By Jenny Blair, M.D. '04
Fred K. Cantor, M.D. ‘62, a neurologist, has enjoyed a long career of research, teaching, clinical care, and volunteering with the Association of Yale Alumni in Medicine (AYAM).
His service as an alumnus, Cantor says, “is a way to pay back. Those of us who do it, by and large, do it because we feel we owe a debt to Yale.” He began volunteering six years after graduation as an Alumni Fund agent, and has since chaired two reunions and served nearly 10 years on the AYAM Executive Committee. In June, the AYAM awarded Cantor a Distinguished Alumni Service Award at his 55th Yale School of Medicine reunion.
A graduate of Yale College as well, Cantor has also traveled abroad on Yale AlumniService Corps (YASC) trips for nearly a decade. He’s gone to Ghana so many times that locals remember and welcome “Dr. Fred,” and he has also served in Mexico, India, and China.
On several of these trips, Cantor planned and took part in public health educational initiatives on infectious diseases, sex education, undiagnosed hypertension, and diabetes as well as medical clinics held in coordination with local health facilities.
Because they were collaborative efforts with local universities and hospitals, these programs had the potential for a more lasting effect than the typical short-term medical care volunteer physicians so often offer on service trips
In addition to health activities, the YASC team goes into the schools, teaches kids things like art, music, and dance that they might not get in their educational system, and also interacts with the local teachers to exchange ideas, Cantor said.
“What an opportunity I have to go and meet people that I would never encounter in different cultures and learn about them and talk to them—and I get to do it with a bunch of very smart, very friendly people,” he added. Cantor has also served two three-year terms on the Service Corps’ board.
A neurologist with wide-ranging interests, Cantor specializes in the care of patients with chronic pain and has published scholarly papers on multiple sclerosis and brain imaging.
He grew up in Waterbury, Conn., in a musical household that also had strong Yale ties. His mother had attended the Yale School of Music. Cantor, his brother, and later, his daughter, would follow in her footsteps to Yale. As an undergraduate, Cantor studied psychology and biology and played clarinet and alto sax with the Yale Precision Marching Band (YPMB). Football games on Saturday morning prevented him from taking a required drawing class for his engineering major. He swapped in a biology class instead, and soon he was hooked on biomedical science.
The Yale School of Medicine, he said, “taught me how much fun it is to be educated and to keep being curious,” Cantor said. “The way that our bodies--and now, also, our microbiomes--work is endlessly fascinating. All one needs to do is to watch and listen.”
After his graduation, Cantor trained in internal medicine, neurology, and neuropathology at Harvard. There, he met his wife-to-be, Jane. Between the Korean and Vietnam wars, Cantor joined the Navy and requested shore duty on the West Coast, expecting a sleepy assignment in Washington or California for him and his new bride. But the couple instead found themselves stationed in Kodiak, Alaska, where he cared for dependents and they both learned to fish, catch crabs, and put up canned food.
His patients included numerous babies, and Cantor improvised a treatment for cradle cap that a local pharmacist labeled “Dr. Cantor’s Baby Dandruff Shampoo.” It went onto pharmacy shelves and “remained that way for long after I left,” Cantor said. “That was one of my original contributions to the Navy.”
Cantor’s career since the Navy has included private practice and research and teaching at Georgetown University, with the Veterans Administration, and at the National Institutes of Health, where he works today as a pain physician.
He is worried by the national opioid epidemic as well as by some of the proposed responses to it.
“Physicians need to be educated to recognize when somebody who’s on chronic opioid medication is getting out of control,” he said. “[They] have to have the skill to convince the patients that you don’t treat your depression by taking narcotics.” Yet if we crack down too hard on opioid availability, some patients with genuine chronic pain might be ill-served, Cantor argues.
“If we could get enough support for treatment for [addicted] patients with a combined pharmacological and psychological approach, we’d have much less of an opioid problem,” he said.
The Cantors make their home in Bethesda, Md., where his wife is a psychotherapist in full-time practice. They have two grown children.