CARY AMIEL G. VILLANUEVA, M.D.

Amiel is a board-certified internal medicine specialist from the Philippine General Hospital (PGH). He graduated in 2017 from the University of the Philippines College of Medicine’s accelerated Integrated Liberal Arts and Medicine (INTARMED) program. During residency training, he was Assistant Chief Resident for Services at the PGH Department of Medicine and was recognized as Most Outstanding Second Year Resident. Amiel first met Universitas as a science scholar in Davao City through the “Leading Leaders: Uniting the Nation in Virtue” seminar. With the help of Universitas’ first CEO, he attended a seminar on medical ethics and natural law at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ. Later he delivered talks on bioethics to university students.  An aspiring critical care physician, he also  enjoys #MedTwitter and evidence-based medicine and does part-time work as evidence reviewer for clinical practice guidelines. Amiel was the first project manager of the Universitas Doctors Forum (2019-2020) and is now the Director of the Research, Publication and New Media arm.

BEHIND THE FACE SHIELDS: DR. AMIEL VILLANUEVA SHARES EXPERIENCE AS A COVID-19 FRONTLINER 

MAY 05, 2020 – The recently-concluded Universitas Fellows’ Night (UFN), held on April 24 via Zoom, was graced by the presence of no less than Dr. Cary Amiel Villanueva, one of the Project Managers of the Foundation and a Junior Associate in the Universitas Fellows Program.

A licensed physician, Dr. Amiel is currently working as an internal medicine resident at the Philippine General Hospital (PGH). The PGH, as the national university hospital, is operated and administered by the UP College of Medicine, from which Dr. Amiel obtained his bachelor of medicine under the seven-year Intarmed Program.

The UFN’s title and concept were taken from and inspired by an article authored by Dr. Amiel himself, entitled “Call to Arms: A Doctor’s Vocation in a Pandemic”. Published last April 16, 2020 on The Public Discourse, the article offers the perspective of a COVID-19 Frontliner on the difficulties brought about by the pandemic and how these have brought out the essential aspects of what it means to be a physician.

During the webinar, Dr. Amiel personally shared with the Universitas fellows and guests his experiences as a COVID-19 Frontliner at the PGH, and the insights he drew from such an experience. Using images typically associated with warfare, Dr. Amiel divided his talk into three segments named ‘Battle’, ‘Skirmish’, and ‘Duty’.

BATTLE: the local COVID-19 situation

In the first segment of his talk, Dr. Amiel provided a brief context on the local COVID-19 situation.

After the Philippine General Hospital was designated as a referral center for COVID-19 cases and suspected cases, Dr. Amiel and his fellow employees at the hospital could not but liken their situation with those of soldiers drafted into a war. But, as Dr. Amiel described, unlike the war that devastated the very same hospital during the 1945 Battle of Manila, the present war they are facing involves no gunshots and bomb explosions. Instead, there is only silence, coupled with a lot of fear. […] read more