Family who fled Saigon went from being on welfare to three generations of medical professionals
Fifty years ago, at the age of 12, Huy Nguyen fled Saigon with his family as a refugee. Today, after a long road, the Nguyens boast three generations of medical professionals who say they are grateful for the chance to achieve their dream.
When they first arrived in the U.S., they settled in Iowa and became the first Vietnamese American family in the Quad Cities, according to the Davenport Public Library. Nguyen's mother worked as a house cleaner. His father worked as a security guard and eventually got his high school diploma at age 45. He went on to pursue a bachelor's degree and became a chiropractor in 1981.
By then, Huy Nguyen was already set on becoming a surgeon.
Now, Nguyen's three children are working to become doctors as well. Two of Nguyen's children graduated from the same medical school as their father — Kansas City University.
As refugees in the 70s, the family went through a difficult time and started out on welfare. Once a chiropractor, the older Nguyen decided he wanted to pay back all the help they got from the welfare system.
'What my dad did was, when he became a chiropractor, he and my mom, they went to the social security service. And my dad asked that — since when he was in school, we were on welfare … if he can put in payment and they could pay off the help,' Nguyen said. 'He was very proud that he received the help, but at the same time, he would pay that help back and contribute more to that.'
Nguyen's family first stop as immigrants was California, where a church sponsored them to move to Davenport, Iowa. While there, Nguyen and his father established themselves in health care. Nguyen eventually had three children of his own — two resident physicians and a current medical school student, now ages 27, 26 and 18.
Five decades after the fall of Saigon, which effectively ended the Vietnam War on April 30, 1975, the day is known as 'Reunification Day' in Vietnam.
'If you see the Afghanistan evacuations, it's very similar to Vietnam on that at the end of a war,' Nguyen told NBC News. 'There was a bombing on the airport, and we were lucky enough to get in the military airplane, and we were airlifted out of Saigon,' Nguyen said.
'My dad in Vietnam — he was lieutenant colonel in the South Vietnamese army, which fought along with the Americans, and so, last minute, he jumped on the plane and he left with us.'
Nguyen said he assimilated to the American culture while living in Iowa — especially as there were no Vietnamese people, foods or languages around him. He fell in love with American football in fifth-grade and learned English by watching TV.
Once the family settled in Iowa, Nguyen's father pursued his studies and later went to chiropractic school. While in school, he worked as a museum security guard to make ends meet. Nguyen's mother brought the kids back to California, where she worked cleaning houses. Nguyen would help her clean after school, he said. Once Nguyen's father graduated, he returned to the family in California and opened his own private practice.
Nguyen eventually got his bachelor's degree at the same university as his father, St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa. Nguyen's older sister became a chiropractor and then a lawyer; Nguyen became a surgeon; two of Nguyen's brothers became surgeons and another became a lawyer. Nguyen opened up his own private practice in San Jose, California in 1997 — one of the largest Vietnamese American communities in the U.S.
In 2008, Nguyen became the first surgeon in the U.S. to perform a single-incision laparoscopic colon resection. Four years later, Nguyen became the first in the California Bay Area to remove a gallbladder using single-site robotic surgery, with his brother Nang assisting the surgery.
'If you think about the American dream, we are it,' Nguyen said. 'If it wasn't for the people that helped us, and also the American government helping us through the welfare system, we would not be where we're at right now. Of course, working hard and everything else comes with it, too.'
