Body
Growing up just outside of Chicago, Benjamin Friedman, MD, knew his grandfather wasn’t like others. His hands trembled and he occasionally had trouble keeping his balance. It wasn’t until Friedman was a teenager that he knew the name for the condition: Parkinson’s disease. On his summer vacations during high school, Friedman’s grandmother often asked him to take his grandfather to a nearby swimming pool and help him do walking exercises in the water. “My grandmother always said it’s not just about the quantity of life, but the quality,” Friedman remembers. “Without my grandmother, he would not have survived with dignity for as long as he did.”
Friedman wasn’t thinking about a medical career when he got to Brandeis University in Massachusetts, but his experience with his grandfather had an effect. He majored in sociology and envisioned a career where he would help people age at home. He interned with an organization that helped people gain access to benefits and home-based services. But the bureaucracy and indirectness of the process nagged at him. “I wanted to be more hands on,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’m not a social scientist. I want to be a physician.’”
After committing to a new career plan and completing the premedical requisites, he attended the Chicago Medical School. During his third year, he was exposed to the field of rehabilitation medicine – and something clicked. “The specialty really spoke to me. It had aspects of neurology, internal medicine, and rheumatology, all specialties that interested me. As a physiatrist, I would be able to work with patients, their families, and an interdisciplinary team of therapists, nurses, psychologists and social workers,” he says. “A team collaborates and enables patients to maximize their potential to function. That type of personalized care was exactly what I wanted to do. I dove into rehabilitation more than 20 years ago and I’ve never left.”
Friedman did his residency at Schwab Rehabilitation Hospital on Chicago’s West Side where he served as chief resident, then joined the faculty and later stayed on for four years as an attending physician. From there, he was recruited to be the Chair of the Department of Rehabilitation at St. Joseph’s Hospital on the city’s North Side, where he also served as the Medical Director of their rehabilitation unit for eight years. Then a colleague suggested he look at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab’s new state-of-the-art facility in downtown Chicago. He was impressed and excited to be in a hospital that was entirely dedicated to rehabilitation medicine and cutting-edge research. Friedman joined Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in 2018 as a physiatrist specializing in the care of people with medically complex issues including strokes, amputation and Parkinson’s disease. “The great resources, research opportunities and a full continuum of care for therapies available at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab made me a more effective physician for my patients,” he says. “One of the most gratifying things is helping people optimize their function or adjust to their disability so they can return to their homes and communities successfully.”
Friedman, 50, is now the Medical Director of the Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders Program at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. The program has three arms: clinical care, Parkinson’s research, and community outreach. The team works with Parkinson’s organizations nationally to educate and inform patients and their care partners about the evolving state of care and new research opportunities. For some underserved populations, “people are coming to us later because of lack of access to care,” he says. “We are going into these communities and getting people plugged into the system.”
Friedman really enjoys what he is doing. “When I meet someone early in their Parkinson’s journey, I learn about them, their support network and their goals. As their disease evolves, we know and understand their baseline function so we can address issues as they come up. We can guide their care to the most appropriate services to help them optimize function and hopefully slow their disease progression.”
Friedman’s focus is on providing clinical care and collaborating with the research team: “I will always agree with my grandmother’s words – it’s about the quality of a person’s life. With the innovative and dedicated team at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, we hope to positively influence both the quality and the quantity of patients’ lives.”