Dr. Sanjay Gupta: CNN’s Doctor to the World

Dr. Sanjay Gupta –  Doing Many Things Well

He’s got to be the world’s greatest multi-tasker. Dr. Sanjay Gupta is living several lives rolled into one. He’s an Emmy-winning  television celebrity, a neurosurgeon, a professor, an author. Not to mention, a husband and dad of three girls, and a sportsman. His dazzling smile is what hooks you first but you soon realize that Gupta is much more than his very attractive image. He is probably the most familiar Indian face on American television and certainly the most recognizable name. As the Emmy-award winning chief medical correspondent for CNN, Gupta has been doling out medical advice to millions across the globe.

He plays an integral role in CNN’s reporting on health and medical news for American Morning, Anderson Cooper 360°, CNN documentaries, and anchors the weekend medical affairs program Sanjay Gupta, MD.  But wait, there’s more: he is much more than a medical guru –  he performs surgery on a daily basis.

Sanjay Gupta’s Pen & Scalpel

Gupta received his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and a doctorate of medicine from the University of Michigan Medical School. He is a member of the staff and faculty at the Emory University School of Medicine. He is associate chief of neurosurgery at Grady Memorial Hospital and regularly performs surgery at Emory University and Grady hospitals

Ask him about his many roles and he says it’s all very organic, with one leading to the other. “People think of medicine and media as very disparate things, but doctors spend a lot of time essentially educating patients, trying to make them more knowledgeable, and overall raising the health literacy rate.”  So he sees himself doing this through television, books, magazine articles, personal appearances and on the web. He spends half the time in practicing medicine, and the rest in working in media, from television to documentaries.

He’s also written two books ‘Chasing Life’ and ‘ Cheating Death’, with companion documentaries, both very close to the health topics that have become a mantra for the huge audience that follows him. He’s traveled all over the world researching these stories and the more he traveled he found that there were certain parts of the world where people’s lifestyles and cultures offered lessons to be learned from a health perspective.  He points out that there are many places where people live longer and have more functional lives, and even though the US is considered a bastion of healthcare, there is much to be learned from other places.

“Television has more of a transient nature to it and I thought some of these lessons were worth putting down on paper where people could read them, spend their time really absorbing it,” he says.  He added the latest research from around the world, and the result was ‘Chasing Life’. His next book ‘Cheating Death’ looked at medical advancements from around the world, including India.  He says, “I have spent time in India as well, looking at what seems to really allow people to prolong there lives near the end of life.”

Fiction by Dr. Sanjay Gupta

He  is moving on  to fiction, a novel titled ‘Monday Mornings’ set around a hospital and the medical mistakes which doctors make. He says, “In many ways this is my first book because I have been working on this the longest, perhaps ten years. It is an amalgamation of stories from my own experiences and the characters are composites from people I have met in my life.  You know this was a departure, but I have really enjoyed the process of writing it; I get a real thrill of putting pen to paper and having the stories come alive.”

Having written scientific and technical papers all his life, he found he set a high bar for himself in non-fiction too, since there was the compulsion to make sure every fact was sourced and scientific data had to be constantly rechecked. Writing fiction, he feels, is a lot more enjoyable and creative.

Gupta has reported from all over the world, from war torn Iraq to earthquake hit Japan to the flooding in Pakistan.  What has been the most life changing experience for him?

“‘Life changing’ conjures up a lot of different things. For me it probably was Iraq, back in 2003,” he says. “It was one of the first big international war zone stories that I covered and is an indelible experience.  It makes you really confront this idea that you are truly risking your life in order to tell a story and I think while people can talk about that in romantic ways, it is not romantic, it is not glamorous, it is really scary and it is really hard. You go for days without sleep or if you do sleep you are sleeping on a desert floor and there are scorpions and snakes around and you have not eaten and you have not had water, it is really hot.”

He recalls a time when they were under a great deal of fire, their base was over-run and people were dying all round: “There is no way to describe what it is like to confront your mortality until you confront your mortality. It is like a reset button on your life and that happened to me in Iraq.”

It was also the place where his two worlds collided: “I was asked to take off my journalist cap and put on my surgeon’s cap and operate, which seemed to me to be absolutely obvious and logical thing. You know, I am a doctor first and putting on a press badge is no bar to your humanity.  But again in the middle of a war zone, with IEDs going off around, wearing a Kevlar vest, a helmet, a mask for bio-terror attacks and operating in these dusty desert tents was just a real life-changing experience.”

Sanjay Gupta’s frenetic schedule ensures that the writing is done on the run, jotted on notepads. “The three B’s of inspiration for me – on the bus, in bed or in the bathtub! I did a lot of the writing on the weekends because I have three small children so frankly that was the only time I could find to do it. A lot of it on planes as well.”

Having just celebrated his 7^th wedding anniversary with wife Rebecca Olson, Gupta loves the family life. “At some point in life I made a decision to be a married man with three children so most of non-work life revolves around them,” he says. “I am the guy who works hard, goes into the most dangerous places on the planet for a few weeks at a time and then comes home and cuts the lawn and hangs out with the three daughters.  So that is sort of my life, you know, and I absolutely love it!”

Indeed, family ties are very important to Gupta and he remains equally close to his parents and younger brother with whom he’s started an online resource, Kahani Movement which tracks immigrants’ family stories. “We are very close and talk on a daily basis, even though we live across the country from each other,” says Gupta. “We thought it was a worthy thing to memorialize family stories.  It was purely for that reason, it is not a venture of any sort, it is just a way of archiving what we think is an important part of history.”

Sanjay Gupta’s ‘Fit Nation’

Not surprisingly, keeping fit is an important equation in Sanjay Gupta’s life and he is a dedicated tri-athlete. Gupta’s passion for inspiring Americans to lead healthier, more active lives led him to launch “Fit Nation,” CNN’s multi-platform anti-obesity initiative. “Fit Nation” follows the progress of Gupta and six viewers as they inspire each other while training for a triathlon.

“When I turned 40 years old, I thought I could start making my biological clock not just run slower, but start to reverse and I think I have done that.  I think in many ways biologically I am younger now than I was five years ago.  Athletics, sports, and fitness are a very, very big part of my life.  I was up at 4:15 and going for a run and a swim, so it is a big part of my life and that is something that I am teaching my girls too.”

A few years ago he almost became the Surgeon General in the Obama Administration but finally did not take it on because he would not have been able to practice surgery. In 2011, Forbes magazine named him as one of the “Ten Most Influential Celebrities.”  His face is seen around the world as the CNN Medicine Man, and that must be a weighty responsibility.

He agrees, “I want to make sure everything I say, everything I write, every word is correct and that involves lots of homework, it involves lots of ruminating, it involves lots of talking to people whom I trust, who are unbiased experts in these various areas.  I love it because I feel I have become a more educated person and more of a citizens’ scholar in the process. Yes, it is a huge responsibility but I love it. I really feel very, very privileged.”

© Lavina Melwani

(This article first appeared in Hi-Blitz)

The Series:

Siddhartha Mukherjee-Battling the Emperor
Sanjay Gupta, CNN”s Doctor to the World
Atul Gawande – A Checklist for Success
Abraham Verghese – The Healing Touchstone
Sandeep Jauhar – The Human Factor