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New Statesman
15 hours ago
- New Statesman
How Britain fell into the K-hole
When we hear that Elon Musk was prescribed ketamine, as he admitted in 2024, what are we supposed to conclude? Is it a sign that ketamine has entered the mainstream of 21st-century culture? Is it a part of a Silicon Valley wellness vogue, or illicit drug culture? Does it connect to Musk's nihilistic right-wing politics, or to the rainbow psychedelia of Burning Man? Is it therapy, or is ketamine itself the problem? Ketamine has certainly entered the mainstream of cultural reference, and the mainstream of recreational life, in the UK as well as the US. An estimated 269,000 Brits aged 16-59 years old used the drug in the year ending March 2024. But despite its prevalence, there remains little consensus about what the drug represents, or indeed what it actually does. Opium had Thomas De Quincey, acid had Hunter S Thompson, but no laureate of ketamine has yet emerged to guide the curious reader through the experience or share the insights that changed their life. Casual observers may have some impression of what a ketamine user looks like from the outside – somewhere on a spectrum from stumbling to comatose – but little idea of the state of consciousness they are experiencing. But we might have expected this. Unlike, say, cannabis, cocaine or mushrooms, ketamine has no deep history or hinterland: it is a product of pharmaceutical modernity. In the last 50 years, however, it has been put to many different uses, accruing layers of meaning that bleed across one another: from medicine to drug of abuse, dancefloor high to mystical experience. Its multiple identities mirror the broad spectrum of its effects. Depending on the dose and method of administration, it can be anything from a mild and pleasant giddiness to a white-knuckle ride into another dimension. Nonetheless, there is something about the experience of ketamine that is uniquely resistant to description. It lacks the signature qualities of other psychedelics; there are no recognisable visual motifs or classic movie depictions of ketamine trips. Its hallmarks are a dissociation of mind from body, felt in large doses as an intense acceleration into an inner space where sensation, dream and memory blur. Time and space become unmoored, reality seems to be constantly shifting; after 20 minutes or so, the pace slows and the external world gradually reasserts itself. The experience is pin-sharp and vivid in the moment but elusive in hindsight, like returning to consciousness after an anaesthetic. Which, in fact, is exactly what's happening. In its original incarnation ketamine was a surgical anaesthetic, developed by Parke-Davis (once America's oldest and largest drug maker) and first deployed in the early 1970s, notably in the Vietnam War. It was ideal for military use because, unlike most anaesthetics of the day, it didn't require continuous infusion or special breathing apparatus: a simple intramuscular injection was enough to separate consciousness from body for the duration of an emergency procedure. Its disadvantage, however, was what became known as 'emergence reactions': on regaining consciousness, patients complained of confusion and nightmarish hallucinations. A new generation of anaesthetics, notably Propofol, soon came onstream to replace it, and ketamine found its place in veterinary surgeries, where the patients registered no complaints about its side effects. My first sight of ketamine was in the late 1980s, in the south of France, when a troubled rich-kid movie producer from California produced a medical vial of clear liquid and a needle and announced that this was the latest miracle treatment for substance abuse. He had been given it by John Lilly, the cybernetics and consciousness researcher who had famously taken huge doses of LSD in a sensory deprivation tank. 'Vitamin K', as it was often referred to in these circles, was one of several novel mind-altering compounds that had recently emerged from the clandestine West Coast network of underground chemists and psychotherapists. Others, most of them known by a cryptic alphabet soup of initials, would turn out to include MDMA, or ecstasy. If emergence reactions were unwelcome in Vietnam, to the psychedelic underground they were not a bug but an infinitely fascinating feature. Lilly was among the early adopters to discover that 150mg of injected ketamine, around a quarter of the full anaesthetic dose, catapulted the user almost immediately into an experience comparable in intensity to the peak of a huge LSD trip. Taking multiple doses in his sensory deprivation tank, Lilly left his body 'floating in a tank on the planet Earth' and conversed with extra-terrestrial intelligences as they ushered him through an ever-expanding series of alternate universes. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Gradually a new generation of researchers, including the psychiatrist Karl Jansen, based in Maudsley Hospital in London, began to investigate ketamine's phenomenological properties by interviewing users and recording their testimonies. Subjects spoke of immersion in dazzling white light, rollercoaster rides through the cosmos, lucid dreams, telepathy, meeting their higher selves and becoming God. Jansen wrote a book, Ketamine: Dreams and Realities (2004), and joined a small vanguard of therapists who took advantage of ketamine's status as a licensed medicine to incorporate the experience into psychotherapy, harnessing it to treat alcohol and other addictions. 