Purpose Driven
When looking back on his personal and professional life in medicine, Dr. Eric Paul immediately tracks to two major experiences that directed him to a career in healthcare.
“I was in college when I decided to pursue medicine,” he said. “My parents came to a parents’ weekend, and my mom had a herniated disc in her back. I couldn’t help her, and she was in pain. I decided I was going to do something to fix that. I guess you could say I went into medicine out of spite.”
A second impactful encounter came later, during his third year of medical school at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock. Unsure what his medical path was going to be, he became interested in surgery.
“I got into an operating room for the first time, and I witnessed neurosurgeons taking a brain tumor out of somebody’s head via a microscope through their nose. I was like, ‘OK, that’s really cool,’” he said. “Laparoscopic surgery was really big; we were trying to do these big surgeries through small incisions, so I did a minimally invasive fellowship, and minimally invasive fellowships typically involve a lot of different things.
“At that time, bariatric surgery really didn’t ruffle my feathers that much, but there was a particular patient that I saw who took a huge amount of insulin every single day. We did a gastric bypass on this patient, and she was down to a very modest amount of insulin a month after surgery. Three months after surgery, she was off insulin completely, which was revelatory.”
Paul joined Baptist Health in 2010, having completed his fellowship in advanced laparoscopic surgery and bariatric surgery at Emory University in Atlanta. He has served in the Baptist Health Surgical Clinic of Central Arkansas and performed weight loss surgery at Baptist Health Bariatric Center-Little Rock.
In the latter capacity, he has changed the lives of thousands of patients by helping them regain control of their weight, improve overall health and reduce the risk of serious health concerns in the future. He said the specialty imparts a special feeling of purpose that he still feels today.
“Between college and medical school, I worked for the UAMS Division of Nephrology, where I did a lot of clinical research with people on hemodialysis,” he said. “The common denominators in people who are on dialysis almost always are hypertension and diabetes. [Bariatric surgery] is a tool that I can use to help people, that can potentially cure them of both of those things and prevent them from getting on dialysis.
“Today we’ve had several patients that we’ve done surgeries on who are getting themselves off of dialysis, which, to me, is fantastic.”
Asked what has kept him with one medical institution for the entirety of his working career, Paul’s rationale is similarly purpose driven. He said he feels gratified to be working in a state that needs him, given Arkansas’ traditionally high obesity ranking nationwide.
“The main thing that keeps me at Baptist is the people I work with,” he said. “There’s so many people there that truly want to do a good job, and they want to take care of people. I could very easily be making way more money somewhere else, but that’s not really my drive. My drive is to be able to provide quality care for patients who, in a lot of instances, can’t get it anywhere else.
“[Baptist is] one of the very few places in the state that takes Medicaid, and we do a lot of revisional surgery, as well. That’s just something that a lot of other places don’t do. It’s a vocation to take care of these people who are desperate for this help. We’re going to continue to try to build this practice and provide as much comprehensive care as we can.”
Photo provided by Baptist Health
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