“I met two guys who had started maybe a year before me — Dr. (Ramesh) Gupta and Dr. (Steven) Rymer,” Dr. Nathan Schneiderman said. “They interviewed me and I joined the group.”
Doctors Schneiderman, Gupta and Rymer are still in the emergency department at Miami Valley Hospital and have more than a century of cumulative experience in emergency medicine.
Schneiderman was headed toward a career in family practice in medical school in Brooklyn — now the SUNY Downstate Medical School — when he heard about the emerging specialty of emergency medicine.
“I went to my guidance counselor and asked him what he knew about it. He had heard nothing because it was so new,” Schneiderman said. He discovered there were only five residency programs for emergency medicine in the country.
He and his wife visited each one and he got his first choice — Akron General Medical Center.
“I was one of the earliest graduates of an Emergency Medicine Residency,” he recalled. “About a year after I started here, the AMA did approve emergency medicine as a specialty.”
Gupta and Rymer were both headed for careers in internal medicine. Gupta graduated from Maulana Azad Medical College at Delhi University, and had already completed his residency. He took a position in the ER at MVH while his wife, Dr. Sharda Gupta, finished her residency in pathology.
“I enjoy the urgent and emergency care,” he said. “The biggest challenge is that you are seeing the patient for the first time and you have to develop (trust) — you only get one shot at treating the patient.”
Rymer had completed his internship year in Internal Medicine at West Virginia University Medical School when he began his ER career in 1973 at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Parkersburg, W. Va.
“I had planned on going back to residency after working a couple of years, but I liked the field so much that I stayed with ER medicine and went on to become board-certified in ER medicine,” he said.
In the early days, ambulance drivers usually drove ambulances that belonged to funeral homes — paramedics and EMTs hadn’t arrived on the local scene.
“In many ways, it was easier (then),” Schneiderman said.
As an example, he related that if someone came in with a heart attack, he was sent to intensive care and spent as much as six weeks in bed resting.
Modern ER doctors work with a cardiologist and, within an hour, the artery may be opened up to minimize damage to the heart.
MVH is a Level I trauma center and has one of the busiest ERs in the state. Schneiderman said that, when he started in 1978, he was the fifth attending physician in the ER.
“We now have 40 emergency attendings and 15 physician assistants.”
The trio also witnessed the introduction of the air ambulances, mobile intensive care units and electronic records.
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