Dr. Nortin Hadler ’64 on “Health at Our Time of Life”

February 27, 2023

Classmates and friends:

We have invited Dr. Nortin Hadler ’64 to speak via Zoom on Thursday, April 27 at 4:00pm EDT on the subject of “Health at Our Time of Life.”

Registration for this Zoom event is required. All spouses are invited and welcome to attend, with or without classmates. Feel free to forward this invitation to anyone you know, such as a relative or friend who might have an interest. Register for the event by clicking on the following link.

Register by clicking here.

You will receive a confirmation email with a link to the meeting. That link will be unique to you. On the day of the event you will receive the meeting link again. You will not have to hunt for it.

About the Speaker
Our speaker is our classmate Nortin M Hadler MD MACP MACR FACOEM.

After Yale, Nortin went on to Harvard Medical School, graduating in 1968. Next came clinical training at the Massachusetts General Hospital, the National Institutes of Health, and the Clinical Research Centre in London. He was certified a Diplomate of the American Boards of Internal Medicine, Rheumatology, Allergy & Immunology, and Geriatrics. He joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina in 1973, was promoted to Professor of Medicine and Microbiology/Immunology in 1985, and transitioned to Emeritus status in 2015. In recognition of his clinical activities, he was elevated to Mastership in both the American College of Physicians and the American College of Rheumatology.

The immunobiology of peptidoglycans was the focus of his early investigative career. Because of the contributions of his laboratory, he was selected as an Established Investigator of the American Heart Association and elected to membership in the American Society for Clinical Investigation. His focus on basic biology was superseded by an analysis of “the illness of work incapacity.” Over 200 papers and 12 books resulted, along with election to the National Academy of Social Insurance, as well as Fellowship in the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

In the past two decades, he turned his critical razor to much that is considered contemporary medicine at its finest. His assaults on medicalization and overtreatment appear in many commentaries and in seven monographs:

• The Last Well Person: How to Stay Well Despite the Health-Care System (2004)
• Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (2008)
• Stabbed in the Back: Confronting Back Pain in an Overtreated Society (2009)
• Rethinking Aging: Growing Old and Living Well in an Overtreated Society (2011)
• The Citizen Patient: Reforming Health Care for the Sake of the Patient, Not the System (2013)
• By the Bedside of the Patient: Lessons for the Twenty-First-Century Physician (2016)
• Promoting Worker Health: A New Approach to Employee Benefits in the Twenty-First Century (2018)

He served on the Governing Committee of the National Courts and Sciences Institute. In 2015 he assumed a leadership role in an initiative to establish the alternative healthcare system described in his latest book.

About This Event
Nortin is a staunch advocate for informed medical decision making and for patient empowerment. The primary role for the physician is in facilitating both. Should the patient still feel overwhelmed, “What would you do, Doc?” is no longer first recourse. In the 21st century, the plaint should be “What would you do if you were me?”, a plaint that calls for mutual understanding of the patient’s preferences, risk tolerance, and much more.

Dr. Hadler will explain the extent and limitations of contemporary clinical science that foster this approach to the patient-doctor dialogue. He will use examples that are familiar to most octogenarians from personal encounters with clinical interventions or from the overwhelming medicalization of our culture. He will rely even more for object lessons from queries offered by registrants attending this Zoom.

Supplementary Viewing and Reading
You may wish to preview this event by watching Nortin’s Commencement address to the graduating class of the medical school of the University of Michigan in 2015. This speech can be viewed on our Class website here. His remarks offer a window into his approach to his practice and his profession. You may also be interested in his essay “Overtreatment: Friend or Foe?”, an invited paper published in 2018 in Gerontology, the premier European geriatrics journal. This essay is particularly relevant to this Zoom event, as it focuses on the medical treatment (and overtreatment) of the elderly. You can read the essay here.

Any Questions for Dr. Hadler?
We ask every attendee of this Zoom event to consider submitting a question that is particularly meaningful to our age group. Send your questions to Sam Francis ’64, who will be moderating this event. Sam will preserve anonymity and transmit your questions to Nortin, who will choose those that are likely to have broad interest and will use them as object lessons in the bulk of his presentation. At the end of the session, time permitting, we’ll have a Q&A session during which questions may be submitted by the audience using the Zoom chat function.

Please mark your calendars, and don't forget to register!

Cheers,