BY KELLY PRICE

Mother really does know best.

Certainly in the case of Dr. Abbas S. Ali, his mother had a flawless sense of direction when she told him to leave India to continue his medical training in the United States.

He had always been a good student, especially in math and biology, and she recognized that in the United States, he would have better opportunities to exercise the skills he had learned at Gandhi Medical College in Hyderabad, India.

In India, an overwhelming number of students want to become physicians, with more than 5,000 applications for every place in a medical school. In a country with more than one billion residents, there are only 202 medical schools. An affirmative action program squeezes out many of the opportunities to participate in medical training. There are 60 applications for every graduate position and, in cardiology, resident positions are only available every other year.

Ali had an opportunity to apply for a cardiology residency in the United States, and 24 hours after he was accepted for the program, he was on his way to America, arriving in Chicago in 1991, with only $10 in his pocket.

He remembers his first reaction when he stepped on American soil: “where are all the people?” Accustomed to the crush of citizens on the streets of Bombay and Singapore, where he had also studied, he was stunned at what seemed to him to be the virtually empty streets of downtown Chicago.

His mother’s brother, an anesthesiologist in private practice in Chicago, loaned him $100 and he joined the residency program at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

He recalls arriving in Detroit and going to a market with a classmate and buying groceries in a very poor neighborhood with the $100 bill his uncle had given him. It was not a neighborhood where people flashed big bills around and he felt very uncomfortable. He was surprised by the street crime he encountered during his years in Detroit.

Ali spent six years at Henry Ford in cardiology residency and fellowship programs in the cardiology department and was selected chief fellow. The politics of academic medicine, coupled with the uncertainty about ongoing funding for research positions, made him decide to go into private practice. He posted his CV on the American College of Cardiology web site and got a call from the Florida Cardiology Group, where he found a good match for his personality and skills upon arrival in 2002.

He is board-certified in internal medicine and cardiovascular disease, with special interests in the areas of clinical, echo and nuclear cardiology, cardiac catheterization and coronary angiography, as well as permanent pacemaker implantation. He is professionally affiliated with Florida Hospital, Health Central, Orlando Regional Healthcare and Orlando Regional Dr. P. Phillips Hospital, and practices at the MetroWest and Clermont offices of Florida Cardiology.

He and his wife were married in the Indian tradition, as an arranged marriage, which “is not like you (might) think,” he noted. Arranged marriages are initiated by interested friends and relatives of young people to introduce them to prospective husbands and wives who share similar interests and tastes. A proposal of marriage is issued through these same channels.

Ali and his wife have four children, and they return to India every other year to visit their families. With a chuckle, he recalled that because family members were routinely assigned middle seats on international flights, his youngest child never realized that they were actually flying. He just thought they went into a big area, sat in some chairs for a long time, and then when they got off, they were in India! That same child was fascinated the first time he flew to Orlando with his father and looked out the window of the plane and saw they were actually flying.

An avid outdoorsman, Ali often takes his children camping, fishing, and canoeing.

He appreciates the opportunities this country offers for practicing medicine, noting “there is so much opportunity, so much fairness. He continues to be fascinated by cardiology, and the possibilities it promises for helping very sick patients. Many significant changes in the field have been accomplished through the progressive miniaturization of lifesaving devices, such as pacemakers. He remembers the first pacemaker had to be brought into the operating room in a wheelbarrow.

Concerned about the skyrocketing costs of medical procedures in this country, he points out that an operation that cost $25,000 a decade ago in this country now costs $60,000 to $100,000, while the equivalent procedure costs $5,000 in India. He worries about small business owners who cannot afford to provide insurance to their employees, and he sees more and more patients who have decided to “chance” going without health insurance because of the enormous costs of policies. Ali thinks physicians often are removed from their business offices and, in practicing the best medicine for their patients, may not be aware of the total charges for procedures they are ordering. He points out that some cardiology practices have gone into competition with insurance companies and purchased hotels that have been converted into surgery centers and recovery centers operated by the practice.

Ali balks at the mention of retirement. “I’ll probably never retire,” he said, with a smile, “I’m having too much fun all day.”


July 2007