Following in a Legendary Humanitarian’s Footsteps

Amanda Alon (CAS’12, MED’14, SDM’18) (left) will encourage better dental care among low-income children in Lawrence with her Schweitzer Fellowship. Aline Souza (MED’16) will use her fellowship to improve the heart health of homeless Bostonians. Photos courtesy of BU School of Medicine

Two BU students will honor the legacy of the great 20th-century humanitarian Albert Schweitzer with projects to improve the health of vulnerable communities in Massachusetts.

Theologian, philosopher, and physician Schweitzer, winner of the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize, entered medical school at the relatively late age of 30, determined to serve the needy. He spent much of the rest of his life running the hospital he founded in 1913 in what is now the west central African nation of Gabon. There he put into practice his philosophy of Reverence for Life, caring for the poor and desperately ill.

Aline Souza (MED’16) and Amanda Alon (CAS’12, MED’14, SDM’18) are among 220 students from around the United States named 2015–16 Albert Schweitzer Fellows. Souza plans to work to improve heart health among homeless Bostonians, while Alon will promote better dental care among low-income children in Lawrence, Mass.

Celebrating its 75th anniversary, the Schweitzer Fellowship provides support to graduate students in a range of disciplines—including medicine, public health, dentistry, and pharmacy—interested in addressing the root causes of health inequalities.

This year’s Schweitzer Fellows will work at 12 program sites in the United States and at the hospital founded by Schweitzer in Gabon. Each receives a $2,000 stipend that may be used to cover project expenses and to implement the project in conjunction with a local health or social service organization.

The fellowship is also a leadership-development program, says former fellow Lisa Peterson, who is program director of the Boston Schweitzer Fellowship program and the fellowship’s national director of program development, training, and evaluation.

“We’re working with young professionals before they go off into the field, to help them think about how to be more effective leaders in community health and partnering with communities,” says Peterson.

Souza, a second year student in the School of Medicine’s Physician Assistant (PA) Program, will be working at Casa Esperanza in Roxbury, a residence for men and women battling both homelessness and addiction, where Boston Health Care for the Homeless (BHCHP) provides health care for residents and outpatients. Souza will work primarily on improving their blood pressure and cholesterol numbers and finding better ways for them to manage their medications, issues that pose special problems for those who live on the streets.

“If they don’t have money to afford shelter, how do they afford medicines?” says Souza’s advisor, Oren Berkowitz, a MED assistant professor of general internal medicine and PA Program director of research. “If you don’t have shelter, where do you put the medicines once you get them? And how do those medicines interact with other things you might be abusing or using on an uncontrolled basis?”

“That’s where the rapport, creating that patient-provider relationship comes in,” Souza says, “because then if someone has enough trust to say, ‘My medications are in my backpack and I’m really concerned that someone’s going to take them,’ then I can talk to them about other options, such as places to store their medications.”

“These problems overlap with a lot of other chronic diseases this population has,” Berkowitz says, “so in this project, Aline’s addressing heart disease, but I think a lot of the things she’s going to learn will have a broad application to the special needs of this population.”

Souza previously worked with BHCHP as an AmeriCorps volunteer after graduating from Wake Forest University. Her upcoming work, which she plans to incorporate into her thesis project, will increase awareness about chronic cardiac conditions through Healthy Hearts wellness groups featuring stress relieving exercises and educational activities. She also plans to provide individual consultations so she can build rapport with the people she’s hoping to help.

“Heart disease is actually the number-one killer of people who are homeless,” Souza says, the result of their diet, “not exercising, not taking their medications, not being concerned with their health because there are other stressors that seem to be more important at the moment. So I think if we focus on heart health, we will be able to provide a better quality of life, as well as decrease mortality in this population.”

Dental student Alon says she plans to use her fellowship to address inequalities in oral health by creating an education program for pre-K children and their parents through the Greater Lawrence Community Action Council Child Care Center.

“There are a lot of disparities in oral health, with kids from low-income families and minority families having much more decay than middle-income or higher-income majority counterparts,” says Alon’s faculty advisor, Corinna Culler (SPH’09), an SDM assistant professor of health policy and health services research.

That poses a significant problem for Lawrence’s large low-income Hispanic population, Culler says, noting that 29 percent of the children enrolled in one recent program there had untreated tooth decay. The issue is far more complex than a couple of cavities. “With little kids, if they have serious problems with oral health, it can cause problems with eating and growth, with learning—they may be distracted and unable to learn—and they may have behavioral problems because they’re in pain and can’t tell people they’re in pain,” says Culler.

For Alon’s project, which she plans to launch late this summer, she will either create or purchase pre-K level books that focus on three key areas: improving nutrition, at-home tooth care, and visiting the dentist. She hopes children and parents will look at the books together and says she plans to undertake additional outreach with children, parents, and staff to see that the message gets out.

The aspiring dentist says she learned about the Schweitzer Fellowships from an informational session at BU. “I got sucked in by the free pizza,” she says with a laugh. After applying for the fellowship, she was connected to the Lawrence child care center through a family friend. The project is of particular interest to her: Alon grew up in Lawrence and is personally familiar with many of the issues facing the city’s Hispanic community.

“I went to a nice high school and got into college,” Alon says. “I’ve been very lucky. I’ve gone to BU for my undergraduate and my master’s degrees and now dental school. I have family members who were not able to do the same things I do. You always hear a lot about oral health disparities, and it means a lot to me to be able to go home and institute a program to help change that.”