At the third JOWMA (Jewish Orthodox Women in Medicine) club meeting of the year on December 8th, 20 YULA students heard from Dr. Yael Zoken, a resident of internal medicine at Adventist Health White Memorial, about her personal motivations for pursuing medicine and the importance of empathy towards patients.
“She showed us how much she cares about her patients and how much passion she has for medicine,” said sophomore Gabi Fozailoff.
JOWMA is a nonprofit organization founded in 2019 by Dr. Mimi Knoll to advance Jewish women’s careers in medicine. The organization provides opportunities for networking and education to its members.
JOWMA partnered with YULA last year, creating a club for YULA students to hear from doctors and be exposed to different facets of medicine. At some meets, students participated in activities like using VR headsets to learn about the body, using sutures, and touring the UCLA basketball center. In JOWMA meetings, students often hear from a speaker who specializes in a field of medicine. The speaker usually describes his or her specialty or topic of discussion. Students have the opportunity to ask questions about the speaker’s role as a doctor and hear the speaker’s opinion on topics like AI in medicine or what it’s like being a Jewish doctor.
Throughout this meeting, students were given an opportunity to understand what factors are taken into account when diagnosing patients. After learning how to approach a patient’s case, students were put into groups and given practice patient cases so that they could apply what they learned and attempt to “diagnose” a patient themselves. Each group presented their conclusion and how they reached it based on the information given, which Dr. Zoken taught attendees how to interpret.
Dr. Zoken told students that she became interested in medicine as a career after being diagnosed with a rare condition that landed her in the hospital as an 8th grader.
“Everything happens for a reason,” she said was a life lesson she had learned from that.
Dr. Zoken works in internal medicine, a branch of medicine dedicated to treating and preventing diseases in adults, usually involving multiple organ systems. She estimated that around 10% of her patients were missing limbs, and many were on dialysis.
Students said that they felt that this meeting highlighted not only the technical aspects of medicine, such as some medical terms, but also the importance of dedication and of caring for people as individuals.
