Doctors' Lounge: Do No Harm: Defending the Physician's Duty in Skeptical Times

Join the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and The Philadelphia County Medical Society for a new, quarterly series:  Doctors' Lounge

The Philadelphia County Medical Society and The College of Physicians of Philadelphia invite you to our next free Doctors' Lounge on Monday, September 15, 2025 for a conversation with Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, FCPP and Paul A. Offit, MD, FCPP on Do No Harm: Defending the Physician's Duty in Skeptical Times. Moderators:  Walter H. Tsou, MD, MPH, College Fellow and President, Philadelphia County Medical Society and College Fellow William King, Jr., MD, Board Member, Philadelphia County Medical Society.  

Event Timeline:

6PM - Reception

6:30PM - Conversation with Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel and Dr. Paul A. Offit

7:30PM - Open discussion & socializing

About the Doctors' Lounge: 

Facing rising rates of burnout and loneliness, some doctors are calling for the return of physician lounges. Once a fixture of hospitals, these dedicated spaces for health workers to rest and socialize went out of style in recent decades as a result of cost-cutting measures. 

Our Doctors' Lounge series is designed to bring physician and trainee members of the Philadelphia County Medical Society and The College of Physicians of Philadelphia together over food and drink to socialize and learn from expert panelists on how to use one’s medical degree to advance their goals in business, public health, leadership/administration, and policy/politics. Attendees are welcome to bring a guest. 

About the Speakers: 

Paul A. Offit, MD, FCPP is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of virology and immunology, and was a member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is a founding advisory board member of the Autism Science Foundation and the Foundation for Vaccine Research, a member of the Institute of Medicine and co-editor of the foremost vaccine text, Vaccines. 

He is a recipient of many awards including the J. Edmund Bradley Prize for Excellence in Pediatrics from the University of Maryland Medical School, the Young Investigator Award in Vaccine Development from the Infectious Disease Society of America, a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health, and the Sabin Vaccine Institute Gold Medal. 

Dr. Offit has published more than 150 papers in medical and scientific journals in the areas of rotavirus-specific immune responses and vaccine safety. He is also the co-inventor of a landmark rotavirus vaccine recommended for universal use in infants by the CDC. 

For this achievement, Dr. Offit received the Luigi Mastroianni and William Osler Awards from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, the Charles Mérieux Award from the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, and was honored by Bill and Melinda Gates during the launch of their Foundation’s Living Proof Project for global health. In addition, he has received numerous other awards and honors for his groundbreaking work. 

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, FCPP is the Vice Provost for Global Initiatives, the Diane v.S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professor, and Co-Director of the Healthcare Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. From January 2009 to January 2011, Dr. Emanuel served as a Special Advisor on Health Policy to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and National Economic Council.  Prior to that he was the founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health from 1997 to August of 2011. Dr. Emanuel received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and his Ph.D. in political philosophy from Harvard University. After completing his internship and residency in internal medicine at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital and his oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, he joined the faculty at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He has since been a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, UCLA, the Brin Professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School, and the Kovitz Professor at Stanford Medical School and visiting professor at New York University Law School. Dr. Emanuel served on President Clinton’s Health Care Task Force, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC), and on the bioethics panel of the Pan-American Healthcare Organization. He has published over 300 articles mainly on health care reform, research ethics, and end of life care.  He has also authored or edited 15 books.