You could say Dr. Joel Mandelbaum sees the world differently.
A family doctor with more than 30 years experience, he was medical director of the Ulster-Dutchess chapter of Hospice and is now an attending physician at a county geriatric care center. But for even longer than he has been a doctor, he has been an avid photographer of people. In March, he will mount an exhibit of photographs from New York City in the 1970s when he was in medical school and no one had cell phones.
Mandelbaum, 60, is a resident of Kingston with his wife of 35 years; they have two grown children.
He practices family medicine in Kingston and Saugerties with Hurley Avenue Family Medicine, and is also attending physician at two units of the Golden Hill Health Care Center. For 13 years, he also served as medical director for Hospice of Dutchess and Ulster counties.
Mandelbaum attended medical school at Columbia University and found himself drawn to family practice because, “I”™m more of a people person than a technocrat.” He was attracted to the whole-person approach a family doctor must take in providing palliative medicine to relieve symptoms and suffering. “A lot of palliative care is knowing what the patient wants and to do that you have to know the patient,” he said.
Mandelbaum”™s interest in what he calls “end of life issues,” was a natural extension of his interest in peoples experience though medicine. His work with Hospice grew out of his observations that the technical possibilities of some medical practices had outstripped common sense approaches to wellness.
“I saw there was a lot of medical stuff done to people at the end of life that seemed useless and made them uncomfortable,” said Mandelbaum. “It took the last experiences of their lives when they should be involved with family and unfinished business, and made it a futile frantic painful search for something that was never going to happen.”
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He repeated the phrase “Do something to people, as opposed to for people,” to emphasize how unbalanced he saw the medical approach to elder care had become, saying it first struck him in his third year at Columbia, when the medical staff was fretting about the failing health of a woman who was over 100 years old and was literally asking to be allowed to die in peace. Ultimately, he said her wish was granted but the case made an indelible expression.
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He said that over the course of decades medical science has only grudgingly come to terms with end-of-life ideas. “The philosophy of reasonable approaches as opposed to throwing everything at something is gaining ground,” Mandelbaum said.
Other changes in the medical field involve the complications of the health care system, a particular challenge for their small practice with three doctors and two nurse-practitioners.
“It”™s a source of frustration, I sort of periodically whine about it but I make a good living, it can support my family and my hobby it can support some travel. So I like to look at the positive aspects,” said Mandelbaum who adds that that the business aspect is only money, which pales in comparison to the real crisis in health care.
“The down side is not dealing with the insurance industry,” said Mandelbaum. “The really sad thing is people putting off badly needed medical care because they don”™t have insurance. And that happens a lot.”
His journey through medicine has had a separate and parallel journey through the art of photography. In 1968, after years assisting his father in taking photographs, Mandelbaum was home on a break from medical school.
“I wanted something to hang on my walls that was original and I can”™t draw at all, so I took one of his cameras and went out on my bike across the Brooklyn Bridge,” said Mandelbaum. “I and came home and developed them and I was hooked. That was it.”
Mandelbaum”™s devotion to photography has led him to exhibit works of his own and to create and exhibit and a website highlighting his photos and work from others in the medical field called HippocratesGallery.com.
Just as with medicine, Mandelbaum has ridden along as technology has changed the way photography is performed.
“When you learned on old cameras you really had to know what you were doing,” he said. “Now its snap, snap, snap without thinking too much about it. You used to need more of an inner eye as to what you needed. Now, you get instant feedback so you can take a shot, move it to the left, move it to the right.”
His collection titled “Vintage New York” is set to open at Seven 21 Gallery on Broadway in Kingston with a reception on Saturday, March 6, 5 to 8 p.m. The show runs through the month of March.
