When Mequon physician assistant P. Rea Katz first practiced among Mexican Americans, she experienced a surprise.
While most other U.S. patients meet with their examining physician or P.A. alone, among the Mexican Americans “the whole family would be in the exam room,” Katz said in a recent interview. “Even during a physical they would stay in the room.”
But Katz, 62, has an undergraduate degree in anthropology, the study of human social behavior and different cultures, and a master’s degree in medical anthropology.
“I feel the study of anthropology has helped me understand the context and the whole patient. When you work with people of different cultures they’ll bring their own medical traditions” to their interactions with caregivers like herself, she said. “I find the perspectives gained by studying anthropology invaluable in my clinical practice.”
In another instance, Katz recalled that when she worked at Milwaukee’s 16th Street Community Health Center she and her colleagues saw many odd bruises on people, and when they saw them on children, they thought they might be seeing child abuse.
What they actually saw were the results of the folk medicine practice of cupping — putting heated cups on the skin that as they cool create a suction that is supposed to “draw the bad humors out,” and that can leave bruises.
“Now my policy is not to assume anything, but to always ask my patients,” Katz said. “Anthropologists ask a lot of questions and good health care providers will also always ask questions of their patients, and listen, and try to understand what might be foreign to the medical provider.”
Such breadth of mind may have helped her rise in her chosen profession. Katz also has a doctorate from Marquette University in educational policy and leadership.
She is presently director of faculty development and an assistant professor at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Illinois.
Katz was born in Madison and raised in Fox Point. She feels she inherited her caring for people from her family.
“My mother and father both emphasized social action and justice through words and actions,” she said. Her mother remains active in the American Civil Liberties Union, Katz said.
Though her first love is anthropology — “When we look at cultures and people who are different than us we can learn much about our own culture” — Katz decided to become a P.A. “because I wanted to practice medicine and did not want to spend the long time in school needed to become an M.D.,” Katz said. “It was a new profession then, and I could not have predicted how popular and important it has become.”
After graduation from Johns Hopkins University in 1977, Katz worked first in a clinic in Random Lake.
“At that time P.A.s worked in mostly rural areas,” Katz said. “Physicians in the city didn’t know what they were and wouldn’t hire me, but I eventually found someone who did hire me. He worked with the medically underserved and that has become my lifelong work and passion.”
Katz has done this not only in the Milwaukee and northern Illinois areas, but has also worked abroad, participating in medical missions in Guatemala and Belize, she said.
Because of Katz’s love of different cultures and languages, she studied Spanish and lived with a family in Ecuador for six months where she spoke only Spanish. Those experiences, she said, helped her work in areas where Spanish was the primary language.
In 2000, Katz began to change directions within her profession, moving toward academia. She joined Marquette University’s then new P.A. program as a diversity coordinator, using her combined interests to develop a curriculum that would train students “to be sensitive to patients who were of different backgrounds than the P.A. students themselves,” she said.
Katz then joined the P.A. department of Rosalind Franklin University. Here she developed a curriculum in population medicine. She also is director of a student run clinic in northern Illinois.
In the past she has been involved as a volunteer in both the Jewish and non-Jewish communities. She’s been an active member and past president of Tikkun Ha-Ir, and was on the board of the 16th St. Community Health Center and on the Mequon Board of Health.
She is a long-time member of Congregation Shir Hadash, chairing its social justice committee and editing its newsletter.
She has been married to computer consultant Richard Bartlein for more than 30 years. They have four adult children and two grandchildren.
Through all this, anthropology still calls to her. Katz said that when she retires, “my interest in different cultures and peoples would [lead] me to travel,” including to the former Soviet Union, to “try to trace my family roots.”
Arlene Becker Zarmi is a freelance writer whose work has been published in more than 40 publications nationwide. She was also the producer and host of a travel TV show for Viacom, and is a Jewish genre and portrait artist. She lives with her husband, Rabbi Avi Zarmi, in Shorewood.
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