M.D. Phenom

Dr. Christine Fukui, winner of a national award, is constantly on the go — treating patients and running a hospital department, not to mention running marathons

Wednesday - April 26, 2006
By Alice Keesing
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Cherilyn Baguyo gets a visit from Dr. Fukui and Dr.
Warren Tamamoto

remembers with a laugh.

After completing her medical training at the University of California at San Francisco, Fukui came home to the Islands. She was hired at Kaiser where she has built the pulmonology department from scratch. These days, along with heading up the pulmonology department, she’s also chief of all medical sub-specialties at the Moanalua hospital. Administrative duties aside, it’s working with patients that Fukui finds the most rewarding. The people she treats have conditions such as asthma, emphysema, pneumonia, lung cancer or tuberculosis.

Fukui herself had asthma as a child and remembers the trips to the doctor and the emergency room.

“I can still remember my father carrying me all night because I couldn’t breathe,” she says.

She also knows firsthand the dangers of smoking, which could be counted as public enemy No. 1 for a pulmonolo-gist. Both her parents smoked and her dad had emphysema. It was Fukui who got her mom to stop smoking by getting her into a cessation program at Kaiser.

“There’s a huge disease burden as a result of smoking, it’s not only emphysema and lung cancer,” Fukui says. Smoking plays a role in heart disease, vascular disease and other kinds of cancer, such as esophageal, bladder and even breast cancer, she says.

One of Fukui’s most important messages is how much can be gained from kicking the habit. The health benefits are dramatic and immediate, she says.

“If you measure the effectiveness of all the things that we do in terms of health maintenance and prevention, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most effective, the only things really at 10 are smoking cessation programs and childhood immunization,” Fukui says.

Other things like cholesterol or diabetes medication come in second at a distant five, she adds.

Knowing what she knows, Fukui is not shy when it comes to talking to people about the dangers of smoking, particularly second-hand smoke. She remembers one summer trip to Italy with her son’s Latin class.

“We were standing in line to go to the Vatican and there were these people who were just smoking a pile, they were French tourists actually, and we were all getting irritated, so finally we got one of the teachers who spoke French to go up to them and tell them that there were all these children here so they really shouldn’t be smoking,” Fukui remembers.

And, yes, the smoking French tourists did stop.

Chalk another one up to the M.D. Phenom.

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