There's a common joke about Cowell Student Health Service: no matter what’s wrong with you, the doctor gives you two Advil and sends you home.
Maybe there’s a reason.
Most of the 25 to 35 patients Dan Cooper sees each day are suffering from minor ailments—colds, sports injuries, acne. “Ninety-nine percent of the time it is the worried well or benign illness,” says the Cowell physician. “My job is sifting through that for the real stuff.” To ferret out insidious problems, such as addictions, HIV and eating disorders, Cooper tries to build a relationship with each patient. When a Chinese graduate student comes in complaining about a sore in his mouth, for example, Cooper asks about his dissertation as he gets a swab from the patient’s cheek. And as he hands the young man a prescription, Cooper acknowledges that Western medicine is often viewed with suspicion in China, and reassures him that the medication should help.
Cooper “has a great rapport with students,” says his boss, Cowell director Ira Friedman. “He understands them and appreciates them.”
Still, Cooper says, it can be difficult to diagnose major illnesses in headstrong Stanford students who don’t have time to be sick. He remembers a student who came into the clinic gasping for breath. The young man was on his way to teach a karate class and just wanted some medication to make it all better. Cooper ordered a chest X-ray—and discovered that the patient had pericardial effusion, which can result in heart failure.
As an undergraduate, Cooper majored in biological sciences and worked as an orderly at Stanford Hospital. Shaving the bodies of heart-donor cadavers—and realizing that one person’s death could save another’s life—“tied things in to what I was studying,” he says. “It put a human face to it.”
Cooper has never strayed far from his Farm roots. At a conference he attended while a medical student at the University of Colorado, Cooper met John Steward, the longtime dean of student affairs at Stanford Medical School, who died in 2000. Steward, ’48, MD ’55, became Cooper’s mentor, and in 1998 convinced him to leave his job as a family practitioner on the central California coast to take the Cowell post.
Although he spends most of his time treating sniffles and sprains, Cooper is glad to be back on campus. Students “are at such an interesting time in their lives, just beginning to flower in their intellectual pursuits,” he says. “They have so much idealism, creativity and energy.” Even if they use some of it to make fun of him.
