Karen Devon
SURGEON - ETHICIST AND SOMETHING MORE
Karen Devon
|
Karen Devon is an endocrine and
general surgeon at Women’s College
Hospital and the UHN. She teaches
ethics to students, residents and colleagues
in various original formats.
She leads a popular ethics quality of
care rounds each month at General
Surgery Quality of Care Conference
for UHN and hopes to roll this out
Department wide. She is engaged
in a variety of writing projects,
including an article on the ethics
of personalized genomic medicine
for a surgical oncology journal, a
popular article on chefs and surgery
for the popular health blog “kevinmd”
which was published by the
Culinary Institute of America, and
she contributes actively to patient
advocacy conversations on Twitter.
Karen founded the Surgery Department Book Club with a discussion of Open
Wound, a historical novel based on the gastric fistula experiments conducted
on Alexis St. Martin by frontier surgeon William Beaumont. She is interested
in studying social media in health care and medical education, and conducts
numerous projects with this focus through the Education Scholars Program at
the Center for Faculty Development. She has given rounds locally and internationally
on the ethics of using social media by healthcare personnel, emphasizing
the importance of physicians input to balance the medical misinformation
and other open sourced miseducation in wide circulation.
|
Karen founded an Endocrine Surgery Journal Club
to bring together surgeons from Otolaryngology and
General Surgery as well as endocrinology, pathology
and radiology representatives. She asks residents who
are rotating on the Womens’ College ambulatory service
to keep a reflective journal which she discusses with
them. She will start an Ambulatory Surgery rotation
for Medical Students as a multidisciplinary course that
will explore this model of surgery for the future. She
moderated a one hour Twitter chat for Colleen Young,
the social media manager and health writer at Princess
Margaret Hospital who runs a popular weekly twitter
chat about health care and social media in Canada.
Karen is studying surgeon-directed ultrasound, a tool for
locating the parathyroid glands and guiding fine needle
aspiration biopsies. She introduced the use of the parathormone
(PTH) assay at Women’s College Hospital - if
an abnormal PTH drops to normal in 10 minutes after
excising the suspected parathyroid gland, it ensures cure
of hyperparathyroidism.
Karen received her medical education at McGill, surgical
training in Toronto, and completed a fellowship in
endocrine surgery and surgical ethics at the University
of Chicago. She has traveled to Turkey, India, South
America and a thyroid surgery mission to the Philippines.
“I am usually planning my next trip.” Her next trip, with
her fiancée Jordan Lerner-Ellis, will be an African Safari.
She skydives, “tries every food known to humans”, and
is an avid reader. Her latest book is “The Spirit Catches
You and You Fall Down” by Anne Fadiman, which she
introduced to the Surgery Department Book Club. She
participates in yoga and spinning, and runs a ‘lean-in
circle’ of ten women at a similar career stage from a mix
of professions.
M.M.
|