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A litre could be brought back on a plane in a drinking water bottle and, when evaporated in a low oven, converted into a mound of fluffy, crystalline white needles, which would cover the cost of the next exotic holiday. The convenience of the powder form made ketamine a staple of dance and rave events. Small sniffs or 'bumps' could be shared on the dancefloor and, especially when combined with ecstasy, produced an agreeably woozy, floaty sensation, like dancing on the moon. It could equally be mixed with cocaine, the cocktail known as a Calvin Klein ('C' plus 'K'), which tempered its dissociative effects with a stimulant and euphoric buzz that sharpened physical, verbal, social or sexual engagement. [See also: Inside the psychedelic elite] All this time ketamine had been quasi-legal, a licensed veterinary product but not a banned drug: a status reflected in its seemingly obligatory media labelling as a 'horse tranquillizer'. 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Since then, levels of use have continued to climb, most sharply among 18- to 24-year-olds, whose usage has tripled in the last nine years. Yet ketamine continued to shapeshift. Just as it consolidated its image as a cheap and disreputable club drug, the psychedelic renaissance arrived with grand claims for its potential as an adjunct to psychotherapy, amplified by celebrity endorsements across the spectrum from Gwyneth Paltrow to Ryan Reynolds, Michael Phelps to Sharon Osbourne. Unlike psilocybin, MDMA and the other psychedelics being promoted for this purpose, it had the advantage of being already licensed as a medicine, which meant that psychotherapists could administer it legally. In the US, particularly California, ketamine clinics mushroomed into a healthcare sector now valued at almost $4bn. Their use of the drug was off-label, meaning that it was only accessible to private patients, typically at hundreds of dollars per dose. 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For all these, its essential promise is that it will – reliably, briefly and relatively safely – make reality feel very different. Web-based distribution has personalised and atomised the contexts in which ketamine is used; it is now, like the internet itself, something of an every-drug. Many of the niches it now occupies existed already, created by other substances. As a relief from depression or anxiety, it serves a similar purpose to sedatives such as Xanax or Valium; as a rocket ship to inner space, it rivals other short-acting psychedelics such as DMT; as an aid to psychotherapy, it compares to MDMA or psilocybin; as a dancefloor party-starter, to cocaine. At the most desperate end of the spectrum, it has established itself firmly in the bargain-basement niche for oblivion-seekers once claimed by glue and solvents. The pandemic played havoc with drug supply chains and mass socialising, but ketamine seems to have benefited from it: wastewater surveys suggest that its use in Britain has increased as much as 85 per cent in the last few years. For those who withdrew into their screens and their bedrooms, it was private and easily manageable even at large doses, and it has now overtaken MDMA in popularity among 18- to 24-year-olds. For those who find social events enervating or overwhelming in the wake of the lockdowns, it offers a 20-minute respite in the corner of a crowded party. For others, it makes it easier to tolerate bleak living conditions, overcrowding and fuel poverty. Underpinning all these selling points is a simple one: ketamine remains cheap, at £20 a gram or less, enough for a mind-bending session for a few friends at less than the price of a round of beers. In a sense it has become the alcohol of drug culture: ubiquitous and multi-purpose, both social and antisocial. Like alcohol, the balance of its health consequences is undoubtedly negative, but it's not hard to understand its appeal as a holiday from reality, an accompaniment to a wide range of pleasures, or a palliative for what ails you. [See also: British psychiatry on the brink] Related
NBC News
a day ago
- NBC News
How RFK Jr. is quickly changing U.S. health agencies
WASHINGTON — In just a few short months, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has begun to transform U.S. health policy: shrinking staff at health agencies, restructuring the focus of some regulators and researchers, changing Covid vaccine regulations and reshaping the mission of his department to focus more on alternative medicine. The directives are all part of the same issue set that drove a slice of health-conscious, left-leaning Americans to eventually vote for a Republican president whose favorite meal is from McDonald's, Trump and Kennedy catered to a type of voter who has grown distrustful of America's health care establishment — but possibly fomented a new type of distrust in federal health policy along the way. Bernadine Francis, a lifelong Democrat who backed Joe Biden for president in 2020 before supporting Donald Trump in 2024, told NBC News in an interview that she approves of Kennedy's efforts so far, despite his 'hands being tied' by entrenched forces in the administration and in Congress. 'From what I have seen so far with what RFK has been trying to do,' she said, 'I am really, really proud of what he's doing.' Francis is among the voters who left the Democratic Party and voted for Trump because 'nothing else mattered' apart from public health, which they — like Kennedy — felt was going in the wrong direction. Concerns about chemicals in food and toxins in the environment, long championed by Democrats, has become a galvanizing issue to a key portion of Trump's Republican Party, complete with an oversaturation of information that in some cases hasn't been proven. It's wrapped up, as well, in concerns about the Covid vaccine, which was accelerated under Trump, administered under Biden and weaponized by anti-vaccine activists like Kennedy amid lockdowns and firings in the wake of the devastating pandemic. 'We knew in order to get RFK in there so he can help with the situation that we have in the health industry, we knew we had to do this,' said Francis, a retired Washington, D.C., public school administrator, who said she left her 'beloved' career because she had refused the vaccine. 