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Balancing the Public and the Personal Art of Health: Dr. Leana Wen

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It’s 5 a.m. on Father’s Day and my friend, Leana Wen, is sipping coffee as she eases our car onto the highway en route to her next appointment. The physician, Washington Post opinions columnist, CNN wellness medical expert, author, and public health scholar is off to another early morning event for which she is well prepared: a sprint triathlon in Columbia, Maryland.

At 41, Dr. Wen has sandwiched miles of swimming, long runs, and bike rides into her life while also juggling speaking engagements, board meetings, and two columns a week on public health and health policy including her newsletter “The Checkup with Dr. Wen.”

Somehow, she has also found time to persuade me to do my first triathlon—a 400-yard pool swim followed by a 10-mile bike ride and a 3-mile run. She even helped me train. Has she always been able to manage such an ambitious schedule?

“I don’t think of myself as especially driven,” she says. “I like setting goals and doing what I promised that I would do. My personal life is not that different from my professional life. I’ve always loved my work. I’m passionate about it because of my experiences growing up as an immigrant, as someone who saw many people go without access to care, as someone who experienced some of those problems myself, and as a clinician on behalf of my patients. I think my professional work is all driven by seeing a problem and then wanting to fix it.”

Born in Shanghai, Dr. Wen came to the United States when she was nearly eight years old with her parents who eventually received political asylum. Even though her mother and father often worked several jobs, the family received food stamps and at times struggled to afford housing.

I think my professional work is all driven by seeing a problem, and then wanting to fix it.
Dr. Leana Wen

Despite such hardships, she went to college at 13, received her medical degree from the Washington University School of Medicine, and studied health policy at the University of Oxford where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Dr. Wen completed her residency at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital before beginning practice as an emergency physician.

She became determined to dedicate her career to public health as a way to serve the country that had offered her so many opportunities. In her book Lifelines: A Doctor’s Journey in the Fight for Public Health, she points to the programs that helped provide her family with food, housing, and education as critical to their health and wellness.

Dr. Wen describes public health as an invisible safety net. “There is a saying, ‘Public health saved your life today. You just don’t know it.’ By definition, public health is about prevention. It’s successful when some bad outcome does not occur. I think when policymakers look for an immediate impact, they can miss the importance of long-term investing in public health.”

She experienced such issues from 2014 to 2018 when Dr. Wen served as Health Commissioner of Baltimore City, the nation’s oldest health department. She calls it her public health “dream job” because it allowed her to influence policy, services, and education.

“I was able to work with the Mayor’s Office, with City Council, with state and federal legislators, to impact policy directly. For example, we were able to pass legislation to allow me to issue a blanket prescription for Naloxone, the opioid antidote,” she says. “But just having a good policy is not enough. We worked with community organizations and outreach workers to get this medication into the hands of our residents, and to ensure that they knew how to use it.”

Now, despite such gains, she says opioid addiction remains one of the major issues facing Baltimore residents. “Overdoses are skyrocketing, and I hope that the city will continue and build on the work that was done in the past to address this challenge.”

She believes that Baltimoreans still understand how concerns not traditionally under the wing of public health can still benefit from its problem-solving approach.

“We often talked about addressing violence from a public health perspective with programs like Safe Streets. If you were to think about violence as contagious, as spreading from person to person, you would look at the holistic picture of the [violent] individual, and not just at what happened in one particular moment,” she says.

“Another thing we worked out was getting glasses to every child who needs them in Baltimore because a child who can’t read, can’t learn.”

Now Dr. Wen is helping her own children, 7-year-old Eli and 4-year-old Isabelle, experience a new school year near their home in North Baltimore. Has becoming a parent affected her own vision of public health?

She quotes one of her mentors, the late congressman Elijah Cummings, after whom her son is named—Our children are the living messengers we send to a future that we’ll never see. “So much of my work now is informed by what I want the world to be for my children, and for future generations,” she says.

Competing in a triathlon is one example of how parenting has already changed her life. Dr. Wen admits she only realized how dangerous it was that she didn’t know how to swim after Isabelle fell into a pool three years ago. The physician enrolled in swim lessons at Meadowbrook, which she describes as life-changing.

“I had never put my face in the water, and now I really love it,” she says. “I’m part of a masters swim team. I never set out saying, ‘I’m going to do competitive swimming,’ but rather I wanted to solve a problem which was that I needed to learn water safety for my kids.”

Today her husband, Sebastian, is bringing them to cheer on their Super Mom.

As Dr. Wen pulls up to the race site, we join an ebullient crowd of several hundred competitors. There are veteran triathletes as well as many first timers, old and young, all shapes and sizes. It’s a heartwarming scene that embodies two of the physician’s most basic recommendations.

While even 11 minutes of exercise per day can lower your risk of heart disease, premature death, and dementia, it can also help establish important social connections—like our friendship—that help alleviate the loneliness and isolation that can also damage health.

I give Dr. Wen a high-five before she dives into the water to begin the first stage of the race. A little more than an hour later—well before I cross the finish line—she ascends the podium to accept the second-place award in her division, less than one second behind the winner.

Glowing with the energy of a job well done, she crosses the field to join family and friends who are already celebrating her victory. One more goal accomplished.

This story is from Issue 18: Wellness, available here.

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