Why Vivek Murthy Matters

It was a sunny fall morning in Boston, and my medical team had finished rounding on our in-patients at around 11 a.m. With only an hour to go before noon conference, we quickly circled back to our team room, where my residents flew to the few available computer workstations and began pulling up notes and calling consults.

My fellow medical student and I looked at each other awkwardly. We would have loved to help out, but with the complete dearth of computers, we didn’t have anything useful to provide. So we sat down at the conference table and quietly tried to blend into the wallpaper.

That was when our attending physician joined us with a warm and knowing smile.

“How are you liking your time on internal medicine so far?” he asked.

With that simple open-ended question, he made himself available to us for the next hour, talking to us about specific patients on our panel, going over unusual lab tests, and probing our brains to help us understand effective therapeutic management. In doing this, he was sending us an important signal: he didn’t consider himself too busy to be tutoring medical students. The reason the signal was so powerful was because the attending was none other than our country’s current nominee for Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy.

Even though he wasn’t the nominee at the time, we all knew of Murthy’s tireless involvement with the physician advocacy organization, Doctors for America. His grassroots efforts with the organization had harnessed all of his best skills in focusing the nation’s attention on the problems besetting health care delivery and legislative reform. During our time on the hospital wards, his superior communications and ease with technology and social media were fully on display. His ability to engage diverse team members, from students to nurses and pharmacy interns helped us achieve the best outcomes for our patients. He inspired intense loyalty among those who worked with him, as we were always impressed with his quiet humility and a leadership style that prioritized consensus-building over assignation of credit.

Over the course of the month, as I got to know Murthy better, I couldn’t help being frequently reminded of why I came to medicine. Training can be so tough and the student loans so large, that one can quickly grow disillusioned. My classmates and I, on the verge of picking our future specialty, would meet up for drinks and talk about which branch of the profession would offer the best flexibility, the best lifestyle, the best salary with a shameless abandon that did not reflect the values that had brought us to medical school in the first place: a desire to help others, a passionate wish for social justice and health equity, and an impulse to build strong communities.

Murthy brought me back to my roots and reminded me of those ideals. His passion for doing right by his patients was clear and genuine. I loved it when someone would bring up his or her frustration with current health care structures, because it meant launching into a conversation about one of his favorite topics: healthcare reform. Murthy had a clear understanding of the failings of our insurance and delivery systems, and through Doctors for America, was devoting every waking hour to educating the public and recruiting medical professionals to become ambassadors for the cause.

Fast-forward a few months, and while everyone in our community was ecstatic about Dr. Murthy’s nomination to the post of Surgeon General (and commencement speaker at Harvard Medical School), no one was truly surprised. Dr. Murthy had the pedigree, trained at Harvard and Yale and attending physician at the Brigham, one of the nation’s best hospitals, as well as the ardor for the job. His track record of success, not only with DFA, but also with other entrepreneurial ventures such as TrialNetworks, a technology company that uses social networking and software technology to connect patients with clinical trials, and VISIONS, a non-profit organization in the U.S. and India that uses direct education programs to teach students about HIV prevention, were proof of an intellectual who could execute well and lead large-scale organizations. Moreover, he had already had wet his feet in healthcare policy with his appointment to the president’s Advisory Group on Prevention, Health Promotion, and Integrative and Public Health.

Simply put, he was the perfect man for the job.

But despite commanding the support of the Harvard community, the New England Journal of Medicine, and physicians and medical organizations countrywide, Vivek Murthy has had his nomination delayed by a single special interest group. This is nothing short of an outrage.

Murthy is a gifted leader, a compassionate physician, and a thoughtful policymaker. This country needs a Surgeon General like Dr. Vivek Murthy: someone who can flawlessly interface between physicians and communities, keeping the central actor – the patient, at center of mind.

Samyukta Mullangi is a fourth-year student in the Harvard Medical School and Harvard Business School combined degree program.