Photograph by Philip Channing. |
He reaches into a file drawer and pulls out several folders, each bulging with cards, letters and notes from patients. One says how reassuring it is to be cared for by "the best of the best." Another mentions celebrating a 25th wedding anniversary.
"I'm really proud of my staff for providing compassionate, competent, outstanding care to our patients. That’s one thing I hear from virtually all my patients," says Parvesh Kumar, M.D. "It really touches my heart.
"This puts everything into perspective,” says Kumar, professor and chair of Radiation Oncology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. “Why are we here? So these patients can live to see their kids grow up and to be at their son’s wedding or their daughter’s graduation.”
Kumar says that Keck doctors "get some of the most complicated cases in the Los Angeles area. It’s our job to find a way to treat these patients and help them."
The department offers a wide range of advanced technological options for very precise planning and implementation of individualized radiation treatment for cancer. Using such tools as a GammaKnife, a robotic CyberKnife and one of the first Mammosite devices in the country, the specialists can deliver "very high doses of radiation to the tumor with minimal side effects and minimal radiation to critical organs," Kumar says.
With a growing faculty of radiation oncologists, Ph.D. radiation physicists and radiobiologists, the department provides services at four hospitals: USC University Hospital, USC/Norris Cancer
Hospital, LAC+USC Medical Center, and Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. “Providing clinical care is just one of our important missions,” says Kumar. The department trains residents and medical students. In addition, research is part of the "ultimate goal of finding a cure for cancer and improving the patients’ quality of life."
For example, Kumar recently was awarded $1.22 million over three years from the Department of Defense (DOD) for developing new treatments for prostate cancer. The translational research project, which involves five different USC departments, is one of only three national grants typically awarded by the DOD annually.
For Kumar, radiation oncology is the perfect combination of science and medicine. With an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering, the physics requirements are "second nature" to him. After medical school at the University of Kansas, he completed his residency at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. At age 29, he headed Radiation Oncology at the Veterans Administration Medical Center affiliated with the University of Tennessee and worked at St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital in Memphis. He started a new academic Radiation Oncology Department at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., before joining USC as department chair in 2003.
He keeps in touch with some of his former patients, such as one little boy from middle Tennessee who was treated in Memphis. "I remember driving five hours to be there for his five-year cure anniversary," Kumar says. "It’s one of the things that makes all of this worthwhile."
For more information on radiation oncology and other medical services available at USC, visit The Doctors of USC at www.usc.edu/health/usccare, or call (800) USC-CARE. |