'It seemed to me, as soon as [Biden] became president, the vaccine was mandated, and that was when I lost all hope in the Democrats,' Francis told NBC News, referring to vaccination mandates put in place by the Biden administration for a large portion of the federal workforce during the height of the pandemic. There are not currently any federal Covid vaccine mandates. There have been 1,228,393 confirmed Covid deaths in the United States since the start of the pandemic, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. How RFK Jr.'s picks are changing public health agencies Dr. Marty Makary, Kennedy's hand-picked commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and a John Hopkins scientist and researcher, told NBC News in an interview that he wants to transform the agency, which he said faced 'corruption' over influence from the pharmaceutical and food industries. 'I mean, you look at the food pyramid, it was not based on what's best for you, it was based on what companies wanted you to buy,' he said, referring to the 1992 and later iterations of official government nutritional guidance. He said there would be 'entirely new nutrition guidance' released later this year, as soon as this summer. He praised the FDA's mission of research and regulation, saying the agency is 'incredibly well-oiled, and we've got the trains running on time.' He also highlighted the 75-page 'Make America Healthy Again' commission report — which focused on ultraprocessed foods and toxins in the environment — as having set 'the agenda for research' at the FDA, HHS and agencies overseeing social safety net programs such as Medicare and food stamps moving forward. (The MAHA report initially cited some studies that didn't exist, a mistake that Kennedy adviser Calley Means said was a 'great disservice' to their mission.) 'I think there's a lot we're going to learn. For example, the microbiome, which gets attention in the MAHA report, needs to be on the map. We don't even talk about it in our medical circles,' Makary said. 'The microbiome, food is medicine, the immune response that happens when chemicals that don't appear in nature go down our GI tract.' Pressed on other areas of the administration, like the Environmental Protection Agency, making decisions that run counter to the pro-regulatory ideas presented in the MAHA report, Makary said he can 'only comment on the FDA' where they are 'committed to Secretary Kennedy's vision.' But Kennedy's public health agenda goes beyond looking at the food supply and chemicals. Recently, Kennedy said in a video posted on X last month that the Covid vaccine is no longer recommended for healthy children and pregnant women, a change in CDC guidance that skipped the normal public review period. Days later, after critics questioned the decision and raised concerns over a lack of public data behind the move, the administration updated its guidance again, urging parents to consult with their doctors instead. Pressed about the confusion and whether Americans are now trading one side of public distrust in the health system for another, Makary defended Kennedy, who has been criticized for spreading misinformation. 'My experience with Secretary Robert F. Kennedy is that he listens. He listens to myself, he listens to Jay Bhattacharya, listens to Dr. Mehmet Oz, he listens to a host of scientists that are giving him guidance,' Makary argued, referring to the director of the National Institutes of Health and the administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, respectively. 'So he may have big questions, but the questions he's asking are the questions most Americans are asking.' The intersection of medicine and healthy lifestyle choices Dr. Dawn Mussallem, a breast cancer oncologist and integrative medicine doctor — a physician who combines conventional treatments with research-based alternative therapies — has tried to help her patients wade through medical misinformation they encounter online and in their social circles. Mussallem has an incredible story of personal survival: While in medical school, she was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer and, after conventional therapies like chemo saved her life, was diagnosed with heart failure. After undergoing a heart transplant, Mussallem ran a 26-mile marathon just one year later. 'I learned a lot in medical school, but nothing compared to what I learned being a patient,' said Mussallem, who dedicates, on average, 90 minutes each in one-on-one sessions with her patients. 'This is not about any one political choice. But we know lifestyle matters.' For example, a new study from the American Society of Clinical Oncology that finds eating food that lowers inflammation in the body may help people with advanced colon cancer survive longer. Mussallem's mission, along with her colleagues, is to elevate the modern medicine that saved her life, as well as encouraging her patients to live healthy lifestyles, including regular exercise, minimally processed foods, less screen time, more social connection and better sleep. But politics do get in the way for millions of Americans who are inundated daily with social media influencers and 'nonmedical experts,' as Mussallem puts it, who stoke fear in her patients. 'Patients come in with all these questions, fears,' she said. 'I've heard this many times from patients, that their nervous system is affected by what they're seeing happening in government.' Mussallem acknowledges that 'a lot of individuals out there' have questioned traditional medicine. For her, it isn't one or the other — it's both. 'We have to trust the conventional medicine,' she said. 'With the conventional care that marches right alongside more of an integrative modality to look at the root causes of disease, as well as to help to optimize with lifestyle, is where we need to be.'
