Matt Seidel
This story appears in our 2020 A-List feature.
In the realm of public health, Dr. LJ Punch is like a wrecking ball swinging at information silos, trying to plant knowledge in people’s minds to bolster the physical wellbeing of underserved populations. Whether speaking in a college classroom or on a streetcorner in North St. Louis, the Ohio-raised physician exudes the charm, identity, and experience that are key to conveying crucial health-related facts to just about anyone.
“I’ve been calling Dr. Punch a hero of mine,” says Jason Purnell, an associate professor in the Washington University’s Brown School who leads the college’s Health Equity Works initiative. Punch has “stepped up in a major way” during the COVID-19 pandemic, Purnell says, and remained a “consistent voice of conscience in this crisis as it relates to racial and socioeconomic disparities.”
Before the onset of the pandemic, Punch, an associate professor of surgery in the Washington University School of Medicine, was focused in large part on challenging med students to think of gun violence as a disease and bullets as vectors. In 2018, Punch received a Loeb Teaching Fellowship to develop a multifaceted curriculum called The Anatomy of Gun Violence. “If we break [gun violence] into pieces and dissect it out,” explains Punch, “just like we understand the body, we can understand and become part of the treatment and prevention.”
Outside the classroom, Punch launched Power4STL, a nonprofit of health care professionals and students aimed at reducing the impact of trauma, injury, and violence. Its activities include youth mentoring and participation in Stop the Bleed, the nationwide initiative that trains people to save lives with first aid before first responders arrive.
When the pandemic hit, Punch began putting in shifts as an intensivist at Christian Hospital in North County. “It feels like a flood in that it’s hurting the people who are in the ‘low country’—those who did not have excellent health to begin with,” Punch says. “The water begins to rise, and there’s uncertainty where it will crest. And it feels like a flood, because it leaves people breathless. The halls are empty in the hospital. There’s no family, no visitors. There’s this eerie stillness about it, as if we’re all just floating.”
The novel coronavirus has presented a challenge unlike any that Punch has ever experienced. “We understand it has effects on small blood vessels, and it’s causing clots and heart attacks, kidney failure, heart failure, and, now, direct effects on the central nervous system. It causes really intense delirium in some patients—it might be because of oxygen or blood flow, but they’re just completely unresponsive,” says Punch, who’s also practiced in Houston and Baltimore. “I’ve seen trauma after trauma. I have never seen anything like this.”
When not at the hospital, Punch has been gathering and disseminating personal protective equipment in coordination with Prepare STL, an ad hoc coalition addressing the pandemic. Punch has also engaged in outreach with such groups as Tent Mission STL, which serves the city’s unhoused population.
The response to COVID in underserved communities is similar to common responses to violence, Punch says: Some fight back, some flee, and some just freeze. “I don’t blame people,” the doctor says. “It’s normal. But those responses give COVID more power, not less. We’ve got to show people they have power and that they can move past trauma response, and if they have resources, they have the power to act.”
