Of his past and current work, Dr. Fries reflects, “I believe we’re really doing good things, and that we have done really good things.” He believes that his penchant for asking the larger questions emanates from his humanities background: Prior to medical school, he degreed in and taught philosophy at Stanford University. “I liked to address big questions, liked to think outside of the box and test several different theories of truth.” His work in patient-reported outcomes, he says, has contributed to “an increasingly broad recognition that the ‘doctor orders/patient obeys’ way of thinking about medicine is lacking,” he says. “Patients get to weigh in their values also. It’s ultimately the patient’s value system that you’re trying to mimic.”
Gretchen Henkel is a medical journalist based in Los Osos, Calif.
References
- Fries JF. Physiologic studies in systemic sclerosis (scleroderma). Arch Intern Med. 1969; 123:22-25.
- Fries JF. Aging, natural death, and the compression of morbidity. N Engl J Med. 1980;303:130-135.
- Fries JF, Spitz P, Kraines RG, Holman HR. Measurement of patient outcome in arthritis. Arthritis Rheum. 1980;23:137-145.
- Fries JF, Hess EV, Klinenberg J. A standard database for rheumatic diseases. Arthritis Rheum. 1974;17:327-336.
- Weyl S, Fries JF, Wiederhold G, Germano F. A modular self-describing clinical databank system. Comput Biomed Res. 1975;8:279-293.
Career
1964 – Graduates from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.
1966 – Completes a two-year residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
1968 – Completes a two-year fellowship in the connective tissue disease division of Johns Hopkins Hospital.
1969 – Completes a one-year residency at Stanford University School of Medicine and accepts a position as instructor of medicine there.
1971 – Becomes assistant professor of medicine at Stanford.
1976 – ARAMIS receives initial NIH funding.
1977 – Becomes associate professor of medicine at Stanford.
1977 – Becomes associate professor of medicine at Stanford.
1977 – Becomes associate professor of medicine at Stanford.
