{"id":1185,"date":"2014-05-22T10:45:09","date_gmt":"2014-05-22T14:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/?p=1185"},"modified":"2014-05-27T15:38:30","modified_gmt":"2014-05-27T19:38:30","slug":"nicholas-hill-73-forging-an-unexpected-partnership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/2014\/nicholas-hill-73-forging-an-unexpected-partnership\/","title":{"rendered":"Nicholas Hill (’73): Forging an Unexpected Partnership"},"content":{"rendered":"

By David Corriveau<\/em><\/p>\n

While diplomats from the United States and other western countries struggled with their counterparts from Iran to find common ground on the latter nation\u2019s nuclear capability in the fall of 2013, Nicholas Hill, 1973 graduate of Dartmouth's medical school, watched Iranian pulmonologists help a patient to breathe easier\u2014using techniques he had shown one of them two years before.<\/p>\n

\u201cA patient happened to come in in respiratory distress \u2013 acute exacerbation of COPD\u2014while I was there,\u201d Hill recalled a few weeks after returning to the Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston from the sixth semi-annual International Congress on Pulmonary Diseases, Intensive Care, and Tuberculosis in the Iranian capital of Tehran. \u201cI was gratified to see that the things I was bringing over were being instituted a bit.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Nicholas
Nicholas Hill ('73)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hill, chief of Tufts\u2019 Pulmonary and Critical Care Division, started sharing ideas and strategies with Iranian colleagues in 2011, while serving as president of the American Thoracic Society (ATC). At that year\u2019s International Congress, he signed a memorandum of cooperation between ATS and Iran\u2019s National Research Institute on Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases (NRITLD).<\/p>\n

And in 2012, NRITLD pulmonologist Atefeh Fakharian visited Tufts to observe Hill\u2019s research on treating patients with chronic lung conditions with non-invasive ventilation: assisting ventilation with a respirator mask instead of an invasive airway in the throat. That led to Hill and Fakharian co-publishing an editorial on the state of non-invasive treatments in Tanaffos<\/em>, a peer-reviewed journal of the NRITLD.<\/p>\n

None of which Hill imagined himself doing while he pursued his MD at Dartmouth Medical School in the early 1970s\u2014at least not in a country with which the U.S. would cut most ties later that decade, and with which it would remain at odds for nearly 35 years. For Hill, all that changed when he was invited to represent the ATS at the fifth International Congress in Iran in 2011.<\/p>\n

Partnering\u00a0with countries like Iran is important to improve world health, says Hill. \u201cFor example, research on resistant tuberculosis is something the Iranians lead the world in, because they see cases of resistant TB quite often among refugees from neighboring countries like Afghanistan. Because of the threat such organisms pose to health worldwide, political considerations must take a back seat to these kinds of challenges. Iranian clinician-researchers are very receptive to collaborating on these issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

During his return trip as president emeritus of ATS in 2013, he saw further evidence of the thaw between the two countries. \u201cThere was a sense of optimism about working more with the rest of the world,\u201d Hill said. \u201cThere\u2019s so much more we can and should do together.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Despite political tensions between Iran and the U.S., Nicholas Hill, a 1973 graduate of Dartmouth’s medical school, has worked with Iranian pulmonologists to improve the treatment of tuberculosis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":1186,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Dr. Nicholas Hill has worked with colleagues in Iran to improve the treatment of tuberculosis and other lung diseases.\r\nhttp:\/\/wp.me\/p4r3h1-j7","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[17,23,270,271,69],"class_list":["post-1185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","tag-alumni-2","tag-global-health","tag-iran","tag-nicholas-hill","tag-tuberculosis","author-15"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2014\/05\/tehran-featured.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4r3h1-j7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1185"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1253,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185\/revisions\/1253"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}