Moshe Ornstein, MA, MD: A Healing Factor
“Although I wanted to make Torah a top priority in my life, I wanted to make a difference in the lives of people as well.”
I see these miraculous things occur, but I know that it's not something that just happened with a snap of the fingers. It's something that happened with a person's positive attitude, a dedication to their process, a belief that they can pull it off. If they're not feeling positive, if they're not engaged, then they won't be able to participate in a meaningful way. It's really about having the compassion or the holistic understanding of a person, understanding not just how this injury is affecting their movement, but how it's affecting their life as a whole.
The biggest thing that I want to instill in my students is really the understanding of what an individual is going through, the compassion and the empathy of what they're going through. And by doing that, I think that will give the students the tools to be able to look at the big picture, look at the whole picture, and overall make that individual's life better.
Most people in the medical field have gotten here because we want to impact a person's life. We want to help them. And to be able to see a person light up when they realize they can do something that they couldn't do before, is probably the highest level of satisfaction you can have.
When his older brother was diagnosed with leukemia, LCM ’05 alum Moshe Ornstein knew he wanted to go into medicine. “Being in the hospital, seeing the physicians, seeing the impact the healthcare team had on my brother’s life… [I was] looking at those role models…saying, ‘I’d like to be like them.’
He’s now a Hematology and Oncology fellow at the renowned Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, and sees his professional life through the lens of Torah Judaism.
As a physician, he believes, it is important to “recognize, in some form, that we are a messenger of G-d, or G-d’s hand in this world, to help heal through His will. It provides a greater context for the illness, for our interaction with our patients, for our respect for our profession.”
And he thanks his training at Lander College for Men for being the key that helped him get to where he is today.
This is Dr. Moshe Ornstein’s story.
