If you have arthritis, who you gonna call?

           Call the Rheumtatologist, the "lesser known" bone and joint doctor in the neighborhood.

          And if there is none, it is because the field is quite new, interest in the field is low, training centers are few or non-existent in many areas, and - this is a personal observation- arthritis as a disease is not as dramatic or life-threatening as, say, a heart attack, a stroke and diseases of the lungs, liver and kidney.

          In fact, in a 2nd year medical class, I asked for a show of hands for the question " is the joint an organ or not"? There was a handful, tentative yes answers. This is not surprising, and while the first year course on human anatomy surely carries this fact -  that an organ is a group of tissues serving a function -  it seems more tangible to hold the cadaver heart, lung or kidney and say, "this is an organ".

          In 2004, the Section of Rheumatology, Department of Medicine, University of the Philippines College of Medicine embarked on an academic program aimed at presenting rheumatology to medical students and training residents in Internal Medicine in a one day symposium consisting of diagnostic and treatment updates of common rheumatic diseases in the ambulatory, as well as, in -hospital settings. We called this now yearly symposium, The Dr. Lourdes Manahan Lectures in Rheumatology (LMLR) in honor of the first rheumatologist of the country. Dr. Lourdes Manahan attended all first 7 symposia  (in her wheelchair), and just after the 7th year, she passed on. 

          The 8th and 9th LMLR featured foreign academic collaborators from the University of Melbourne - Prof. Keith Lim and Dr. Lawrence Clemens, and this year, on the 9th LMLR, we had Prof. Tsutomu Takeuchi of Keio University of Tokyo, Japan.

          The University of the Philippines, as the state university, is mandated to provide health services for the Filipinos, and we have graduated more than 50 rheumatologists, presently serving in hospitals in all the big Philippine islands of Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao.

           Now, the challenge is to retain trainees who will stay to be faculty of the university, bring new knowledge about rheumatology as it affects the Filipino and pursue honest to goodness research of rheumatic diseases. To date, our own bright graduates have checked out our program as a specialty to take, with 4 of them currently undergoing training with us. I would like to believe that the LMLR has partly achieved its goal. Dr. Manahan's legacy is strong and will sustain the next generations of doctors of the country to expand this field.

           Dr. Lourdes Manahan was a pioneer, a teacher, mentor and researcher. Her life continues on in us who have decided to follow in her footsteps.