George Kent has delivered babies in the mountains of Mexico. He's lugged his laptop to Malawi in Central Africa, where he wrote field guides on nutrition and malaria. He even attended a public health conference in Managua in the midst of civil war in Nicaragua.
But since he returned to the Bay Area in 1987, Kent has discovered that medicine' s real frontline is working with patients one-on-one in a suburban clinic. "Family practice is wonderful because it is literally from birth to death," Kent says. "It is so close to the essence of life and, to me, that's what being a physician means."
Kent, who now lives in Los Altos with his wife, Julee, and his two young children, is associate director of the Family Residency Program at San Jose Medical Center. In his practice, where the patients range from newborns to the elderly, Kent, 43, treats everything from flu epidemics to heart disease to cancer. He is also a clinical associate professor of medicine at Stanford, and gets great satisfaction in teaching a family practice rotation to Stanford medical students at the clinic.
Kent is particularly drawn to the challenge of treating people with AIDS. Kent was working as a researcher at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta when the AIDS epidemic first exploded in the early '80s. Soon after returning to the Bay Area, he joined the staff of the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center AIDS clinic. Between his family practice and the AIDS clinic, Kent sees approximately 100 HIV-infected patients.
Kent pays attention to the psychological needs of his AIDS patients as well as their physical health. His gentle, nurturing manner is appre- ciated by nurses, too. Dee Suess, a charge nurse at the AIDS clinic, remembers how Kent called her at home when a patient they were both very close to began to slip away.
"He asked if I wanted to come in for the end," Suess recalls. "George was standing with the family, crying alongside them."
But it has not all been tears. In the last year, especially, Kent has seen new drug combinations give dramatic promise of prolonged, healthier lives. "I'm giving out so much more good news these days," Kent says. "People are now suddenly making future plans."
As for Kent's future, there are no exotic trips in the works. He's staying right where he is because people are relying on him. He says, "I have always wanted to participate in the whole life cycle of my patients."
By Chlöe Rebecca Sladden, '96, MA '97
