Feature Story

Dr. Gary Stadtmauer at a Human Rights Clinic
training

Dr. Gary Stadtmauer is a specialist in internal medicine, with a subspecialty in allergy and immunology, who teaches at Mt. Sinai Hospital and has a private practice in New York City. Seeking to use his medical expertise to undertake international health work, he contacted DOW after finishing his fellowship. Instead of sending Dr. Stadtmauer abroad, DOW “brought the world to [him].” He began volunteering to assist torture survivors seeking asylum in the Human Rights Clinic (HRC) in 1999, and since then has evaluated over 60 asylum applicants. He also works as a mentor and trainer for new HRC volunteers, sharing his experiences with fellow health professionals and working with them to develop methods of evaulation torture survivors.

Dr. Stadtmauer explains that serving as an HRC volunteer has changed the way he approaches his life and practice. “After seeing an asylum case, I am in a constant position of re-appreciating friends and family…not to mention the other liberties here [in the United States].” Part from fostering renewed gratitude for his personal life, regular contact with clients who bear the scars of extraordinary hardships has enriched his understandings of the links between health and human rights. “We are trained in medicine to think of a health as a human right, but we don’t always practice medicine that way…To apply my professional training to human rights is a privilege.”

In order to create a baseline of medical knowledge that can be used to evaluate and treat torture survivors, Dr. Stadtmauer has been working with HRC volunteers and staff to make their methods more academic and scientific. Employing the basic tenets of medical practice, Dr. Stadtmauer and his colleagues rely on their medical training, review of relevant literature, and discussion of particular cases to develop best practices for addressing the needs of their clients. This work complements his individual contact with torture survivors and contributes to DOW’s development of groundbreaking methodology to identify and mitigate the health impacts of torture. Indeed, it is both the personal and systematic elements of his work that inspire Dr. Stadtmauer: “Anyone who desires can make a difference…and that is what volunteering at DOW is about.”