Westmont Magazine Practicing a Broad Range of Family Medicine
Lauren Brown-Berchtold ’09 stayed in a stilt shack on an islet of Indonesia’s Riau Islands during her summer with an Emmaus Road service project. When the tide receded, she looked down on rotting garbage, trash and junk covering the sea floor. Prepared to help the people in the village with physical therapy, Lauren quickly realized that the paralyzed girl suffering from malaria and meningitis required more care than she could give. “A physician with broad training—not a physical therapist—could help the entire population,” she said. “I wanted to return someday and provide the health care they lacked, including simple things like toothbrushes to keep their teeth from rotting.” Despite the poor conditions she encountered, Lauren grew to love the warm, generous people in the tiny, remote community.
Back at Westmont, she changed her career plans from physical therapist to doctor and worked hard to get into medical school—and she went back to Indonesia the next summer. A cellular and molecular biology major, she assisted Professor Eileen McMahon with her research and minored in religious studies. She got accepted to the Keck School of Medicine of USC and enrolled the fall after graduating. “I got great training at LA County Hospital and ended up specializing in family medicine,” she says.
During medical school, Lauren returned to Indonesia to volunteer for an organization helping people in Banda Aceh recover from the destructive 2004 tsunami. But meeting her husband, Nick Berchtold, a police officer in their tiny hometown of Escalon, California, led her to plan a career in the United States rather than overseas.
Lauren completed her residency in family medicine at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, the largest such program in the country, and a fellowship in obstetrics. As part of her training, she worked at an international health clinic serving relocated refugees. “I treated patients from many different countries, including Somalia, Iraq, Bhutan and Nepal,” she says. Her experiences in Indonesia prepared her to work with these people, most of whom had never seen a Western doctor—or one who was a woman.
She returned to Indonesia once more for a rotation at an Indonesian hospital in the Maluku Islands, helping physicians and public health officials prevent the spread of HIV. She later spent a month performing cesarean deliveries in Uganda at the hospital with the highest number of deliveries in the world.
Throughout her residency, Lauren developed an even stronger passion for obstetrics and gynecology, and she completed training in C-sections and obstetric surgery. She obtained board certification by the American Board of Family Medicine. “I wanted to reclaim the heritage of family medicine and perform my own procedures and treat a wide spectrum of patients and conditions,” she said.
Lauren and Nick decided to return to their hometown after her mother died in a car accident. As a physician at San Joaquin General Hospital in French Camp, California, she does surgery, teaches residents about labor and delivery and performing obstetric procedures, and treats patients at a hospital-owned clinic. “I want to do everything I was equipped to do,” she says. “I treat a variety of patients from the cradle to the grave.”
On a typical day, she may see patients in the morning, review care plans with residents, schedule a C-section, admit sick patients to the hospital, put in a central IV line and remove fluid from a patient’s lungs. “I love this,” she says. “I’m so lucky this is my life.”
She recently gave birth to her first child, learning firsthand what her patients experience; the hardest thing was taking maternity leave and stepping aside from her work. Parenting will give her even more insight into treating families and helping the people in her community.