Emergency medicine found Dr. Fred Landes, the new director of of Baystate Franklin Medical Center’s Wound Center, out of necessity.
As a doctor for the Indian Health Service working in South Dakota, he knew something was amiss there when he pulled up to borrow the hospital’s company car on a day off and saw a group of white people gathered — the facility was exclusively for Native Americans, unless the patient was in labor or dying.
“That’s not a good thing,” he said of the scene. The patient in question had suffered a heart attack, and the only other doctor available at the time was tied up with another situation. Landes jumped into action and began cardiac life support, traveling with the man in the ambulance to the nearest intensive care unit 65 miles away.
The ambulance’s cardiac monitor didn’t work, so he manually monitored the patient’s condition by having him squeeze his hand periodically. The patient survived, and Landes’s career was changed forever.
“After I got back, I said, ‘That was it. That was really fantastic to help someone like that,’” Landes called New York and found an emergency medicine training program, then spent more than three decades as an emergency room doctor, before entering wound care.
At first, he didn’t think he’d enjoy it, but he soon found it to be extremely rewarding.
“They’re grateful,” he said of the patients he gets to work with. “We do a lot of the things other people don’t want to do. We take care of wounds that have been open for a long period of time and are frequently infected.”
As a double board-certified physician with the American Board of Emergency Medicine and with the American Board of Wound Management, Landes is the only board-certified doctor in wound care in the Greenfield area.
He said he most enjoys watching his patients get better and experience a better, healthier lifestyle than they did before coming to the Wound Center.
“We try and be personal — we know where people hunt, where they fish, what they knit and what they read,” Landes said. “We get to know people, and the nurses we have here are people who love to do this. We heal people, and it’s great.”
Landes, a Pittsfield resident, began his medical career by hopping on a plane to work as a family physician for the IHS in Eagle Butte, S.D., and Browning, Mont., after graduating medical school in New York. He found himself working in the sole hospital on a reservation the size of Connecticut, with a population of just 5,000.
“You could drive for an hour and a half and not see a person,” he said. “It was quite beautiful, but there were more cattle than people.”
Those communities, he said, face intense poverty and the health problems that come along with it. Working conditions weren’t ideal, either — he noted the cone that goes on the end of the otoscope used to look in patients’ ears were sanitized and reused.
“In terms of means, what people could afford, you’d have to take that into consideration every time you prescribed something, and you had to be really careful in administering treatment,” he said. “That’s true here, also, but it was much worse there.”
For more information, visit: www.baystatehealth.org or call 413-773-2441.