experiences, growing up one of six children in a working class family, living in a small northern Ohio steel town, with no health insurance.  But it was her gut-wrenching experience as a young physician, fresh out of residency, which charted her path as a reliever of suffering, truth-teller, and policy maker. She speaks about the deadliness of silence, the importance of bearing witness and how small acts of kindness can create hope. Join us for our latest episode in our quest to re-humanize medicine.