2003 DCMS President's Profile - Robert W. Haley, MD List of Past President Pages

If your last name is Haley, becoming a physician may be predetermined at birth. So it was for Dallas County Medical Society’s incoming president Robert W. Haley, MD, the son and grandson of a physician and one of four children who all practice medicine. But before his hereditary predisposition to practice medicine kicked in, Dr Haley wanted to be a philosopher.

“My undisputed hero was Ludwig Wittgenstein,” Dr Haley says about the 20th century analytical philosopher he studied while a philosophy major at Southern Methodist University. “He put an end to all philosophy as it had been known and set us on the road to analytical philosophy, the philosophy of language. I was interested in epistemology, the theory of knowledge—how we know what we know.”

Upon graduating from SMU, Dr Haley was accepted to graduate school in philosophy at SMU and to medical school at UT Southwestern. “I had decided to go to grad school in philosophy,” he says. “Then I decided, no, I’ll go to medical school, but my professor said, ‘You can’t do that. I’ve already signed you up to teach the night classes in philosophy and we don’t have anyone else.’ So, I taught the night class in philosophy while I went to medical school.”

Ultimately, Dr Haley took the path of medicine, choosing epidemiology as his specialty and working at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta from 1973 to 1983, before returning to Dallas as director of the epidemiology department at UT Southwestern. Still, philosophy remained in his subconscious.

“Public health is a very abstract activity, in contrast to taking care of a patient right in front of you, which is more tangible,” he says. “Public health is trying to prevent things. You’re applying measures that have a theoretical basis, even though they’re empirically proven. My early training in analytical philosophy helped me do public health and epidemiologic studies more effectively.”

In fact, the teachings of Wittgenstein helped Dr Haley discover the Gulf War Syndrome. He now sees how philosophy played a role in the research that began in 1994 and culminated with the 1997 publication of three articles in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

“At the beginning of the Gulf War Syndrome research, it wasn’t clear there even was a disease,” Dr Haley says. “It was a potential disease. We had to figure out what the disease could be in the mass of symptoms.

“Like Wittgenstein's fly in a fly bottle, I had this terrible feeling that I could see out, but I couldn’t get there,” Dr Haley recalls. “I saw this was a disease, but I couldn’t define it.

“I immediately saw this ambiguity, and I undertook a study to analyze the symptoms and try to disentangle the ambiguity of the symptoms,” Dr Haley says. “I spent five or six months analyzing the data and finally developed this factor analysis. That’s the breakthrough that allowed us to define the three Gulf War syndromes. Then we were able to identify brain damage which was distributed differently in these three groups. It could be disentangled only by analyzing and dissecting the language that was being used in this study.

“When I show the work to statisticians, they all remark on that aspect of it. They say, ‘If you hadn’t disentangled those ambiguous symptom descriptions, you never would have gotten here.’ ”

While Dr Haley has managed to merge medicine and philosophy, his ultimate preference would be to do neither. “I would prefer to be a pro quarterback,” he says. “That was my chosen field until I graduated from Sunset High School (in Dallas) and realized it wasn’t going to happen.”

But Dr Haley managed to live out a semblance of that dream at his 30th high school reunion in 1992, with a football match between the reunion team and the older Sunset All-Stars—the former all-district and all-state players, some of whom became all-pro.

“We had a very serious touch football game,” remembers Dr Haley, who suited up as quarterback and called his own plays. “We started working out in early January and worked out every week until July 4. And, I computerized the game plan.”

The reunion team beat the All-Stars, for only the second time in history. “We were very proud of ourselves,” Dr Haley says. “It was a close, tough game.”

Of the honors Dr Haley has accrued, he says playing in that reunion football game was one of the great moments of his adult life. Now he takes on another honor and again gets to call his own plays.

“I’m thrilled to see him taking on this position with the medical society,” says Dallas County Judge Margaret Keliher. Although she’s been in office only since September, she says she’s already called on DCMS twice to help her with medical issues. “It’s wonderful to have someone like Dr Haley available to work with the county.”

Dr Haley’s focus as DCMS president will be on strengthening the local public health system. Coincidentally, public health is what made him become active in DCMS, after the county government dropped the AIDS prevention program in the mid 1990s.

“That was a terrible defeat for public health,” Dr Haley recalls. “I looked around for allies to see if we could restore that, somehow. I found the most important ally was the Dallas County Medical Society. It leaped into the breach and helped catalyze other support. That coalition was responsible for reviving the AIDS prevention program, under the auspices of the medical school, where it continues successfully today. Without the medical society’s leadership, that would have been a permanent and dismal defeat, and we would have had a recrudescence of the AIDS epidemic in Dallas.”

Out of that experience, he says, he saw the importance of DCMS to give medicine a voice in community affairs. “No individual doctor is going to have much influence in local affairs,” he contends. “Physicians are some of the smartest citizens and some of the most well-meaning citizens, but they’re all busy. DCMS gives them an organized voice to exert that force in the community and the state through TMA. Once I recognized that, I was eager to play in this game.”

In 1999, he was elected to the DCMS board of directors and his role in organized medicine intensified. “Until he got involved in the board, he had been focused on research and teaching,” says wife Stephanie Haley. “His work with the medical society gave him another perspective.”

Despite an already busy schedule, he embraced his role on the board. “He was surprised at how interesting and worthwhile the process was,” his wife adds.

UT Southwestern Medical Center president Kern Wildenthal, MD, says that in addition to his cutting-edge research and dedication to clinical care, Dr Haley is a good citizen. “There has never been a time when he failed to serve on a committee or provide expertise, whether for his church or an international organization. UT Southwestern relies on his wisdom extensively,” he says, adding that DCMS and all of Dallas medicine is fortunate to have him in a leadership position.

Dr Haley says he plans to continue the effective leadership of past presidents. “No. 1 on our list is the need to strengthen our local public health system. We have such a crisis in public health.

“Our local health department still provides some functions, but it’s not a vital force that’s going to protect us from bioterrorism and emerging infectious diseases, which we’re seeing increasingly. West Nile Virus, for example, makes us realize we’re not as immune to epidemics as we thought,” Dr Haley says. “DCMS will provide leadership to the residents of Dallas to try to channel this emerging fear into a well-organized, well-led county health department, which will be up to protecting us against these new threats.”

And that’s quite a big play.

But members and the community at large have much confidence in the new leader. “He has a lot of good ideas and is well-versed on the issues that need to be addressed,” Judge Keliher says . “If I had to bet on someone, I’d bet on Dr Haley.”

All in the Family “The tradition in our family is to do something worthwhile—it doesn’t matter what,” says incoming DCMS president Robert W. Haley, MD, about his family’s preponderance of physicians. “It’s not something anyone has to do. I think by not stressing it, people feel free to do it.” Dr Haley’s grandfather was a physician who had four sons, three of whom became doctors, including Arvel E. Haley, father to Robert and three other sons who all practice medicine in Dallas. “He was a powerful role model, and my dad was a powerful role model—very calm and professional and caring,” Dr Haley says. These role models never coerced their offspring to follow medicine—they all took their own direction, including Robert Haley’s sons, who both are pursuing medical careers. “We do wish we had someone who could do home repair or finances,” laments wife Stephanie Haley, “but those talents don’t run in the family.”