Interview with Dr. Kenny Lin, family practitioner, medical school faculty-member and blogger [Show Summary]

Dr. Kenny Lin is a graduate of Harvard, NYU Medical, and Johns Hopkins, and today is on faculty at Georgetown Medical, Johns Hopkins, and Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. In today’s episode Dr. Lin shares his thoughts on medical school, public health, a critique of medical school rankings, and more!

Dr. Kenny Lin shares his thoughts on primary care, academic medicine and medical school rankings [Show Notes]

Now I’m thrilled to introduce our guest, Dr Kenny Lin. Dr. Lin earned his bachelors in history and science from Harvard and then went on to NYU to earn his MD and to Johns Hopkins a little later for an MPH. Today he is a family practitioner, professor at Georgetown University School of Medicine, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and Johns Hopkins. He also has a blog where he writes about health and medicine and in one post med school rankings. We’ll be talking about that a little later.

Can you tell us a little about yourself? Your background and where you grew up. [1:55]

I grew up in suburban Maryland and both my parents are immigrants from Taiwan. I don’t actually live far from where I grew up now. I come from a family where there were already a few doctors on my mom’s side. My mom is a pharmacist, but two of her siblings are doctors and my grandfather was a fairly prestigious neurologist in Taiwan, and consulted for Chiang Kai Shek before the revolution in China.

How did you get interested in medicine? [3:33]

When I was in high school I did some volunteering at the local hospital where my mom worked. I worked in the post-op recovery room, bringing patients drinks and stuff like that. The other volunteering job I had there probably foreshadowed my dual career, which was working in the PR department, designing ads, promoting the hospital, writing news blurbs and so forth, which I found really enjoyable.

I was a history major at Harvard and wanted to stay away from the traditional premed path like biology, as I wanted to get a more varied experience. In the short term doing that made me feel a bit out of my league starting first year med school, but long term I feel like it really helped, as I can relate to my patients better, feeling comfortable talking with them about politics, history, and other things that are not science-based.

Why did you pursue an MPH in addition to the MD? [6:29]

Part of it was I had a period where I worked for the federal government with people interested in public health, but also in my practice I realized that it is less efficient to change things one-on-one than it is to change things overall. For example, you can council an individual to lose weight, but if the environment they are living in has less nutritious foods available, and no place to exercise safely that is not practical. What I was hoping to do was promote health via policy. At the time I was doing this it was when the ACA was being debated and there was a lot of excitement about that, with calorie labeling and things like that. So it was about public health and benefitting patients in total.

Can you tell us about your blog and why you decided to write it? [9:06]

I started it because I took a science writing class and people asked why I took it. I had a mentor who had a medical advice column many years prior,