Meet the President

Tara C. Friedman, MD FAAHPM

What led you to the specialty of hospice and palliative medicine?

As a kid I thought I might become a counselor, so I majored in psychology at Colgate University. By the time I got to medical school, medicine was becoming a volume business, and primary care no longer fit with the kind of relationships I wanted to have with my patients. I recall the end of a long day as a resident on the medicine service and going to talk with a patient who had been in the hospital several times with an idiopathic pleural effusion. We sat for a while talking about his fears and what he thought might be going on, and I gave him my honest professional opinion. Although the news was hard, he was grateful that someone was listening, validating his concerns, and giving him a way forward. That was 25 years ago, but I can still see us sitting in his hospital room with the curtain drawn to give us privacy. It was fortuitous that I was an internal medicine resident at Mount Sinai Medical Center, where I had the opportunity to spend time with a new palliative care team. There, I found my path. Hospice and palliative medicine (HPM) provides the perfect blend of skillful application of medicine with the opportunity to connect deeply with patients and their families and fill critical gaps in care for the most vulnerable.