What lessons from Haverford do you carry with you in your life or career?

Haverford taught me the value of perseverance and hard work. As Neil Buckley would say, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going" and “Stop whining; get to work.”

I vividly remember showing up for my remedial math course in the summer of eighth grade. We were in the warm sub-basement of the Middle School. We just had a fan. In walks Coach Mayock. He looks at us and says, “Okay, boys, we're going to learn some math.” We all straightened up: “Yes, sir, we are!”

Haverford taught me that most—not all, but most—problems are solved by just working harder. 

What advice would you give to recent Haverford School graduates interested in pursuing medicine?

Medicine is a great career choice, but it’s important to ask yourself why you want to do it. Making a lot of money is not a good reason to pursue medicine. It’s possible you won’t make much, depending on your specialty. It’s too much work to do it solely to please your parents. Please your parents by taking out the garbage, not committing to getting into medical school, getting through medical school, getting through residency, and then having a challenging career. If you want to pursue medicine for a regular 9 to 5, you’ll miss out on some of the best parts of the career. Getting better requires seeing more patients and making tough decisions at uncomfortable times. 

Medicine today is much different than it was when I was starting my career. Artificial Intelligence will be transformative in law and business, but particularly medicine. Traditionally, doctors spend much of their time interpreting tests—reading CAT scans, EKGs, or EEGs. There’s evidence that, soon, AI will be able to read and interpret those tests as well as any doctor. Young people pursuing medicine have to face the question, “In 20 years, will I be displaced or marginalized by AI?” Nobody wants to talk about that. If you’re a neurologist and earn much of your income reading EEGs, know that AI may be doing that instead of you in ten years. 

How can schools best support students with neurological differences?

Recognize that learning disabilities and seizures are common. Understand that half of people with cerebral palsy are cognitively normal. Most importantly, know that people with neurological problems don't want pity. They want to be accepted for who they are, not as a person with a disease.

Usually, serving students with learning disabilities is not the focus of a private school. Haverford is a college preparatory school. Particularly in Pennsylvania, children with learning disabilities are best served in vocational training. Teach them to read as well as they can, but don’t force a square peg into a round hole.

Most learning disabilities are in the area of reading. Most students with learning disabilities will not graduate high school beyond a 10th-grade reading level. We tend to judge people’s intelligence based on how well they can read. A few hundred years ago, farming skills were more important. No one cared if you could read! Think about George Patton, not my favorite character, but an interesting person. He was a brilliant tactician, but he struggled through school because of his significant learning disability. Military tactics are a right brain function (visuospatial), having nothing to do with reading. Sometimes, the intelligence of those with language processing challenges is underrecognized. 

What do you hope for the future of pediatric neurology? 

I hope for the continued improvement of treatment for patients with genetic disorders. When I was just starting my career, pediatric neurologists were basically dysmorphologists. We compared what we could see in our patients to the descriptions in our textbooks. Now, we don’t waste our time with that. If a patient presents significant developmental delays, we can get a whole exome sequencing to see what’s happening. Oftentimes, that will return information like, say, a micro deletion on 16P1. We're creating these genetic libraries that tell us about patients who have experienced 16p1 deletion syndromes. We can be so much more definitive with our diagnoses now, which can mean we’re more targeted in our treatments. There are some very helpful gene therapies available for Duchenne's muscular dystrophy. A type of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) called Werdnig-Hoffmann disease, a rare form of motor neuron disease, can be very effectively treated using a virus to re-introduce the relevant gene. But, that treatment is over two million dollars. This is the problem: We have the treatments, but we can’t afford them. 

We must get rid of for-profit medicine. I’ve worked for Geisinger Health System for over 30 years. We’re a true healthcare system. We have our own insurance, our own hospitals, we employ our own doctors. Profiting off health care means denying health care. For-profit health care systems are incentivized to give patients the least amount of healthcare possible for every dollar of revenue they get. Until we move to nonprofit health care, patients are going to be dissatisfied. There are plenty of non profit health care systems in this country, and the model works.