Long before she realized exactly what an oncologist is or does, Edith Mitchell was an intellectually hungry Tennessee farm girl who wanted to be a medical doctor helping people who were ill.
Today, Dr. Edith P. Mitchell, a clinical professor of medicine and medical oncology at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, has achieved her childhood goal. As a medical oncologist, focused on helping cancer patients, she is spreading the health care message on the national stage and working at efforts to increase the ranks of medical scientists and practitioners.
As the new national president of the more than 30,000-member National Medical Association (NMA), Mitchell is spending much of her yearlong term that began in August helping the nation’s oldest African-American organization of medical scientists and practitioners stay focused on health and medical trends. In the process, she has emphasized continuing to work on improving the health status, care and practices of people of color.
“It’s very clear Americans are living longer; they are healthier,” says Mitchell. “Yet there are disparities. While everybody has improved, the gap between the races has increased,” she says, as she ticked off a list of health gaps between racial groups in America.
Black men, for example, have the nation’s highest rate of prostate cancer and the highest rate of death from the disease, despite their share of the nation’s population, she says. Black women, meanwhile, develop more aggressive negative types of breast cancer at younger ages than peers their age in other racial groups; it proliferates or grows faster, too, relates Mitchell. Her list of concerns goes much longer.
At Jefferson, where she heads the gastrointestinal oncology section for the teaching hospital’s Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, Mitchell teaches medical students and physicians in training and conducts research and clinical trials. She is widely published in medical journals and volunteers for a variety of health groups. This comes on top of her principal interest: helping her hundreds of patients at the hospital.
Acknowledging that “people are afraid of cancer,” Mitchell expresses a differing viewpoint. She says she has a desire to study cancer and work with her patients at Jefferson and colleagues there and elsewhere to explore what medications work for taming and, one day, successfully tackling the deadly disease.