Glasgow Times
a day ago
- Glasgow Times
D-Day landings boosted by import of ‘wonder drug' to Britain, archives reveal
Production of the antibiotic penicillin had struggled to take hold at a large scale in Britain, despite being discovered in 1928 in London by Sir Alexander Fleming. Attempts to produce substantial quantities of medicine from the bacteria-killing mould had not been achieved by the start of the Second World War. Then prime minister Sir Winston Churchill became increasingly frustrated that Britain had not been able to produce enough penicillin in the preparations for the Normandy landings in 1944. Official papers released by the National Archive – containing handwritten notes by Sir Winston – highlight efforts to boost quantities of the antibiotic, with Britain eventually forced to import it from America. The documents were released ahead of the 81st anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. Official papers highlight the efforts to boost quantities of penicillin (The National Archives/PA) In one report on February 19, after the issue had been raised in the House of Commons, Sir Winston scrawled in red ink on a Ministry of Supply report noting the Americans were producing greater quantities: 'I am sorry we can't produce more.' On another paper, he complained: 'Your report on penicillin showing that we are only to get about one tenth of the expected output this year, is very disappointing.' Elsewhere in the same file he instructs: 'Let me have proposals for a more abundant supply from Great Britain.' With preparations for D-Day ramped up, efforts to deliver enough American-made penicillin for frontline military personnel soon became a matter of urgency. Decisions needed to be made on the quantities of antibiotic imported, how much to administer to individual patients, and how to get medical staff trained in time. Most British doctors did not know how to issue penicillin – until this point, doctors had nothing available to treat infections like pneumonia and many people died of blood poisoning after minor injuries because no drug existed that could cure them. Royal Navy D-Day veteran John Dennett, 101, at the British Normandy Memorial in Ver-sur-Mer to mark the 81st anniversary of the landings (Gareth Fuller/PA) Early in January 1944, Prof FR Fraser, the Ministry of Health's adviser on the organisation of wartime hospitals, wrote that 50,000-100,000 wounded could be expected from the Second Front. He proposed the Emergency Medical Services might need as many as five billion units of penicillin per month for this. Further documents show discussions on whether the antibiotic should be supplied as calcium or sodium salts, or in tablet form. Ultimately, it was agreed powdered calcium salts would be issued for superficial wounds and sodium salts for use in deep wounds. On May 24 1944, less than a fortnight before D-Day, Prof Fraser reported: 'Sufficient supplies of penicillin are now available for the treatment of battle casualties in EMS hospitals, but not for ordinary civilian patients.' Plans were made for casualties from the frontline in France to be brought back to coastal hospitals in Britain for treatment. A week before D-Day, on May 30 1944, hospitals were instructed to treat battlefield patients en route: 'In an endeavour to prevent the development of gas gangrene and sepsis in wounds the War Office have arranged for the treatment of selected cases by penicillin to be commenced as soon after injury as possible.' Military reenactors watch the sunrise over Gold Beach in Arromanches-les-Bains, Normandy, on the 81st anniversary of the D-Day landings (Gareth Fuller/PA) Injections of penicillin were to be given to them at intervals of not more than five hours and patients would be wearing a yellow label with the letters 'PEN'. The time and size of penicillin doses should be written on it, they were told. Dr Jessamy Carlson, modern records specialist at the National Archives, said: 'File MH 76/184 gives a glimpse into the extraordinary levels of preparation undertaken in advance of the D-Day landings. 'Only six weeks before, penicillin is just reaching our shores in quantities which will allow it to play a major role in improving the outcomes for service personnel wounded in action.' As Allied forces made inroads into Europe, restrictions on the use of penicillin for civilians began to relax, but only in special cases. In July 1944, Ronald Christie, professor of medicine, wrote to Prof Fraser to tell him: 'The War Office approves of American penicillin being used for medical conditions in service patients and for air raid casualties among civilians.' On the home front, demand for the new 'wonder' drug began to increase, according the National Archives. It was decided that penicillin for civilians should only be supplied to larger hospitals where the staff had been properly trained to administer it. Only in 1946 did it become fully available for the general public.
