DO - Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine

Eric Greenfield
all the right reasons
By Mary Reed
The ink is still drying on the Ohio University diploma that
names Eric Greenfield a doctor of osteopathic medicine, but
he has already made more house calls than most physicians will
make in their entire careers. This is because prior to medical
school, Greenfield was a paramedic for nine years – an experience
that shaped his professional trajectory as well as his philosophy
as a practitioner and teacher of emergency medicine.
“You get to make a big impact on people’s lives,” Greenfield
says about his paramedic career. He remembers treating five
cardiac arrest cases on five consecutive Christmas days.
“When you’re in somebody’s house and you see somebody
who’s collapsed literally in front of the Christmas tree, it
gives you a perspective you can’t see anywhere else.”
This in-home, pre-hospital assessment as a paramedic was
the formative beginning to Greenfield’s medical career.
He eventually earned a nursing degree through Regents
College, and then went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in
health sciences through Excelsior College. He was making
a good living as a nurse when he became a part-time
paramedic instructor at the University of Alabama, but he
again changed careers to help establish a paramedic degree
program at nearby Calhoun College. “It was the best job I
ever had,” Greenfield recalls.
Medical school had always been on his mind, however,
and he eventually hit an educational ceiling as a nurse and
a paramedic instructor. He knew it was time to pursue a
medical degree, and he knew it would be at an osteopathic
medical school.
One of the things that drew Greenfield to OU-COM was
the patient-centered continuum program, a student-directed
curriculum where small groups of medical students are presented
with patient cases, and they come up with their own learning
objectives. “It was good for me because of my nontraditional
background,” Greenfield says. Describing a typical PCC
discussion, he says, “We might have a patient with a cough
or pneumonia. We’d start talking about the differential
diagnosis of a cough … a microbiologist in a previous life
might say, ‘These are the typical bugs we see.’ My contribution
is typically, ‘This is what you see in real patients, this is what
you look for.’”
Now Greenfield interacts with patients from the perspective
of a resident physician—he’s starting an emergency medicine
Eric Greenfield, left, and his mentor, Henry Gaillard, M.D.
residency at the Medical College of Georgia. “I didn’t really
want to do emergency medicine when I started medical school,”
he says. “I wanted to do a little bit of everything—which left
me with family medicine or emergency medicine. Then I realized
it was emergency medicine that made me want to go to
medical school to begin with.
“From seeing people die to delivering babies—that experience
at a formative age really changed me. I think life is precious
and I think we have a duty to give back to people.”
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