From Berkeley to Ben-Gurion, a med student who’s all over the map

When Shelli Bein was a student at U.C. Berkeley, she did her coursework in biology but spent her spare time studying the Brazilian martial art capoeira and African dance.

It's no surprise, then, that when she applied to medical school, she chose one with an international focus.

Bein, of Palo Alto, has just graduated from medical school at Ben-Gurion University-Columbia University Medical School for International Health in Beersheva.

Her father is Israeli, her mother American, so she spent her formative years both in Israel and the United States. While she was born in the United States, between the ages of 1 and 5 she lived in Haifa, so she speaks English with a slight accent.

After graduating high school, she began her freshman year at Berkeley, but Israel was calling. So she took time off from college and served in the Israeli Defense Forces. As a dual citizen she was considered a returning native and was given certain benefits.

After finishing up at Berkeley, she spent six months in Brazil, where she studied more capoeira and volunteered in the Brazilian favelas, or slums.

A yearlong stint at Planned Parenthood in Mountain View also increased her desire to work with underserved populations.

Attending the medical school in Beersheva was an obvious choice — Bein was longing to get back to Israel, and the international focus of the program greatly appealed to her.

"What interested me most was the other students who were there," she said. "These were people who had done the Peace Corps, or traveled, and wanted to do international work."

Most American Jews who study medicine in Israel attend the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University. But the Ben-Gurion program is about one-third Jewish, and hosts students from around the world.

When she first got to Beersheva, she was in for a bit of a shock.

"I had lived in Israel, but most Israelis haven't been to Beersheva," she said. "They go through the bus station on their way to Eilat." The fact that it seemed so isolated, she said, "was hard for all of us at first."

Bein had to take a year off because of an injury, and she did research on childhood obesity in Oakland. But when she went back to Israel for her third year of the program, she did her clinical rotations at Soroka Medical Center in Beersheva.

This was a great learning experience, she said, because of the diverse populations. In her internal medicine rotation, most of her patients were Russian immigrants, and she'd often rely on doctors and nurses to translate. There were also Ethiopian and North African immigrants.

"In interviewing a patient, you'd learn a little about their history, and in Israel, the relationship between the doctor and patient can be casual, so it made for a nice connection," she said.

In her pediatric rotation, the majority of children she saw were Bedouins. "They have high childbirth rates, sometimes 16 children," she said. "They live in rougher conditions, so they come in with burns from running into the fires they use for heating, or congenital defects from cousins marrying each other."

Her fourth year was spent in a series of rotations around the United States, except for two months in Peru.

To satisfy a mandatory health project while in Peru, Bein developed a survey on the local young male population and risky sexual behavior. She and her colleagues also worked in a public hospital, which was challenging, to say the least.

"You don't get a lot of things you usually depend on in hospitals and the doctor must rely more on their clinical evaluation, as in basic touching and examining the patient," she said.

In one very isolated area of Peru, she worked at a hospital where the specialty is treating snakebites and delivering babies. And that is about all that's done there.

"They do what they can, but they don't even have an X-ray," she said.

Bein soon begins her residency at Jacoby Hospital in the Bronx, N.Y.