TouroCOM News

If you walked into Lecture Hall-1 at Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine (TouroCOM) on November 10th, you probably wouldn’t recognize anything out of the ordinary. Students sat in their lecture seats, listening attentively to a detailed PowerPoint presentation on the musculoskeletal system, which was followed by lectures on the nervous and circulatory systems. Occasionally, someone raised his or her hand to ask a question, give a comment, or clarify an idea. Yet what was different about this particular scene was that the students weren’t actually in medical school—they were in high school. 

“Free flu shots! Free blood tests! Come get your free health screenings!” called out Touro College of Medicine (TouroCOM) students Krystle Garcia, Eun Kim, and Hillary Ramroop to passersby on Harlem’s W. 125^th Street as they held signs promoting the community-wide “Fall Into Health” fair. Across the street and a block over, students sitting under white tents in front of the State Office Building were doing the same thing. 

Dressed as skeletons in the spirit of Halloween, a group of three student physicians—Anthony Bonzagni, Daniel Lee, and Dhaatri Kuchipudi—delivered a fun, interactive lesson about bones to the first-grade class of New Beginnings Montessori School. Two TouroCOM-Middletown faculty members joined the students in the presentation: Professor Leah Labranche, anatomy instructor, and Dr. Martin Torrents, Associate Chair of the Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine Department. The TouroCOM presenters taught the children different ways of keeping their bones strong, such as eating healthy foods like vegetables and calcium-rich dairy products, and emphasized the importance of physical exercise in maintaining an active, healthy lifestyle. They engaged the children in the lesson by performing a short skit about an “ailing skeleton” and having the first-graders dance, jump, and run in place to “revive” him.

In June 2014, Jeffrey Karpen came over from the West Coast—where he’d studied, researched and taught for nearly three decades—and joined the Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine as its Associate Chair of Basic Biomedical Sciences and Associate Course Director of Physiology, in addition to conducting classes as a Professor of Physiology. His full-time transition to teaching and administration comes on the heels of countless papers and publications dedicated to better understanding and exploiting cell signaling, i.e. how our cells process and interact with their environment—or, at times, fail to—and dictate our basic sensory and biological function.

There are so many reasons why certain diseases go under-diagnosed and, consequently, under-treated. But in the minds of doctors and professors who took part in the Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine’s (TouroCOM) “Bridging the Gap” forum on Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH) this past August, a bright spotlight was aimed at this insidious condition.

This past Labor Day, the inaugural students of the Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine (TouroCOM)-Middletown Class of 2018 participated in their formal White Coat Ceremony, the culmination of a series of weekend-long celebrations commemorating the grand opening of the new TouroCOM campus in Middletown, New York.

In the spring of 2013, Jemima Akinsanya, then a first-year student at Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine (TouroCOM), was tutoring a local high school sophomore through MedAchieve, an after-school medical science enrichment program based in Harlem, when she had an insight. This young student was bright and ambitious; however, Akinsanya realized, perhaps she lacked a clear road map to achieve her goals.

SGA put on quite a soaker of a BBQ. The orientation barbecue was a huge success that left no one dry! Students, old and new got their only opportunity at soaking the Deans, their Faculty and supportive staff. Our grill masters made us amazing hamburgers and hot dogs and everyone had a great time.

Before leaving the halls of TouroCOM and the streets of Harlem for internships and residencies across the country, the graduating doctors of 2014 sat down to offer the incoming class some words of wisdom and share some of what they've learned on their journey through med school.

The leadership, staff and faculty of Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine wish the class of 2014 well and remind them of some of the important things they should remember as they head out to the hospitals as physicians, but perhaps most of all, that TouroCOM is "always here for you".