Dr. Mila Gauvin always enters her patient’s examination rooms at a quick pace. She takes the time to greet you. She may have a series of patients to see that day, but she takes the time to make eye contact, ask how you’re doing, and only turns to the computer screen to check the readout on your vitals after she’s made a connection with you, the patient.
She is proud of the fact that she gets to know her patients emotionally as well as physically. “It’s a big relationship; it’s the biggest,” she said. “It’s just like you got married to someone or you have a friend for some time…they ask me about myself and I ask them about their family as well, and then we become family somehow.
“When you have a patient who’s [been] your patient for 20 years, it’s a big trust, right? And you would do anything for that person; you’ll do anything for all your patients. So, I have 20 years of trust coming to me to do their physical every year, to help them take care of themselves. And you hear a little bit of their family history, their social history, of things that they’re not proud of themselves about that they come to you to discuss.
“I think it’s sacred, this relationship.”
Dr. Gauvin has worked for the last 20 years as a board-certified doctor of internal medicine at Advantage Care Physicians’ medical offices in Brooklyn Heights. On top of caring for her own patients, Dr. Gauvin serves as the regional director for Advantage Care’s Downtown Brooklyn hub of medical offices.
Each day, she has a long list of patients to see. To get an appointment with Dr. Gauvin, you usually have to schedule for an opening that could be months away. (But in cases of emergency, the doctor said she can make exceptions and get a patient in to be seen). Because she is a Black doctor, who speaks French, Spanish and Creole, she’s in high demand.
She said part of her job is just reassuring patients and helping them understand what’s going on with their bodies. She’s had to explain things like the devastating effects of diabetes and about how exercising, healthy eating, and a low carbohydrate diet with a few medications could help patients. “Just by finding words and sometimes, you know, because I have an accent, I say, ‘If you don’t understand, let us go and explain it again.’ And you get the patient to explain it back to you and see if they get it.” Occasionally she has female patients who are going through menopause and perimenopause but don’t always understand what’s happening to them. They will have insomnia or a little bit of anxiety. Their hair might be thinning and skin changing. Dr. Gauvin said she tries to calm them down with explanations and education. “I’m a woman about your age right now,” she will say to them, “and I can tell you, if you understand what’s going on, you will know that you do not need medication. What you can do is healthy eating and exercising, a little bit of yoga, you know, and understand what you are going through. Once you understand what you are going through, you are more calm. But when you don’t understand, and your medical provider fails to explain to you what’s going on, that’s when the problems start.”
Being able to talk with patients and help them realize how to care for their health was one of the primary reasons Dr. Gauvin became a physician. At 14, she noticed that people were often misdiagnosed because they misinterpreted what was going on with their bodies. “I come from a country where going to the doctor is a privilege, where you have to work with what you have. That’s why semiology is a big deal for us because sometimes we don’t have a lot of clinics or lab tests and all of these kinds of things you rely on. We would have to know the symptoms and signs of a disease in order to do something about it.”
Dr. Gauvin attended medical school at the State University of Haiti where she met and married her husband, Yves Anthony Gauvin, MD. While she completed her residency at Woodhull Medical Center, her husband completed his at Bronx Lebanon Hospital––the same place his mother had worked as a nurse and later given birth to him. Dr. Yves Gauvin practiced primary care medicine in Greenwich, Connecticut and served as a U.S. army officer for several years before recently retiring.
Now both Dr. Gauvins look toward the future they see for their daughter, Mila Gauvin II, who attended Stanford Law School and is now working as a law clerk. “Having two parents as physicians, we thought that she would go into medicine,” Dr. Gauvin said. “We never pushed her toward any field, she had to be the one to choose because she’s going to be the one living with it, right?
“You have to love what you do. I’m happy with my life because I love what I do. I feel happy coming to work because that’s my temperament: if I am in something, I’m 100% and it shows. I’m even a bit emotional when I talk about it because when we were around the table having dinner with my daughter, I used to tell her if you are choosing medicine you have to understand that you’re going to have people who are sick and when you are sick you are anxious and when you are anxious you want things to be as fast as possible,” Dr. Gavin began. “When you are a patient, or a family member is a patient, that’s when you understand your patient, that’s when you really understand your patient… you have got to communicate right away. You have got to tell your patient if everything’s fine. They want to know immediately, that’s why I told my daughter, you have to understand that people are going to come to you to complain. A physical exam is a physical exam, but most of your patients are going to come for something that is not working right. Whether this is a simple thing or something complicated, they’re going to come with complaints. If you see 20 patients per day, 15 of them are going to have something to complain about. Even when they come for a physical, they grab the opportunity to tell you, ‘Doc, this is, you know, I was having some ear pain last week. I wanted to see if you could take a look at it now.’ And I think this is where you can make the most impact. You are kind of like the gatekeeper for the patient to remain healthy.”