Dr. Hsin Wang is the kind of person you’d want as your neighbor. Or, as it turns out, as your doctor.
Between delivering babies, treating incontinence and performing surgeries, this local OB-GYN is also hearing about her patients’ ups and downs, kids and grandkids or what’s going on with their pets.
It’s part of a philosophy she’s held since she started her career in medicine more than 18 years ago.
“Treat everyone like they’re your neighbor,” she says. She shares that motto with others in the field and also applies it to her staff. “It makes them feel really good and you get to know them and then you remember them.”
Dr. Wang, part of the DMC Medical Group, currently sees patients at offices in Commerce Township and Bloomfield Hills. Born in Beijing, Dr. Wang came to the U.S. at 4 years old, attended undergrad at the University of Michigan and medical school at Wayne State.
Now living in West Bloomfield with her husband, two children and two dogs, she calls herself “a Michigan gal” who enjoys skiing, water activities and spending time at the lake with her family.
“We’re outdoors people,” she says. “We enjoy the seasons, for sure. I don’t enjoy the cold, but I do enjoy Michigan.”
The Midwest is “such a nice, homey place,” Dr. Wang says, and full of great people. “It’s just a different culture here. I feel at home in the Midwest.”
And she’s proud to call those friendly people her patients.
“When you start thinking about these people – they’re not patients to me, they’re people. They are my neighbors, they’re my kids’ teachers, they’re my kids’ friend’s mom,” Dr. Wang says. “They’re counting on me. You take care of your own; they’re my own, so I’m taking care of them.”
Greeting patients in the waiting room with a big hug or smile, Dr. Wang is reminded daily why her career choice was the right one. “That’s what keeps me going,” she says.
Going into medicine, after all, is as much about building relationships as it is about symptoms, diagnoses and treatments.
“That’s definitely a huge benefit and a huge part of my life as an OB-GYN is this long-term relationship I have with my patients and their sisters and their daughters and their nieces and their aunts and their grandmothers,” she says. “I can easily see four or five female family members from one family. It’s so rewarding and so awesome.”
Also rewarding are the moments in her career when she’s able to change the lives of patients who feel like no one else is listening. She recently worked with a woman in her 40s who was wheelchair bound with chronic pain and suffering from recurrent bladder infections and severe incontinence.
“It turned out the bacteria was resistant to all the oral antibiotics out there,” Dr. Wang explains. So she admitted the woman to the hospital for IV antibiotics, lined up specialists to see her and later performed a procedure to address her incontinence.
“She’s so happy now,” Dr. Wang says of her patient, who was previously getting up five to six times a night to urinate and now sometimes doesn’t need to get up at night at all.
With her bladder habits under control, the patient is also losing weight since she can get up and walk more often. “It’s life changing. It’s amazing how the bladder can change her life. And she’s somebody who, unfortunately, other doctors have neglected her,” she says.
That story and others like it are a testament to the power of listening to your patients and refusing to give up on them, Dr. Wang says. It goes back to her theory about treating everyone like her neighbor.
“You really can change a person’s life around by just fixing one thing for her,” she says. “In a world where we’re getting less and less human, more robotic, let’s remember we are human here.”
