On Call with Dr. Gupta

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On the set of CNN’s “House Call with Dr. Sanjay Gupta.”

Photograph by Mark Hill

With the possible exception of Dr. Mehmet Oz, there’s no other doctor with a higher profile in the country than neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta. The Michigan native, who turned 40 in October, grew up in Novi and attended U-M. He’s gone on to a crowded career. He’s a surgeon at two Atlanta hospitals, is chief medical correspondent for CNN, hosts CNN’s weekend show House Call with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, reports for the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, writes a column for Time magazine, has made several documentaries, blogs for CNN.com, Twitters regularly on medical topics, was embedded with the “Devil Docs” in Iraq, and, as a White House Fellow, was an adviser to former First Lady Hillary Clinton.

As if that résumé weren’t impressive enough, Gupta was chosen as one of People magazine’s Sexiest Men of the Year in 2003. To the consternation of his admirers, the handsome doc, the son of East Indian immigrants who were both engineers for Ford Motor Co., is married to family-law attorney Rebecca Olson Gupta. They have three daughters and live in Atlanta.

He’s also the author of Chasing Life, about delaying aging, and the recent Cheating Death (Wellness Central, $24.99), which concerns stories of people who made astonishing recoveries from the jaws of death. 

President Obama offered the office of surgeon general to Gupta, but the doctor declined the position last March.

We caught up with the busy doc in late September via phone from Philadelphia, where he was filming an accompanying documentary to Cheating Death (available on DVD and iTunes).

So, irony of ironies, you, a doctor, recently contracted H1N1 in Afghanistan.

Yeah — go figure.

I read the account on your CNN blog, but in a nutshell, explain for our readers what you went through.

I was covering the war in Afghanistan, and this thing just wouldn’t go away. It started as a cough, then came the body aches. But the chills were the most memorable. It was over 100 degrees there in the desert, but I was walking around in sweatshirts and blankets. And I don’t get sick very often. There was also a complete lack of appetite. I think I realized that I should stop working when I got out of my sleeping bag one day and couldn’t take more than a couple of steps without feeling that I had complete disequilibrium. … I’m doing fine now.

You grew up in Novi and went to the University of Michigan for your undergrad degree and med school. Where did you typically go when you lived here?

My family is Indian, so we did a lot of things that revolved around our culture. We went to the Indian festival, and those of other cultures, too [in Hart Plaza]. And every summer, we’d go to the Renaissance Festival. My mom is a big cook, and a lot of the things we did as kids revolved around food. We’d also go to Tiger Stadium, but also to culturally related performances downtown. In college, I had friends who went to Wayne State University or were residents at hospitals around there, and we would go to Detroit jazz clubs and restaurants. But most of my adult life in Michigan, I was very, very busy. As a neurosurgeon resident, I was working about 110 hours a week, and as a med student, you don’t have a lot of time to play, so to speak.

Did you meet your wife in Ann Arbor?

Yes, I did. I met her through some mutual friends, and it went from there.

Some information in Cheating Death seems counter-intuitive. Hypothermia is something we link with danger, but it can actually be beneficial because it buys time for the patient and doctors. So why aren’t more health professionals advocating therapeutic hypothermia?

Let me preface the answer by saying that, as I’m talking to you, I’m at the University of Pennsylvania. I’m making a documentary related to Cheating Death, and one of the issues I was specifically looking at today is hypothermia. So I’m at U-Penn, which is a major academic hospital where they’re doing hypothermia every day. … It’s not really that complicated. Literally, you’re cooling the patient. So, you take this simple device that wraps around the torso with cold saline in it, and it cools them down.

To about 90 degrees?

Well, it varies a few degrees — 90 to 93 degrees, around there, depending on their age and their specific health issue. What’s striking to me is that all the literature I’ve looked at says that hypothermia can absolutely improve the likelihood of survival after cardiac arrest. The concept is pretty simple. Hypothermia slows down your body’s metabolism, and it decreases the body’s need for oxygenated blood.
But to your point of why aren’t more hospitals doing it — there’s not a good answer. And I wish there were, because it’s a simple device and it’s not costly. This technique just requires a good advocate in hospitals, good spokespeople who’ll say, ‘Hey, there’s no champion for this, but it makes a huge difference in terms of survival. Let’s start doing it.’

One of the stunners in your book is that conventional mouth-to-mouth in CPR is virtually useless, but rapid chest compressions are far more effective. Why is that?

It is startling, and the answer’s pretty simple. That is, if you’re walking through the streets of Detroit today and a guy or gal were to collapse in front of you — sudden cardiac arrest — what we know is that, from a purely physiological standpoint, they were breathing right before they arrested, and they have plenty of oxygen in their blood for several minutes, maybe even 10 or 12. The real key is to get that oxygenated blood moving. Anything that stops that process — stopping, for example, to give mouth-to-mouth — is simply not moving the blood through the body. … The survival rates can actually be worse if someone stops to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, as opposed to just pushing hard on the sternum, 100 pushes every minute, until the paramedics get there. The average person [a bystander] could save a life. 

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