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DR . JOHN SHAW and THE RIPPLE EFFECT
A CAREER in PURSUIT of WHOLE-PERSON MEDICINE
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26 LOUISVILLE MEDICINE here . It starts with a pen and paper ,” Sharon Shaw told me simply . She interjected this midway through the couple ’ s account of a lifetime of astonishing work , smiling at my incredulous look .
Sharon Shaw is an occupational therapist and the wife of Dr . John Shaw , who retired this academic year from the University of Louisville Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation Department . He is an exceedingly rare breed : both fully an orthopedic surgeon and a physiatrist . In the time I spent working with him as one of his last physiatry residents , I saw how both things informed and flowed into his care . For patients , he was an interlude of wholeness in a modern medical culture that can feel very siloed . It was this observation that prompted me to seek more of their story ; I was expecting to glean perhaps a maxim that might guide me through some clinical scenario . I got much more . As Dr . Shaw himself put it , “ There were highlights along the whole journey . Everything was built on another thing . Life is a constant opportunity to see what ’ s next if you don ’ t live in the past .”
Wrapping up his orthopedic residency at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1972 , Dr . and Mrs . Shaw felt nudged to work as medical missionaries . They set off that very year to Conju , South Korea through the Southern Presbyterian Church and arrived during the reverberations of a dwindling polio epidemic . They set to work , often traveling to several cities to see patients , who would come in droves looking for the hope the American surgeon could offer . They often traveled to Cheju , an island where many expectant parents brought their polio-stricken children . From the Shaws ’
by JILL PENMAN , MD
observations , disability was typically hidden in South Korea , so the children were brought quietly . The need seemed bottomless but the resources modest . “ There was no vision ,” Mrs . Shaw explained , “ I just looked around for something I could do with what was there .” The Shaws quickly discerned that bracing and therapies were of greater need than surgeries for many of these patients . They began to figure out the bigger picture : the whole patient . With little means but ample ingenuity , they mined talent from the community around them . A local handyman became their prosthetist . A pizza shop lent its oven after hours to construct plastic braces . A speech therapist and physical therapist joined in ; the Shaws looked around and realized it was becoming a whole operation . Dr . Shaw still marvels at the resourcefulness that he stumbled upon to fill the medical needs at that time . “ Korea was a footprint in which I could practice creatively . I would walk downtown with a hand drawn picture of a surgical instrument asking someone to make it for me . A week later , I ’ d return and they ’ d have it for me .”
Eight years after arriving , the Shaws were opening the Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine ( IRM ) in 1980 , the first comprehensive rehabilitation center in the country . It was to be a place where the orthopedic patients could better recover function after surgeries . Still , they had no rehabilitation doctor . One quickly surfaced , however , much like many of the solutions for the Shaws ’ dilemmas did , not because anyone had a vision or goal but because there was a need and someone daring to ask “ Why not me ?” This time that someone was an anesthesia resident named Bongok Kim . She approached Dr . Shaw and asked to be the first rehabilitation resident . And not just the first in the hospital , mind you . She would be the first in the country of South Korea , where at the time the specialty of physiatry did not exist . Not being a physiatrist himself , Dr . Shaw agreed to help train her . Together , they traveled to the states to train , again as residents , at the PM & R program at Frazier Rehab in Louisville .