Meet the President

Meet AAHPM President Holly Yang, MD HMDC FACP FAAHPM

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

I was in medical school when my grandmother, Shue- In Yang, enrolled in hospice with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. No doctor ever came to the house, but we received excellent care from the team, especially her social worker and home health aide. The week she died, I was scheduled to shadow the palliative consult service at Northwestern, and I followed Charles von Gunten for an afternoon. That experience led me to a subinternship in palliative care, where I witnessed what an inpatient palliative care team (Cameron Muir, Judith Paice, and others) could do. The consult nurse Barbara was the first person to encourage me to lead a family meeting with the presence of a supportive team. During residency I received a James Green Family fellowship grant for a 1-month rotation at Massachusetts General Hospital, where I met the palliative care team led by Andy Billings and had the good fortune to have Nicholas Christakis as an attending. He was the first person to compliment me on my use of silence. It blew my mind at the time to be praised for the absence of words.