Lured to Stanford
In the late 1970s, Dr. Lorig planned to obtain her doctorate in health education at the University of California, Berkeley, and she applied for a job with Stanford University to help finance her graduate studies. The Midpeninsula Health Service organized by Dr. Holman, Stan Shoor, MD, and others had obtained federal Multipurpose Arthritis Center funding to further its work with patient education in an aging arthritis patient population. The funding for the center grant required an educational research component, and that’s where Dr. Lorig came in.
Because her focus and expertise were in maternal and child health, Dr. Lorig’s initial response was to turn the job down. “I’m not really interested in arthritis,” she told Dr. Holman when he proposed she come to work with their team. She also felt the project would be too time consuming while pursuing her thesis. But when Dr. Holman offered to help pay for her dissertation, it became an offer she couldn’t refuse. “He’s very good at bribes,” Dr. Lorig jokes about her long-time mentor and colleague.
She notes that she has always truly appreciated Dr. Holman’s openness to new thoughts and new ways of serving the public, as long as they seem worthwhile. “He was willing to work with a nonphysician and a woman. Very few physicians would take seriously a doctoral student who was a nurse. He was well before his time.” When questioned on this point, Dr. Holman says simply, “I didn’t give it a second thought. What she offered was a person with an interesting background that had included nontraditional medical activities. We had a practical program trying to help patients learn to take care of themselves better. We recognized that we would get nowhere in the long run unless we were able to prove that what we were doing worked. With Kate, it was possible to set up an investigative program to test self-management education.”
