Learning From Patients With Parkinson Disease: Laxman Bahroo, DO

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“Seeing patients teaches us how to apply science to them, how to deliver care—which you cannot learn from a textbook. You can learn by doing, you can learn by observing. But more importantly, you learn by doing. Seeing patients makes science more personal, makes it more relatable, and it makes it an important goal for a provider to be able to improve their quality [of life].”

Treating patients is the goal of medicine, whether those patients have chronic illness or otherwise, and while the field has refocused on the importance of the patients’ role in the conversation around their care, there is also a need to rerecognize what they bring to these conversations. At this year’s inaugural Advanced Therapeutics in Movement and Related Disorders (ATMRD) Congress in Washington, DC, June 17-19, 2022, Laxman Bahroo, DO, highlighted this sometimes-overlooked aspect of shared decision-making.

In speaking with the PMD Alliance, which put on the meeting with Georgetown University, Bahroo, who is an assistant professor of neurology and the codirector of the Neurology Residency Program at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, noted that learning from patients while in the clinic can be invaluable to a physician’s ability to provide better care. As another expert in the care of patients with Parkinson disease (PD), Jill Farmer, DO, also told the PMD Alliance, that if a physician has seen one patient with PD, they’ve seen one patient with PD. The heterogeneity of this patient population, Bahroo explained, provides a constant learning experience, even for those who have been in practice for quite some time.

Click here for more coverage of ATMRD 2022.