Laura Robin '84 is a doctor of osteopathic medicine-a specialist in preventive medicine and an epidemiologist who has helped Navajo Indians, Gulf War veterans, members of the Alaska Miners Association, and chronic sufferers of arthritis in Oregon.
As a biology major at Union, Robin debated between traditional medical school and a school of osteopathic medicine, which in addition to traditional medicine emphasizes looking at the patient as a whole and learning the relationship between structure and function of the body. She chose the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine because it had “more of a relaxed, human atmosphere.”
It was during medical school that Robin, who grew up on Long Island, first visited the American West. Encouraged by an uncle living in Albuquerque, she spent six weeks on the Navajo reservation in western New Mexico and loved it.
After medical school, she joined the Indian Health Service, an agency of the Public Health Service, which provides outpatient and twenty-four-hour emergency care for the reservation. One of several doctors, she lived in government housing on the reservation.
It was, she says, probably the best experience she ever had.
“It was fascinating to be living in a different culture and still be living in the United States,” she explains. And she loved working with the Navajo population.
“The way the Navajo look at disease is very different from the Western medical perspective,” she says. “To them, illness is often caused by negative forces or a curse, and their way to treat it is to go to a medicine man or woman and have them perform a ceremony to remove the curse.”
Although many people would come to the medical doctors, they did not always take the doctors' advice, sometimes relying on medicine men to cure them.
Robin spent two years with the Indian Health Service, becoming frustrated that there were not sufficient resources to prevent the problems. “I'd see a sixteen-year-old girl through a pregnancy only to see her pregnant again four months later,” she says. “I realized we were putting out fires but didn't have the time, money, or energy to
help people prevent these fires.”
Increasingly interested in preventive medicine and public health, she decided to enter the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, where she began to focus on epidemiology-the study of populations and disease.
As part of her residency program, Robin returned to New Mexico to study the high frequency of respiratory disease that she had discovered among children on the Navajo reservation. She suspected that the leaky stoves in the small, smoky huts and houses heated with wood and coal were contributing to the illnesses, and her study proved it.
After she completed her master's program, Robin joined the Center for Disease Control's two-year fellowship program in epidemiology. Able to choose where to work, she went to Alaska. “I'm always up for another adventure, and I really enjoy working with native populations,” she says.
Based in the State Health Department in Anchorage, she investigated illness outbreaks-from outbreaks of botulism that emerged in the native population to an outbreak of illness following a luncheon at the Alaska Miner's Association (due to undercooked reindeer pate). She also continued her research, ranging from the lack of lead poisoning among young children in Alaska to the characterization of illnesses among Persian Gulf veterans.
Robin finished her work with the CDC about two years ago and has settled into two private practices in Oregon, once again relying on her training in osteopathy. She is a county medical examiner and epidemiology consultant to her county's Department of Health and is continuing her research with Johns Hopkins on the Native Americans in the Southwest. And now she is becoming interested in alternative medicine.
“As my time went by in Alaska, I was realizing more and more that Western medicine is wonderful for many things, but somewhat limited-that there are blinders,” she says. “There are cultures around the world that have been using other healing methods for thousands of years. Healing is not only the technical aspect of the disease, but the emotional, mental and spiritual as well.”
To Robin, Western medicine often treats the symptoms, not the underlying problems causing the illness. She is learning more about nutritional concepts of medicine, looking at how what we eat often determines how we feel. She combines traditional, holistic, and nutritional medicine in her two private practices and also works with an internist who uses Chinese medicine and acupuncture.
One day, Robin hopes to combine her interests and expertise to research the effectiveness of some of the many methods of alternative medicine. “My feeling about alternative medicine is that there's a lot that is wonderful and a lot that's not,” she says. If she can discover which is which, a lot of people would listen.