Rewan Abdelwahab AB '20

My name is Rewan, and I am a Class of 2020 alumni. I was on campus recently with the delayed commencement, which was interesting to stay in Currier. I’m currently a third year medical student now at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

Many advisors at Harvard further pushed me into medicine. I came into college thinking about law, but I was open minded to science. It was never my strong suit per se, but I had a lot of great advisors in college who suggested this might be something I would be interested in. I didn’t have that much interaction with healthcare directly growing up. That being said, I did serve as a ‘pseudo-translator’ for my parents and saw a lot of gaps in the healthcare system through my experience. Working through the Crimson Care Collaborative site in Chelsea, I worked with a lot of communities that I hope to continue to work with as a future physician. What made me really interested in medicine was that I have this perspective of someone who was outside of the system for a while and saw a couple of gaps, bringing this unique perspective to address some of those gaps that I now see still in medical education and care. Specialty wise, I am very open minded, but anything related to oncology would be what I’m interested in. 

A lot of work can be done still in cultural humility, community engagement, and community education. It has improved since when I was growing up, and I do see more of an investment on the medical profession size. In college, I remember there was a big measles outbreak in Minnesota, and from the outside, it might have seemed like a lot of individuals were unvaccinated for random reasons. But as I have been connected to these communities, I saw how these groups were taken advantage of for their lack of health literacy. There was a rise in Minnesota with the rates of autism among Somali children at that time, and as I had interacted with this community before sharing the same faith, I saw that unlicensed physicians and non-medical professionals were coming in and telling people that the MMR vaccine was what was causing autism in kids. There was this dramatic decline, then, in a community that had been fairly well vaccinated prior to these initiatives. This happened because there was not a strong healthcare presence in the community, and I wanted to work in community education to combat that, because these issues will lead to epidemics and vulnerable populations taken advantage of because they don’t have the scientific basis to know how to fight back. The healthcare community needs to be proactive in engaging with these communities to prevent things like this from happening again and again, and it most recently happened again with COVID. 

In regards to medical education, one project I have been involved in has been working on the significant gap in the representation of skin of color in medical imagery. A lot of physicians have a lack of comfort in diagnosing conditions within darker skin tones, and that in turn perpetuates health inequities. If physicians aren’t comfortable diagnosing things with certain skin tones, that’s a problem and that perpetuates disparities. It also fosters distrust because if physicians cannot treat patients well, it’s natural for people not to seek physicians out. 

Here at Mayo, two advisors have been extremely helpful in helping jumpstart these initiatives Dr. Newman and Dr. Vidal because they have this interest being dermatologists. I have also been working with Dr. Atunah-Jay and Dr. Elegbede at Mayo, and we have been working to systematically revamp the curriculum and write up a framework that can be adopted by a lot of other institutions to make sure this change is pervasive and other community education efforts. 

There’s a lot of metrics that I’ve been helping lead for this curriculum change, which is really a collaborative process with the Faculty. One of them is skin color, making sure we have imagery that is equitable, and to also increase body representation because there tends to be a skewing of representing individuals who are thinner, which is not a reflection of the US population at large. This is critical for helping physicians learn how to navigate physical exams and maneuvering around a larger body is something that is not brought up often enough. 

We also have to include more about cultural and social factors that impact health outcomes, as opposed to just assuming genetics is the cause. One case that really stood out from this revamp was a case rewritten about polymyositis, which affects your muscles and how you can stand up. The typical prompt was that people have trouble going up the stairs. But if we’re limited to this, we are limited in how we assess and look for the signs. The case that stood out was that they were talking about a Muslim patient who was engaging in their daily prayers and was having trouble getting up from prayer. It was a different way of looking at the same thing, but asking these questions with more cultural sensitivity and a more holistic lens. 

Having communities within medical school is fundamental to resilience and not having burnout. For me, that means going to medical education groups where I meet likeminded people who are going through similar struggles. I’m also in the student national medical association, where I can share similar experiences with other minority students. The Diversity Equity and Inclusion Office is also great — Dr. Valencia is a newer addition, but she has been great in fostering really inclusive social events and making sure we have time for ourselves. Make sure to prioritize wellness to find those communities. A lot of the time, the people who will go to bat for you don’t necessarily look like you, so also be open minded when pursuing mentors. 

Wellness is a major thing that is easily lost because the path of medicine is so long. But if you do not figure out systems to destress in healthy outlets, it will confront you very quickly and you will burn out and not be motivated. It’s a disservice, then, to your past, current, and future self if you don’t take that time to really check in with your mental well-being and spiritual and physical well-being, making those a priority because if you don’t have that, everything else deteriorates quickly. In order to be present for your patients, you have to be present yourself. Also, work in groups! You get a lot more done in a collaborative approach than you do alone, which is difficult to imagine for high achieving individuals, I understand. Make sure you reach out to your classmates who you notice might be dealing with burnout and they’ll do the same when it comes to you. Community and collaboration is essential. 

If you notice that there is a gap or something you dislike in the system, I would encourage you to not just let it slide. Figure out a way to combat it and it will enhance the practice of medicine. It does not have to fall on your shoulders only — that’s a fast track to burning out — but realize that you have more insight and power as a medical student than you might assume. 

Start a conversation with a trusted mentor and you may be able to effect positive change. For me, I found in my first year doing a surgery rotation that they did not know how I could enter the OR wearing a hijab. They were asking a lot of culturally and religiously insensitive questions, not intentionally, but because I was a lowly medical student with high surgeons, I left that session in a lot of emotional turmoil without knowing how to enter an operating room — a huge gap. You might be recruiting diverse classes, but if the resources for these students are lagging, then what does it all mean? I held that to myself for a while, saying I would never consider surgery. But after talking to a few mentors, I was connected to a surgeon who did teach me how to scrub in effectively and pushed me to take it further, encouraging me to change the curriculum and write something up. So we wrote up a paper that was picked up by the Association of Perioperative Nurse and now protocol has changed on the national scale. All of this was born out of believing in yourself and noticing a problem, having supportive mentors, and just going for it because you want things to be better for those who will come after you. 

Rewan Abdelwahab

AB 2020 | Integrative Biology

Medical Student 

Interviewed and Compiled by Felicia Ho