San Diego County doctor's passion leads her to treat patients nearly 8,000 miles away
Originally aspiring to be a classical pianist, Dr. Kim's path changed when her family emigrated from Seoul, South Korea, to the United States in the 1970s.
She pursued a medical career and eventually founded a nonprofit organization that raises funds for medical and educational supplies in a place thousands of miles away.
'I really wanted to help people; I thought it was my calling,' said Dr. Kim, who spent time in Los Angeles before moving to San Diego County.
She eventually found a second calling during a trip to Chile with her colleagues. That's where she met Ming Ma, a Sherpa from Nepal.
'Once he found out that we were doctors and nurses, he said, 'come and help us in Nepal,' and I said, 'sure'… I didn't really think of it,' Dr. Kim recalled.
In 2016, Dr. Kim's father passed away, strengthening her passion for helping others in new ways. This led to the establishment of the Kim Volunteer Foundation.
In 2019, Dr. Kim and her colleagues embarked on their first trip to Nepal, a challenging journey that included long hikes and flights to reach Hillary Hospital, located 13,000 feet above sea level, the highest in the world.
The hospital is named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who, along with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, was the first to reach the summit of Mt. Everest.
This May, Dr. Kim and her colleagues will visit the hospital and perform gastrointestinal procedures for local patients.
Dr. Kim's foundation aims to improve conditions at the hospital by raising $500,000 for medical equipment upgrades.
She hopes that her and her colleagues' work there, along with new supplies, will address common health issues such as stomach cancer and intestinal parasites.
Although Dr. Kim regularly makes the nearly 8,000-mile trip to the Himalayas to help at Hillary Hospital, when asked if she had a goal of one day reaching Everest's summit, she replied, laughing, 'No…I'm not that crazy.'
All facts from this article were gathered by FOX 5/KUSI journalists. This article was converted into this format with assistance from artificial intelligence. It has been edited and approved by FOX 5/KUSI staff.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Frost, also the Smith College Harold and Elsa Siipola Israel professor emeritus of psychology, developed the course with Lee Shuer, who now facilitates it around the world. Shuer, a certified peer specialist and hoarding disorder expert, said he never calls anyone a 'hoarder.' 'If you're trying to build trust and rapport, it's often such a turn-off. I self-identify as a finder-keeper in recovery, but a lot of people use collector, archivist, environmentalist, prepper. 'But it doesn't matter what we call it — we want to call it getting better.' Shuer started 'collecting' at school, as children often do. 'I didn't abandon that phase,' he said. 'Suddenly we weren't getting together to trade stickers and baseball cards. They were at parties, and I was reading comic books by flashlight at 3 in the morning, miserable.' In hindsight, he realizes he began to develop signs of depression in his teens and that the 'treasure hunting' ramped up in his 20s. 'It was a self-soothing coping skill for my extreme ups and downs with bipolar disorder and ADD (attention deficit disorder). As my mental health challenges continued to manifest and become more significant, so did the maladaptive coping skills.' Like others, Shuer's collections were broad, but he was particularly interested in video games, especially once he realized their social currency. 'I went from being an awkward outsider to being interesting because of my stuff,' he said. It was only with therapy that he really began to understand that dynamic. 'I realized Space Invaders was the key memory I have from the day of my grandfather's funeral. I was dropped off at a family friend's house and remember playing that.' That realization triggered a 'wave of emotion,' he said. The video games were 'an example of all the things around me that represented unresolved grief, guilt, loss.' 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I believe that if you care enough and you want it bad enough, you can change anything. That was definitely a motivator for me.'
