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She watched her father suffer from the complications of Crohn’s disease and her brother struggle with irritable bowel syndrome. “We always needed to know where the nearest bathroom was. I grew up with that around me, and I was always just fascinated by the gut and the digestive system,” said Dr. Haghighat, who just finished up her fellowship at the University of Miami and is now a gastroenterologist at University of California, Los Angeles. She also serves as social media editor for AGA’s Gastro Hep Advances.
As she got to know the personalities of the GI department in the first year of medical school, “I realized that our senses of humor and personalities kind of aligned, and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is where I’m supposed to be,’ ” said Dr. Haghighat, who can be found on X @DoctorShida.
Humor is something Dr. Haghighat has reached for throughout her life and career. She eventually channeled her gift for satire onto the stage and the internet, as a stand-up comedian. In an interview with GI & Hepatology News, she spoke about the connection between GI medicine and humor, and the creative ways she has helped promote cancer screening in underserved populations.
Q: What practice challenges have you faced in your career?
Dr. Haghighat: I trained in a county hospital, so I’ve always worked with underserved and vulnerable populations. One of the challenges has been just navigation of care, especially as it pertains to cancer diagnoses or cancer screening. A lot of the time, patients don’t understand why they have to do a test or something invasive like a colonoscopy for symptoms they don’t have.
Q: A focus of yours has been improving uptake of screening in underserved communities. Please talk about the work you’ve done in this area.
Dr. Haghighat: I was at Los Angeles General Medical Center — a county hospital in Los Angeles — for residency, where we treated underserved, uninsured patients. I noticed in our primary care clinics a very low uptake of colon cancer screening. Patients didn’t want to bring the stool tests back or get colonoscopies. I surveyed a bunch of the patients and asked: How can we make colon cancer screening easier for you? About a third of the patients said, “If I can do it in the clinic before I go home, that would be great.”
So, I started this initiative called “Go Before You Go.” We would ask patients, “Hey, do you need to go to the bathroom right now, if you can?” Our nurses handed them the stool test to do in the bathroom before they left the clinic after their doctor visits.
We saw really good results with that. Surprisingly, a lot of people can go on demand. We saw increased screening rates, and that quality improvement project went on to win multiple first place awards in research competitions. So that’s what got me interested, and that’s where I had my beginnings of increasing preventative services in underserved communities on the ground.
Q: Can you discuss some health disparity studies you’ve done in this area?
Dr. Haghighat: As a GI at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, I was seeing cancer disparities firsthand every day. I wanted to approach these disparities from a research funding standpoint on a federal level. I was particularly interested in gastric cancer because it’s not common enough in the United States to warrant universal screening, but it’s very common among certain racial and ethnic minorities, which would warrant targeted screening.
I evaluated cancer funding allocation from the National Cancer Institute among the most common cancers in the United States and found that cancer afflicting a higher proportion of racial and ethnic minorities was receiving lower funding. One of those cancers was stomach cancer. This study basically highlighted that, to decrease these disparities, a top-down policy approach is necessary to distribute cancer research funding equitably across these groups.
A lot of stomach cancer comes from a bacteria called Helicobacter pylori, which can be more prevalent in certain countries. In another study, I looked at country of birth as a risk factor for stomach cancer, specifically for gastric intestinal metaplasia, which is a precursor for gastric cancer .
We found that country of birth is a key risk factor for gastric intestinal metaplasia and that it should be incorporated into risk stratification for targeted screening.
Q: Outside of medicine, you perform as a stand-up comedian. You have a popular satirical alias on social media. How did you get interested in stand-up comedy?
Dr. Haghighat: I gave my medical school’s commencement speech, and I had sprinkled a few jokes in there. Afterward, multiple people approached me and said, “You should really consider stand-up comedy. Your timing and delivery are great.” A few months later, I started my intern year in Los Angeles and simultaneously took stand-up comedy classes. I started performing at local clubs around town throughout residency, and I had two or three good sets that I could rely on. And so that’s how I got into stand-up comedy.
My intern year is also when I started this social media satire account. It was a way to cope with the anxieties and stress of residency. Before I knew it, the account gained multitudes of followers, doctors, and other medical professionals. And I joke that the more hours I work in a week, the more memes I make, the more posts I make. It’s kind of a creative outlet for me after a long day.
Q: What types of things do you talk about during your stand-up act?
Dr. Haghighat: A lot of it is about growing up in an immigrant household as a first-generation Iranian American. One of my favorite jokes is, my parents gave me so many options for a career. They said I could be a family doctor, a surgeon, a plastic surgeon, and if I worked hard, even a wife of a surgeon. But I talk a lot about being a woman in medicine. That always gets a lot of laughs. And now that I’ve graduated GI fellowship, I’m excited to incorporate some GI jokes because it turns out people love poop jokes.
Lightning Round
Texting or talking?
Text
Favorite city in U.S. besides the one you live in?
Denver
Cat or dog person
Dog
Best place you went on vacation
Patagonia
Favorite sport
Basketball
Favorite ice cream
Rocky Road
What song do you have to sing along with when you hear it?
Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On
She watched her father suffer from the complications of Crohn’s disease and her brother struggle with irritable bowel syndrome. “We always needed to know where the nearest bathroom was. I grew up with that around me, and I was always just fascinated by the gut and the digestive system,” said Dr. Haghighat, who just finished up her fellowship at the University of Miami and is now a gastroenterologist at University of California, Los Angeles. She also serves as social media editor for AGA’s Gastro Hep Advances.
As she got to know the personalities of the GI department in the first year of medical school, “I realized that our senses of humor and personalities kind of aligned, and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is where I’m supposed to be,’ ” said Dr. Haghighat, who can be found on X @DoctorShida.
Humor is something Dr. Haghighat has reached for throughout her life and career. She eventually channeled her gift for satire onto the stage and the internet, as a stand-up comedian. In an interview with GI & Hepatology News, she spoke about the connection between GI medicine and humor, and the creative ways she has helped promote cancer screening in underserved populations.
Q: What practice challenges have you faced in your career?
Dr. Haghighat: I trained in a county hospital, so I’ve always worked with underserved and vulnerable populations. One of the challenges has been just navigation of care, especially as it pertains to cancer diagnoses or cancer screening. A lot of the time, patients don’t understand why they have to do a test or something invasive like a colonoscopy for symptoms they don’t have.
Q: A focus of yours has been improving uptake of screening in underserved communities. Please talk about the work you’ve done in this area.
Dr. Haghighat: I was at Los Angeles General Medical Center — a county hospital in Los Angeles — for residency, where we treated underserved, uninsured patients. I noticed in our primary care clinics a very low uptake of colon cancer screening. Patients didn’t want to bring the stool tests back or get colonoscopies. I surveyed a bunch of the patients and asked: How can we make colon cancer screening easier for you? About a third of the patients said, “If I can do it in the clinic before I go home, that would be great.”
So, I started this initiative called “Go Before You Go.” We would ask patients, “Hey, do you need to go to the bathroom right now, if you can?” Our nurses handed them the stool test to do in the bathroom before they left the clinic after their doctor visits.
We saw really good results with that. Surprisingly, a lot of people can go on demand. We saw increased screening rates, and that quality improvement project went on to win multiple first place awards in research competitions. So that’s what got me interested, and that’s where I had my beginnings of increasing preventative services in underserved communities on the ground.
Q: Can you discuss some health disparity studies you’ve done in this area?
Dr. Haghighat: As a GI at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, I was seeing cancer disparities firsthand every day. I wanted to approach these disparities from a research funding standpoint on a federal level. I was particularly interested in gastric cancer because it’s not common enough in the United States to warrant universal screening, but it’s very common among certain racial and ethnic minorities, which would warrant targeted screening.
I evaluated cancer funding allocation from the National Cancer Institute among the most common cancers in the United States and found that cancer afflicting a higher proportion of racial and ethnic minorities was receiving lower funding. One of those cancers was stomach cancer. This study basically highlighted that, to decrease these disparities, a top-down policy approach is necessary to distribute cancer research funding equitably across these groups.
A lot of stomach cancer comes from a bacteria called Helicobacter pylori, which can be more prevalent in certain countries. In another study, I looked at country of birth as a risk factor for stomach cancer, specifically for gastric intestinal metaplasia, which is a precursor for gastric cancer .
We found that country of birth is a key risk factor for gastric intestinal metaplasia and that it should be incorporated into risk stratification for targeted screening.
Q: Outside of medicine, you perform as a stand-up comedian. You have a popular satirical alias on social media. How did you get interested in stand-up comedy?
Dr. Haghighat: I gave my medical school’s commencement speech, and I had sprinkled a few jokes in there. Afterward, multiple people approached me and said, “You should really consider stand-up comedy. Your timing and delivery are great.” A few months later, I started my intern year in Los Angeles and simultaneously took stand-up comedy classes. I started performing at local clubs around town throughout residency, and I had two or three good sets that I could rely on. And so that’s how I got into stand-up comedy.
My intern year is also when I started this social media satire account. It was a way to cope with the anxieties and stress of residency. Before I knew it, the account gained multitudes of followers, doctors, and other medical professionals. And I joke that the more hours I work in a week, the more memes I make, the more posts I make. It’s kind of a creative outlet for me after a long day.
Q: What types of things do you talk about during your stand-up act?
Dr. Haghighat: A lot of it is about growing up in an immigrant household as a first-generation Iranian American. One of my favorite jokes is, my parents gave me so many options for a career. They said I could be a family doctor, a surgeon, a plastic surgeon, and if I worked hard, even a wife of a surgeon. But I talk a lot about being a woman in medicine. That always gets a lot of laughs. And now that I’ve graduated GI fellowship, I’m excited to incorporate some GI jokes because it turns out people love poop jokes.
Lightning Round
Texting or talking?
Text
Favorite city in U.S. besides the one you live in?
Denver
Cat or dog person
Dog
Best place you went on vacation
Patagonia
Favorite sport
Basketball
Favorite ice cream
Rocky Road
What song do you have to sing along with when you hear it?
Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On
She watched her father suffer from the complications of Crohn’s disease and her brother struggle with irritable bowel syndrome. “We always needed to know where the nearest bathroom was. I grew up with that around me, and I was always just fascinated by the gut and the digestive system,” said Dr. Haghighat, who just finished up her fellowship at the University of Miami and is now a gastroenterologist at University of California, Los Angeles. She also serves as social media editor for AGA’s Gastro Hep Advances.
As she got to know the personalities of the GI department in the first year of medical school, “I realized that our senses of humor and personalities kind of aligned, and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is where I’m supposed to be,’ ” said Dr. Haghighat, who can be found on X @DoctorShida.
Humor is something Dr. Haghighat has reached for throughout her life and career. She eventually channeled her gift for satire onto the stage and the internet, as a stand-up comedian. In an interview with GI & Hepatology News, she spoke about the connection between GI medicine and humor, and the creative ways she has helped promote cancer screening in underserved populations.
Q: What practice challenges have you faced in your career?
Dr. Haghighat: I trained in a county hospital, so I’ve always worked with underserved and vulnerable populations. One of the challenges has been just navigation of care, especially as it pertains to cancer diagnoses or cancer screening. A lot of the time, patients don’t understand why they have to do a test or something invasive like a colonoscopy for symptoms they don’t have.
Q: A focus of yours has been improving uptake of screening in underserved communities. Please talk about the work you’ve done in this area.
Dr. Haghighat: I was at Los Angeles General Medical Center — a county hospital in Los Angeles — for residency, where we treated underserved, uninsured patients. I noticed in our primary care clinics a very low uptake of colon cancer screening. Patients didn’t want to bring the stool tests back or get colonoscopies. I surveyed a bunch of the patients and asked: How can we make colon cancer screening easier for you? About a third of the patients said, “If I can do it in the clinic before I go home, that would be great.”
So, I started this initiative called “Go Before You Go.” We would ask patients, “Hey, do you need to go to the bathroom right now, if you can?” Our nurses handed them the stool test to do in the bathroom before they left the clinic after their doctor visits.
We saw really good results with that. Surprisingly, a lot of people can go on demand. We saw increased screening rates, and that quality improvement project went on to win multiple first place awards in research competitions. So that’s what got me interested, and that’s where I had my beginnings of increasing preventative services in underserved communities on the ground.
Q: Can you discuss some health disparity studies you’ve done in this area?
Dr. Haghighat: As a GI at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, I was seeing cancer disparities firsthand every day. I wanted to approach these disparities from a research funding standpoint on a federal level. I was particularly interested in gastric cancer because it’s not common enough in the United States to warrant universal screening, but it’s very common among certain racial and ethnic minorities, which would warrant targeted screening.
I evaluated cancer funding allocation from the National Cancer Institute among the most common cancers in the United States and found that cancer afflicting a higher proportion of racial and ethnic minorities was receiving lower funding. One of those cancers was stomach cancer. This study basically highlighted that, to decrease these disparities, a top-down policy approach is necessary to distribute cancer research funding equitably across these groups.
A lot of stomach cancer comes from a bacteria called Helicobacter pylori, which can be more prevalent in certain countries. In another study, I looked at country of birth as a risk factor for stomach cancer, specifically for gastric intestinal metaplasia, which is a precursor for gastric cancer .
We found that country of birth is a key risk factor for gastric intestinal metaplasia and that it should be incorporated into risk stratification for targeted screening.
Q: Outside of medicine, you perform as a stand-up comedian. You have a popular satirical alias on social media. How did you get interested in stand-up comedy?
Dr. Haghighat: I gave my medical school’s commencement speech, and I had sprinkled a few jokes in there. Afterward, multiple people approached me and said, “You should really consider stand-up comedy. Your timing and delivery are great.” A few months later, I started my intern year in Los Angeles and simultaneously took stand-up comedy classes. I started performing at local clubs around town throughout residency, and I had two or three good sets that I could rely on. And so that’s how I got into stand-up comedy.
My intern year is also when I started this social media satire account. It was a way to cope with the anxieties and stress of residency. Before I knew it, the account gained multitudes of followers, doctors, and other medical professionals. And I joke that the more hours I work in a week, the more memes I make, the more posts I make. It’s kind of a creative outlet for me after a long day.
Q: What types of things do you talk about during your stand-up act?
Dr. Haghighat: A lot of it is about growing up in an immigrant household as a first-generation Iranian American. One of my favorite jokes is, my parents gave me so many options for a career. They said I could be a family doctor, a surgeon, a plastic surgeon, and if I worked hard, even a wife of a surgeon. But I talk a lot about being a woman in medicine. That always gets a lot of laughs. And now that I’ve graduated GI fellowship, I’m excited to incorporate some GI jokes because it turns out people love poop jokes.
Lightning Round
Texting or talking?
Text
Favorite city in U.S. besides the one you live in?
Denver
Cat or dog person
Dog
Best place you went on vacation
Patagonia
Favorite sport
Basketball
Favorite ice cream
Rocky Road
What song do you have to sing along with when you hear it?
Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On