When Taraneh Azar, MD, now a surgeon at Portsmouth Regional Hospital, was 13 years old, she came to the United States with her mother and 10-year-old sister to visit her American grandmother for a summer, and ended up staying. It was 1980, and their beautiful homeland of Iran had been devastated by the Iranian Revolution.
Medicine was the family business – her father had come to the U.S. from Iran to attend college and medical school and met her mother, a nurse, while they were both students at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. After completing his training, which included a pediatric surgery residency in London, they returned to Iran where her father established a cardiac hospital with a cardiac surgery training program. After their relocation to the U.S., Dr. Azar’s family ultimately settled in Virginia where her father joined a cardiac surgery practice. Her mother worked as a med-surg nurse, before she began to teach nursing and public health, something she continued until recently when she joined her husband in retirement.
So, it wasn’t a surprise when Dr. Azar, who had always dreamed of being a surgeon, went into medicine. The global health perspective Dr. Azar brings to her practice extends beyond her childhood in Iran. While an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, Dr. Azar wrote a letter to Mother Teresa asking about volunteer opportunities with Missionaries of Charity and that spring, joined her in Calcutta. Once in India, she volunteered at an orphanage and later transferred to the Home for Death and Dying. In the evenings, they drove a van through the streets of Calcutta looking for people who were very sick and brought them back to the Home to provide much-needed food, medicine, and comfort. Many survived, some did not.
Working with Mother Teresa, who, as Dr. Azar describes, “humbly maintained the dignity of each person who passed through her doors, in life and death,” continues to impact the way she approaches patient interaction today. “Understanding the importance of meeting each patient where they are and appreciating the circumstances they are in as individuals is something I can largely trace back to my time in India.”
Dr. Azar continued to weave public health into her journey through medicine, working at a shelter for victims of domestic violence in Virginia a year before beginning medical school. Six years ago, she joined the Board at Haven, the largest organization in the state of New Hampshire to help victims of domestic violence, assault and stalking. While she has worked with Haven New Hampshire, the organization has seen a lot of change, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Much like other healthcare and social service institutions, they had to pivot, making contact easier for their clients by implementing texting and email options to ask for help in light of increased rates of domestic violence and assault.
Empowering women in and out of medicine is a focus for Dr. Azar. In her 21 years of medicine, 18 of which she has spent at Portsmouth Regional Hospital, she has seen a tremendous shift: When she finished her residency, fewer than 5 percent of otolaryngologists were female. Now, women make up 50 percent otolaryngology residents nationwide. She thrives in an environment in which she can provide support for colleagues and mentor young women who have expressed an interest in medicine.
The variety of patients and the complexity of the issues seen in otolaryngology is what drew her in and keeps her coming back. She truly enjoys getting to know her patients as people. Whether working with a cancer patient for years or seeing someone for the first time, performing smaller in-office procedures or complex multi-hour surgeries, the interpersonal component informs her care.
“I love that I get to treat people of all ages and interact with so many other medical specialties in order to diagnose complex problems,” Dr. Azar said. “I am equally happy to be an otolaryngologist today as I was on the day I started.”
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