Stanford Medicine physician Dr. Bryant Lin is the perfect professor to teach the course “From Diagnosis to Dialogue: A Doctor's Real-Time Battle with Cancer” at Stanford. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.
The class focuses on the cancer journey of a non-smoking patient diagnosed with lung cancer. Dr. Lin is that patient.
“I want to take something that is obviously very negative to me personally and get some benefit out of it for at least for other people,” Dr. Lin said.
20 years ago, Dr. Lin chose a career in medicine for a simple reason.
“I wanted that personal connection and that satisfaction from helping people on a day-to-day basis,” Dr, Lin said.
This same motivation led Dr. Lin to co-found Stanford’s Center for Asian Health Research and Education in 2018, with a particular focus on lung cancer in non-smokers.
“Our colleagues in oncology were seeing lots of Asians coming in with lung cancer having never smoked,” Dr. Lin said. “A lot of the population, including doctors, thinks about lung cancer as a smoker's disease.”
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This is why Dr. Lin was (and in a way was not) surprised when earlier this year he found himself part of the 20% of lung cancer patients who have never smoked.
“I'm stage 4B. So the most advanced stage of lung cancer. It's spread to my brain, to my liver, to my bones,” Dr. Lin said. “I went through the stages of grief rapidly, and it was totally true. Everything we learned in medical school.”
The combination of treatments Dr. Lin is receiving has slowed the disease and given him the ability to continue working and teaching. Dr. Lin, who says he is always thinking of new courses to teach, decided to make his story the centerpiece of this new class.
In his class, he draws from his personal experiences to discuss the disease, treatment, and even how spirituality can play a role for those with terminal illnesses.
Dr. Lin feels with his experience as a physician and now a patient with a serious illness, he’s uniquely qualified to educate future physicians about the patient experience.
“I told them my one wish for the class is that one of the students goes into something related to cancer care,” Dr. Lin said. “Hopefully, this will inspire you to do something about and improve cancer care.
